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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 4209809" data-attributes="member: 29398">Tales From the League StatisticianI'm in process, over these few weeks, of doing some number-crunching on just this topic: whether starting stats make any appreciable difference to the life expectancy of the character.**Those who do not like statistics may wish to jump to the next post now.  You have been warned!**Study parameters:  - all are/were 1e-based characters played in games sometime between 1981 and now; - roll-up method for all is/was 5d6 drop 2, 6 times, rearrange to suit - note this forces acknowledgement that these characters will be somewhat higher powered overall than the norm for the game; - study comparison is between characters who lasted 10 or more adventures and a control group of characters who died early (career of 3 adventures or less); - intent is to determine correlation if any between adventuring career length and starting rolled stats.Data: - including party NPCs, I have a potential pool of about 830 characters from maybe 10 different campaigns to pull from...in reality, I'd guess I have access to the character sheets of about 75% of these; - of those 830, 72 have reached the 10-adventure benchmark; I have access to 69 of those character sheets and have the starting stats (after racial adjustment but before any other changes e.g. Con loss due to death) recorded for those 69; - of those 72, 15 have reached the 20-adventure plateau; 2 of those have reached 30; - note that about half of these characters would have had longer careers yet were it not for the fact the game they were in ended; - I have not yet dug out and recorded a control group of 70 or so short-lived types - that's next on the agenda - note that this control group will be randomized by the most basic of systems: I'll just use the first 70 I find that fit the crieria. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> - I have also not done any analysis on whether the prime stat is most critical to success or whether having most or all high-ish is better.Findings so far: - there's a rather wide variance in the stat-power level within the top 69, and even within the top 10, when average of the 6 stats is compared; - taking the top 69, breaking them down into groups of 10, and taking the overall average stat for each block (add the 6 stats together, repeat 10 times, divide by 60) the 1-10 group has the lowest overall average of the seven groups as follows: 1-10 14.1111-20 14.3221-30 14.8431-40 14.2741-50 14.5451-60 14.1461-69 14.29So, among the high end there's little difference between a 10-adventure character and a 25-adventure character...this alone indicates that once a character's career is nicely started, stats probably don't matter very much in terms of keeping it going.I'll update once I've done the number-crunching with the control group.Lane-"I'm too sleepy to know if this all makes any sense"-fan</blockquote>

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