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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9834979" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You're missing the forest for the trees.The person doing point buy cannot start with 18. It's not possible. The absolute best they can start with is 15. As a result, when you cut off the bottom low-roll results, there is no cost paid for this potential, and it's pretty damn high potential too--with just 4d6k3, there's a 9.3% chance to get an 18, and a further (separate) 20.7% chance to get 17. More than half the time, your highest stat with six rolls of 4d6k3 will be 16, 17, or 18 (56.76%, to be precise).Obviously if you watch enough cases you'll always see such values. I'm wondering how much as "a pretty good number", because statistically, it really shouldn't be that high.That, however, is shocking to the point of looking suspicious. The odds of any player getting a 4, even as their lowest stat, is only 0.08%. Hence, the odds of two players both rolling that at the same time are 0.0046^(2) = 0.00002116, or 0.002116%. That's a 1 in 47259 chance. (Rounding up because it's only the tiniest bit shy of that value.)You are much more likely, as in literally 7.7x more likely, to see a player get all six stats being 16+: (0.2342)^6 = 0.000165, or about 1 in 6060.Any math that is that forgiving is math that makes strategy worthless.I see the former requirement as shortsighted. Even a fair amount of imbalance can be fine, if and only if it is truly for a moment. But games are not for a moment. They are for hours and hours and hours. Designers cannot afford to think only about the here-and-now. They have to think about the long haul.As for the latter, I was given to understand we have fairly robust statistical evidence that players do in fact notice when the power difference gets beyond, very roughly, 15% performance. Which, I'd say, makes sense. If one person is doing, say, 20%-25% more than anyone else, you're gonna notice over time. You won't notice in one single instant, because that's not how distributions work, but you'll get the feel over time. Just like how a small scatterplot may not have any visible pattern, but a long-term scatterplot with millions of points will usually have a clear pattern if there is any pattern to observe. (Consider, for instance, the famous scatterplot of airplane bullet holes on returning aircraft. The naive conclusion from that is to put armor on the places where lots of bullet holes are; the correct conclusion is to put armor on all of the places where the bullet holes aren't...because those are the places where, if you get shot there, you ain't coming back.)And that's why I generally use, very roughly, a +/- 10% range for what I consider equivalent. If two results cannot be brought within 10% of one another, something is wrong and one or the other needs to be tweaked. This is, of course, quite complicated--but there are ways to get usable data even in places you might not expect. (E.g. you can quantify the benefit of crowd control by looking at it as a form of damage prevention--every attack a monster doesn't get to make because it's CC'd is equivalent to having spent resources on healing that damage, after all.)</blockquote>

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