Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Exactly... the mechanic sickliness of rastlin is distinct from his narrative sickliness.
Low ability scores -- more fun?
- Thread starter Bullgrit
- Start date
Exactly... the mechanic sickliness of rastlin is distinct from his narrative sickliness.
5 or 6??? I would have said more like 15 or 16. The guy coughed up blood whenever he cast a spell, yet he traveled thousands of miles in a couple of years and helped to defeat a god and her army of dragon-creatures. A person with a 5 or 6 Con probably would have died after falling in Crystalmir Lake.
Remathilis
Legend
While I detest god-mode characters (lowest score: 14) I don't see any specific bonus in playing low-score PCs either. Unless you're a hobbit who inherited a ring from his uncle, most adventurers choose to take up the lifestyle and tend to be the a bit above the common-folk just to survive; if they were clutzy, stupid, weak or frail, they'd be better suited to turnip farming than dungeon raiding.
Of course, that's the nature of D&D; ability score mods mean a lot (esp physical ones) and what is "high" or "low" is dependent on edition (a 13 is good in BD&D, trivial in AD&D, and practically worthless in 4e. Likewise, the value of a 9 is very different in each edition). I think most adventurers (well, the ones who will live to high level) typically have better than average but not godlike stats; something the current point-buys for 3e & 4e kinda-sorta emulate (roughly that range of power).
That said, I see the value in an unlikely hero with a handicap he must overcome; an ox-dumb fighter, a barbarian prone to rash decisions, a socially uncooth ranger, or a frail wizard who can't carry his own gear are all fun characters, but they best serve a extremes to emphasize the "norm" (aka the heroic/better scores of normal adventurers) than as a necessity to "proper role-playing". If ALL fighters have to be dumb, brash, or unpleasant to be around; it gets old quicker than if they had reasonable or heroic scores in the same places.
Of course, that's the nature of D&D; ability score mods mean a lot (esp physical ones) and what is "high" or "low" is dependent on edition (a 13 is good in BD&D, trivial in AD&D, and practically worthless in 4e. Likewise, the value of a 9 is very different in each edition). I think most adventurers (well, the ones who will live to high level) typically have better than average but not godlike stats; something the current point-buys for 3e & 4e kinda-sorta emulate (roughly that range of power).
That said, I see the value in an unlikely hero with a handicap he must overcome; an ox-dumb fighter, a barbarian prone to rash decisions, a socially uncooth ranger, or a frail wizard who can't carry his own gear are all fun characters, but they best serve a extremes to emphasize the "norm" (aka the heroic/better scores of normal adventurers) than as a necessity to "proper role-playing". If ALL fighters have to be dumb, brash, or unpleasant to be around; it gets old quicker than if they had reasonable or heroic scores in the same places.
Celebrim
Legend
How often have we heard the complaint that a character from literature is flat, uninteresting, boring, and unrealistic because they seem to be hypercompotent at everything and are superhuman not only in their physical prowess but apparantly in their internal thought life, self-control, and morality as well? While this isn't always a fair criticism of literature, in RPGs I think it is true that a character with 6 18's is flat, unintering, and boring (besides violating the fundamental rule of role-playing).
Wasn't one of the innovations that Stan Lee was celebrated for that he brought characters with real human depths (well, at least more human depth) to comic book heroes?
Flawed characters are interesting, both to watch play out and to explore yourself. Since most variants of D&D lack advantage/disadvantage systems, the way that this most often has come out in the past is playing a character with a low attribute score as if that score represented some meaningful personality trait.
Someone mentioned the character Raistlin and the fact that his the attribute on his character score didn't reflect the characterization they saw. That may be true, but that 10 Con represented to the player who created Raistlin something he could grab onto to learn about the character. The entire ideal of the frail mage was born from that idea drawn from what was an otherwise uninteresting and rather mundane character sheet. The 10 Con spoke to the player and told him something about the character.
Wasn't one of the innovations that Stan Lee was celebrated for that he brought characters with real human depths (well, at least more human depth) to comic book heroes?
Flawed characters are interesting, both to watch play out and to explore yourself. Since most variants of D&D lack advantage/disadvantage systems, the way that this most often has come out in the past is playing a character with a low attribute score as if that score represented some meaningful personality trait.
