Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9826403" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As above, I think there is a compromise. "I roll, you don't".Really? People aren't that variable IRL. Like genuinely. There was some vague loose notion in the early editions that ability score modifiers correspond to standard deviations. 68% of people have |z|<1; 95% of people have |z|<2. Even though that's only on a single score, going with the 95% figure, .95^6 = 73.5% of people lack even a single ability score modifier bigger than +/- 1. 10% of people have no nonzero modifiers of any kind. The vast majority of people are, in fact, very minimally variable.It is an artificial, genuinely unrealistic expectation that characters should have highly variable stats--doubly so when we start factoring in a dangerous world that has razor-thin margins of error, as is typical in early-edition D&D play. Under those conditions, it's actually quite unrealistic to expect that some Fighters have a strength of 6 and some have a strength of 18/00 and some have 14 etc. We not only can, but should expect that extremes, especially low extremes, should be quite rare--because few people who have such shoddy strength would do all three of (a) bother trying to be a Fighter in the first place, (b) stick with being a Fighter through all the training where they failed and failed and failed and failed and (etc.), and (c) never got any better at Strength things as a result of their training. Like...failing at something a lot of times but never getting even the slightest bit better at it is kind of crazy, and reflects either a profoundly damaged human being (since most characters in early-edition D&D are human) or someone incapable of growth and adaptation...which means they shouldn't survive their first dungeon, let alone their tenth.My point here is just...people only get as variable as the dice indicate when you look at the extremes. And when you do look at the extremes, you're necessarily going to see extremes that...work with what they have, or that got better at what they sucked at. Which means most Fighters are going to be fairly strong (or dextrous, if that's their bag). Most priests are going to have a little wisdom, even if some are lower than others. Etc.Sure. Though, with the way most people feel about ability scores, it seems unlikely that only a single player would prefer PB or something similar. And certainly, if one is using a rolling method that differs, then one should use a PB method that differs as well. Because that expectation? That's a desire for balance. It's expecting everyone at the table to be held to some common standard, whatever that standard might be.Personally, I'm of the opinion that players should be given an incentive to have crappy numbers in "good" stats like Dex, Con, or Wis. That way, players actually want to opt in for "these stats make my character succeed less, but experience more interesting things". However, that also kinda requires that "succeed less" does not directly translate to "die more", since that creates far, far too big an incentive in the other direction. This is one of the difficulties of game design. It is entirely natural that players should want to fail less and succeed more. It is entirely natural that a player should examine the rules and determine from them smart courses of action.Given I have been guilty of it myself, perhaps it is wise to not presume the thoughts of another user.</blockquote>

Verification