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<blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5614643" data-attributes="member: 54710">As I noted upthread, I agree that it's realistic to require fighters to have high strength to be effective.&nbsp; In real life, physical conditioning has a huge impact on performance in athletic endeavors.&nbsp; To pick just one example, Mark Spitz may be the most skilled swimmer ever (at least in his ability to convert physical energy into forward progress in the water), but his records have been overcome by less efficient swimmers who used modern weight-training techniques to become considerably stronger than athletes were in the 70s.&nbsp; Likewise, strength, size and speed make a huge different in combat capability, at least according to all the martial arts, boxing, wrestling and other combat style activities I've seen practiced.And, yes, you can play with a 16 in your primary attribute, and an unobservant player might not notice the character's reduced effectiveness.&nbsp; To hit modifiers are a big deal.&nbsp; They are why we have all these expertise feats.&nbsp; But that's not the issue -- I don't think that type of realism is a useful goal for a character generation system in a game like 4e and even a 16 is a huge cost in point buy if you want to play a genius warlord or a super-charismatic cleric.I think that a core goal of the character creation rules should be to allow players to create a variety of interesting, different and viable characters with minimal rules overhead (quoting myself above).&nbsp; Because to hit modifiers are so important to a characters effectiveness (both in damage per round and in the ability to land important effects), WotC severely reduced the number of reasonably effective builds for little gain.-KS</blockquote>

[QUOTE="KidSnide, post: 5614643, member: 54710"] As I noted upthread, I agree that it's [i]realistic[/i] to require fighters to have high strength to be effective. In real life, physical conditioning has a huge impact on performance in athletic endeavors. To pick just one example, Mark Spitz may be the most skilled swimmer ever (at least in his ability to convert physical energy into forward progress in the water), but his records have been overcome by less efficient swimmers who used modern weight-training techniques to become considerably stronger than athletes were in the 70s. Likewise, strength, size and speed make a huge different in combat capability, at least according to all the martial arts, boxing, wrestling and other combat style activities I've seen practiced. And, yes, you can play with a 16 in your primary attribute, and an unobservant player might not notice the character's reduced effectiveness. To hit modifiers are a big deal. They are why we have all these expertise feats. But that's not the issue -- I don't think that type of realism is a useful goal for a character generation system in a game like 4e and even a 16 is a huge cost in point buy if you want to play a genius warlord or a super-charismatic cleric. I think that a core goal of the character creation rules should be [b]to allow players to create a variety of interesting, different and viable characters with minimal rules overhead[/b] (quoting myself above). Because to hit modifiers are so important to a characters effectiveness (both in damage per round and in the ability to land important effects), WotC severely reduced the number of reasonably effective builds for little gain. -KS [/QUOTE]

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