Someone mentioned the character Raistlin and the fact that his the attribute on his character score didn't reflect the characterization they saw. That may be true, but that 10 Con represented to the player who created Raistlin something he could grab onto to learn about the character. The entire ideal of the frail mage was born from that idea drawn from what was an otherwise uninteresting and rather mundane character sheet. The 10 Con spoke to the player and told him something about the character.
Celebrim
Legend
Yes. But I find that the narrative weakness never seems to happen when the player thinks he has justification to avoid it.
"Why, yes, I am good at everything. I don't like to bring it up myself, because I'm so modest, but thank you for noticing."
Actually, that 'Buzz Lightyear' schtick would be better than what you usually get from the sort.
Celebrim
Legend
I consider this an example of how a mechanical flaw in the game encourages redundant roleplay. Your going to have some of this problem just because of the fundamental law of roleplay ("Thou shalt not be good at everything.") whether you have a class based system or not, but it gets particularly bad when that class system gives each class no significant reward at all for having high scores in one more attributes. This leads to having a small range of optimal builds with very sharp drop offs in utility if you deviate from them, which in turn reinforces archetypes too heavily. For example, in default 3e, its virtually impossible to build an mechanically interesting 'smart fighter' or 'charismatic fighter' (much less both). Hense, all fighters tend to be big dumb brutes which may be correct for the stat sheet, but doesn't encourage much innovation in character conception.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Point being it seemed to happen for Raistlin ... I always figured it was a way of justifying horrible hit points for mus anyway. Int dex and con were always the highest stats on mus I saw people build.
Celebrim
Legend
So you are claiming that if Raistlin hadn't have had a 10 Con, but a 16 Con, and had been turned over to the writers with a physical description like, "He has a wiry athletic physique." rather than, "He has a slight build.", that we would have ended up with the same character?
Raistlin was born through imagining the weaknesses of the character, particularly with respect to the character described as being his brother. I don't think that is a very contriversial stand. Raistlin wasn't built with a goal of making a mechanically optimal character, else, he would have had a 16 Con. He wasn't 'built'. He just 'showed up'.
Crothian
First Post
He's a novel character that someone gave D&D stats to. If it was the other way around then the point might be made with him as an example. But characters in novels live by different rules then ones in an RPG game.
I'm not a big fan of low scores, though I have played PCs with them, and I consider roleplaying to be more important than combat.
I've got a friend who claims to like playing crappy PCs. But then such PCs tend to be played as annoying characters. He also seems to suck at rolling.
a low score isn't as bad when you've got some other awesome scores. But if your best scores are average and you get stuck with some crap stat, that sucks. Especially if the other players rolled pretty good. Because it means that when it comes to getting stuff done, your PC is always last.
In an ideal game, each PC is good at something, such that they don't feel like they are behind at every encounter. This is the real point of class balance and such.
I've also found that I can roleplay an awesome PC just as well as a sucky PC. Therefore, why play a sucky PC?
As much as I advocate non-crappy scores, at my table, I don't do point-buy nor do I let players keep rolling until they get a keeper. We do 4d6, keep the best 3, six times arrange to taste. Re-roll the PC if and only if the total bonus is <=0. bad stats happen.
I've got a friend who claims to like playing crappy PCs. But then such PCs tend to be played as annoying characters. He also seems to suck at rolling.
a low score isn't as bad when you've got some other awesome scores. But if your best scores are average and you get stuck with some crap stat, that sucks. Especially if the other players rolled pretty good. Because it means that when it comes to getting stuff done, your PC is always last.
In an ideal game, each PC is good at something, such that they don't feel like they are behind at every encounter. This is the real point of class balance and such.
I've also found that I can roleplay an awesome PC just as well as a sucky PC. Therefore, why play a sucky PC?
As much as I advocate non-crappy scores, at my table, I don't do point-buy nor do I let players keep rolling until they get a keeper. We do 4d6, keep the best 3, six times arrange to taste. Re-roll the PC if and only if the total bonus is <=0. bad stats happen.
Similar Threads
