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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ECMO3" data-source="post: 9836231" data-attributes="member: 7030563">Balance means balanced results for two players.  If one player swings a sword and does 9 damage and another player swings a sword and does 7 damage that is not balanced.If one has an 8 strength and one has a 20 it is not balancedIf both of them have a 16 strength it still is not balanced.Giving them equal strength does not make it significantly more likely they will balanced in play.The same mean or probabilty does not mean the same or a balanced outcome.  It means the same average failure rate or the same mean damage.In party A one player will do better than the other even though they both have the same abilities.  They will not be balanced once they pick up the dice and start rolling.It has almost no effect on the chance the two players are balanced in play. What I am saying is if you make their abilities the same and in fact if you make every single thing about them the same (class, race etc) they will still be unbalanced in play. The only way to balance a game involving dice is to stop rolling.  You are not going to have a balanced game if you are rolling dice for outcomes.Sure if qualitative factors are eliminated, this is extremely likely to be true.If you are going to do this though, I will point out that you need to consider the distribution associated with the ability score rolls to begin with.  There are 6 abilities, you are comparing the chance of one character having an 8 and another character having an 18 at that index.  The chance of 1 PC rolling an 18 as their best score is 9% (using 4d6d1).  The chance of someone rolling an 8 or lower as their best score is 0.00013 or roughly one in 1 million.Assuming both are barbarians and both put strength as their highest stat, the chance the one with the lower 8 in strength will outperform the one with a higher strength in combat during a session is substantially higher than the chance of getting this disparity to begin with.When you say "will experience more frequent failures" you are discounting extremely unlikely outcomes.  This is fine, but it works both ways - if you want to make a statement like this, then the counter would be that condition (one PC with 8 the other with 18) won't exist.</blockquote>

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