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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 5146640" data-attributes="member: 85870">Well, a somewhat facetious response might be, "It's only DM fiat because it isn't rules-as-written. As soon as they make it rules as written, it's not DM fiat anymore!"  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But in all seriousness, I see where you're coming from--it's just that it's clear from BECMI that OD&D's later editors like Mentzer(sp?) had some idea that "racial limitations" were a key indicator for how far a character could actually progress. I guess I'm wondering where on earth we got this idea that it was perfectly okay for a PC--specifically one of the common races--to have an attribute score that represented something completely beyond the norm of human evolution? If you think there's any merit in <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/d&d-calibrating.html" target="_blank">calibrating our expectations of D&D</a> to at least some real-world reference point--and I think there are some compelling role-playing reasons to do that--then I think one of the reasons balance has become such a difficult thing to pin down is because players have somehow gotten it in their heads that a 20 ability score with a +5 bonus is "natural." If you look at a "real world" calibration of a 20 ability score in "real world" terms, there's only maybe 10-20 people on the entire planet at any one time (out of 7 billion people) with a score that high. A guy with a 20 strength is one of those 350-pound muscle guys who literally pulls tractors by himself on ESPN, the guy that can squat a half-ton automobile. A guy with a 20 intelligence is a child prodigy, one of those kids who graduates high school at age 8, and graduates with a PhD from Yale by age 18. A woman with a 20 charisma is Angelina Freaking Jolie--so attractive, so compelling, that paparazzi are literally willing to travel the globe to get a single photograph of you, and movie studios are willing to pay you 5 million dollars to make a single picture. So going back to my last point--it's obvious that both 3.x and 4e extend the "reality" of a character's real physical capabilities far, far beyond a normal statistical distribution. A 20 attribute score is more than three standard deviations from the norm of a 10--it's in the 99.999th percentile of human physical capacity. Ultimately, then, you can limit some measure of "unbalance" by simply using a "real world calibration" to say, "No, that's just physically impossible." And I guess my real question is, if balance is a big a deal as everyone makes it out to be, why aren't game designers using this? I mean, it's a foregone conclusion that by 30th level, your typical 4e character is going to have a minimum of a 24 in their primary stat--to say nothing of magic bonuses. And I seriously doubt if there's anyone who's ever lived on planet earth who ever actually achieved that. And yeah, yeah, I know, it's D&D, it's fantasy, it's not reality--but if you want to "balance" a game that simulates reality in any real sense or fashion, one of the ways to do it is to balance the actual physical capacity of the people that inhabit that reality against each other.</blockquote>

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