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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salamandyr" data-source="post: 6885253" data-attributes="member: 40233">I for one approve giving realistic stats to literary characters when I model them.  The trick is to ask what stats a character absolutely need to have in order to portray them accurately in the game.  So let's see...Drizzt is athletic, but also very small and light.  Average human strength (10) is actually a little above average for someone his size.  19 Dex (starting at 17) sounds right.  His most notable quality is his balance, speed, and agility.  Consitution 14--he's tough; that's puts him in about the 85th percentile of humans (judging the mass of humanity on the bell curve created by the 3d6). Sounds about right.  Intelligence might be a little low for a guy described as a good potential wizard, but the Int score also covers education, so Int 12 can accurately describe a bright person who shirks academics in favor of physical pursuits, like our boy here.  Wisdom 14...again, sounds right.  Guy is intuitive, strong willed, and a good judge of character--but not superhumanly so.  He's definitely above average (85th percentile), but you can easily imagine people better than him in this regard.  Charisma 11--he's a good looking guy, well liked by friends who nevertheless cannot overcome most people's instinctive prejudice against his race, and winds up in a lot of unnecessary fights because of it (he fails a lot of diplomacy checks).  Charisma 11 actually sounds a little generous.So I think these stats do a really good job of accurately describing the character whose adventures we've followed all these years, with an eye toward playability.  I think it does a better job of capturing Drizzt than the ridiculously high physical stats given to him back in 3rd edition (somewhat of a carryover from 1st & 2nd edition where stat bonuses didn't even begin until 15, so anyone who appeared even marginally competent in a fictional work got modelled with multiple 18's)   Fictional characters don't need those unplayable stats.  They shouldn't be better than the characters PC's can make.  They ought to be reasonable representations of the stuff PC's ought to be doing.I mean, after all, isn't that the reason we play fantasy RPG's; to do the cool things that Raistlin and Gandalf and Elric and Conan get up to?</blockquote>

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