I'm trained to do administer standardized tests, and I know people within a given field vary widely in their particular talents. There are plenty of people who are fantastic surgeons or car mechanics or whatever who do not have minds that are generally exceptional. If a character has a 14 Int, and most fighters have a 10, and the sharpest minds have 16s to 20s, the character is pretty darn brilliant from the standpoint of the ordinary person. Or from a more abstract rationale outside the game world... it's a few points, so what?
Reality ≠ D&D. Your experiences in the former carry no weight in discussing the latter.
Whichever. The point is that if he's 4 points behind at level 1, he's 4 points behind at level 30, or more or less, because there are so many other variables.
Yes. You can never make up for it. Glad you'll concede at least that.
Simply because someone starts as a wizard's apprentice does not mean they will end up being the Arch Wizard of the High Tower, nor does every plucky squire grow up to the nationa's premier jousting knight. Not every legendary character is going to fit a narrow definition of optimization within the game system. Arthur was not the combat monster in the group; Lancelot was. Paksenarrion, in Elizabeth Moon's stories, does not have exceptional skills as a swordsman, but she gains them, even though she is never as fluid as the best she knows, even at a peak where she can outfight many of them.
That's true, but now that I know what you mean, I don't see how it is relevant to this discussion (about how 4e deals with ability scores).
In the d20 version of the Star Wars game, both took a detour from their primary Jedi skills to take levels in Ace Pilot. It's also not a given that either had truly exceptional ability scores apart from an abnormal Dex and a decent Wis and Int. They simply became very high level characters.
In d20 SW, your Jedi wasn't quite a Wizard. He needed skill ranks and BAB rather than spell slots. You can get skill ranks and BAB from many sources, unlike spell slots.
Magic weapons didn't really "make up for" low Str in AD&D. They could just as easily enhance an already powerful powerful character.
No, really, they could. Only level affected attack rate, but attack bonus and damage were a combination of level, Strength, and magic bonuses. A guy with a THAC0 of 8 didn't care if two points of that came from Str and two came from his sword, or if instead four came from his sword and Str gave him nothing.
Also, in 2e your DM could give the low-Strength dude a Belt of Giant Strength, which granted a fixed Strength rather than a bonus -- the guy with 18/98 would have gotten no use out of it.
In 3e, the belt did stack, but you could build a weapon with a higher Enhancement bonus rather than more special abilities. If you had a very high Strength, you might add on Ghost Touch instead of another +1. If you had a low Strength, you could make up for it with Weapon Finesse + bonus damage (e.g. Holy, Shock, Bane, etc.). Even if it was often optimal to be a two-handed Power Attack monkey, it wasn't required, and against whole classes of foes the bonus damage dude would have been at a significant advantage.
In 4e, you lost both degrees of flexibility. You can't trade out enhancement bonus, and you can't use ability boosters because there are none.
No, that's not why. There has never been a "make up for" set of abilities in D&D. It has always been power on top of whatever you had before.
See above.
(...) it makes 4e an easier game to mess around with, because the expected variation is so narrow, you almost can't make yourself unable to hit somehting.
Agreed. This was one of their goals, and they achieved it.
But that's not what I was doing. I just liked the idea of the character. I never felt gimped, useless, or impractical, although I realized other characters might have some advantages in some ways.
So when you said this:
pawsplay said:
I felt that given the constraints I placed on him in the beginning, every victory was worth celebrating.
... you didn't mean that those constraints impaired your PC? If they did impair him, that's the only meaning of "gimped" to which I refer -- you need not sleep in a box, nor wear only paraphernalia, to be "gimped".
Sadly he no longer works for WotC.
Cheers, -- N