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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7060924" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Back when nobody increased their stats over time, and a 15 didn't give you anything anyway, it didn't really matter what you rolled. You didn't need to start with an 18 to be competitive, because nobody else had one either, and the benefit of having one was negligible for most classes.Blame 3E for this, with its universal ability bonus. As soon as you had a stat that governed whether or not you hit, even with spells, and that bonus increased evenly along its distribution instead of being limited to extreme cases, it quickly became the case that you needed to max out your score in order to be seen as competent. This is a good reason to dislike 3E.There has never been an edition where this was the case. Earlier editions didn't have a +1 to +5 scale, and later editions have always allowed scores higher than 18 without magic. And even if you did use 3d6 for stats, you'd still roll an 18 a little less than 0.5% of the time; there's nothing impressive in being the seventh-strongest person in the village. If you think that +3 is heroic and +5 is legendary, than that's just you not intuiting probability distributions accurately.Not everyone has the potential to reach high levels. Most people don't have the right mindset to throw themselves into danger like that. But given that you're only talking about a tiny minority of people who ever get to high levels anyway, why shouldn't those people have the potential to reach the peak of natural ability?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 7060924, member: 6775031"] Back when nobody increased their stats over time, and a 15 didn't give you anything anyway, it didn't really [I]matter[/I] what you rolled. You didn't need to start with an 18 to be competitive, because nobody else had one either, and the benefit of having one was negligible for most classes. Blame 3E for this, with its universal ability bonus. As soon as you had a stat that governed whether or not you hit, even with spells, [I]and[/I] that bonus increased evenly along its distribution instead of being limited to extreme cases, it quickly became the case that you needed to max out your score in order to be seen as competent. This is a good reason to dislike 3E. There has never been an edition where this was the case. Earlier editions didn't have a +1 to +5 scale, and later editions have always allowed scores higher than 18 [I]without[/I] magic. And even if you [I]did[/I] use 3d6 for stats, you'd still roll an 18 a little less than 0.5% of the time; there's nothing impressive in being the seventh-strongest person in the village. If you think that +3 is heroic and +5 is legendary, than that's just you not intuiting probability distributions accurately. Not everyone has the potential to reach high levels. Most people don't have the right mindset to throw themselves into danger like that. But given that you're only talking about a tiny minority of people who ever get to high levels anyway, why shouldn't [I]those[/I] people have the potential to reach the peak of natural ability? [/QUOTE]

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