D&D 5E Point Buy vs Rolling for Stats

[Satyrn]

That's just dumb. A person can push more than he can lift, and drag more than he can push.

And how much you can push or drag totally depends on the friction involved. If you can drag a 540 pound block of concrete across a tarmac, you can probably drag a 737 (wheels down) across it too.

The D&D rules are not a good or complete physics model.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But I still don't see what a sentence in a book published nearly 40 years ago has to do with today's D&D.

D&D was a fad, then, and 5e rests its success on cleaving to the feel & traditions of that sort of Golden Age, so, yeah, it matters.

 

[Oofta]

D&D was a fad, then, and 5e rests its success on cleaving to the feel & traditions of that sort of Golden Age, so, yeah, it matters.

Many, many things have changed over the decades and D&D has evolved.

The proof that 3d6 is a good method to get average person ability scores is that people have decided that 3d6 is a good way of generating ability scores. Seems quite circular to me.

It also ignores common sense that 1 in 216 people would be as strong as humanly possible (barring special training). If that makes sense for your campaign, more power to you. It's obviously not true in the real world and would be ludicrous in most campaigns.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Many, many things have changed over the decades . .

Sure, and some of them, like D&D, have changed back, too.

 

[Oofta]

Sure, and some of them, like D&D, have changed back, too.

So I guess that means that dwarves can only be fighters and hobbits are all thieves? Only elves can be both wizards and fighters?

Nostalgia is great, but 3d6 was never a good model for distribution of ability scores for the general population, it was just one of the easiest.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So I guess that means that dwarves can only be fighters and hobbits are all thieves? Only elves can be both wizards and fighters?

Not 'only,' no, (not that it was 'only' back at the height of the fad), but you can still play those sorts of characters...

Nostalgia is great, but 3d6 was never a good model for distribution of ability scores for the general population, it was just one of the easiest.

'easiest' sounds good.

 

[Lanefan]

In most of the game's history, humans outside of PC's HAD NO STATS AT ALL. 3e is the outlier here in giving everyone 6 stats. There was absolutely nothing indicating that 3-18 was the bell curve of a population.

It's indicated in the 1e DMG and assumed elsewhere.

This comes right back to another argument from a different recent thread: just because we don't know the hard numbers attached to something that's "offscreen" does not mean there are in fact no hard numbers. We just don't know (and most of the time don't need to know) what they are; and when we do need to know we generate them then...but in generating them we are merely codifying what was always there to begin with, in the game world.

And, let's just look at the 3d6 bell curve for a second. That gives a nice, gentle bell curve. But, populations don't look like that. Probably something like 90% of the population would be between 8 and 12. And you certainly wouldn't have 3% of your population with an 18 or a 3. That's ridiculous. The reason we baseline at 10 is because that covers about 90% of the population.

I've already pointed out several times that a 3d6 bell curve is too "loose" to model a whole population, and have suggested some dice sets that could give a tighter version of the same curve. 5d4-2 is one. 7d3-3 or -4 is another, even tighter; though it gives either a 3-17 or 4-18 range depending which modifier you use. EDIT: Or you could use 7d3-(d2+2) to get a properly random 3-18 range...

Lan-"if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it have stats"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

... but 3d6 was never a good model for distribution of ability scores for the general population ...

Fine.

Got a better one?

One that models a somewhat generic but still randomized population and that - to mirror what the game uses for its PCs - gives a 3-18 range?

If yes, let's hear it!

 

[Maxperson]

So I guess that means that dwarves can only be fighters and hobbits are all thieves? Only elves can be both wizards and fighters?

Nostalgia is great, but 3d6 was never a good model for distribution of ability scores for the general population, it was just one of the easiest.

It's a much better model than point buy, though. If it's not a good model, then point buy is horrible for modeling it.

 

[Maxperson]

And how much you can push or drag totally depends on the friction involved. If you can drag a 540 pound block of concrete across a tarmac, you can probably drag a 737 (wheels down) across it too.

The D&D rules are not a good or complete physics model.

Absolutely. That's why even though I like more realism than the game gives at the base, trying to model reality is really a drag.