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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4730063" data-attributes="member: 82106">It wasn't at all like that in our games. There was no unequivocal "I'm throwing this character away and starting over" notion. Not that a DM was going to make someone play a character with all horrible stats or no good ones either for that matter. But it was understood in our games that you took what you were dealt and the fun of it was to make the character interesting and workable. If you said to the DM "I just can't work with this" or "this stat array just won't let me do some interesting thing I want to try" then usually either you could start over or tweak one of the numbers. There were always the power gamers around that wanted all 18's, but we mostly just found that amusing. I cannot recall anyone insisting on running a totally bad stat character, but we probably would have allowed it just for laughs. Characters with 2 low stats though were not all that gimped and the really memorable characters in our games were mostly of that type.Gilladian, the dwarf with 6 int and something like maybe 3 or 5 wisdom. The character was still the toughest fighter in the group, but it was hillarious when he would do something amazingly blockheaded. Grog the half-orc, another super low int character, with horrible charisma to boot, but a happy-go-lucky personality (and again a pretty tough character).Etc.I also recall the contrary character my sister had, "Thayson" the Bard. All ridiculously high stats. You could win a million in Vegas with the luck of that set of stat roles. It was a really powerful character, but much more lacklustre than the more interesting ones.That is what 4e is missing out on a bit.Sure, you can stick in some 'disad' rules, but it just isn't the same thing. First of all every disad system I ever saw was always an invitation to game the system, so it inevitably creates charop problems. And while you can certainly come up with plenty of decent personality stuff to go with disads it provides a lot less variety, less basic "who am I". One other nice thing about stats as an RP device, even the less RP focused players are at least getting some kind of an idea of what their character is and what it can do. If the character has a low dex, he's clumbsy. Maybe the player doesn't work with that much, but at least once in a while the DM has a logic to make the character fall down and go bump. That's something.</blockquote>

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