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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 7228467" data-attributes="member: 6799649">First, you can imagine that Einstein et al have stats higher than 18, or maybe higher than 20. Einstein would be a high level Physicist, and his adventures would have given him ASIs and Tomes and so forth.All the 18 says is that you are (statistically) the strongest in a room of 216 people, not that you are the strongest man on the planet!This was even addressed by Gygax himself in AD&D 1E, when he mentioned that the hypothetical strongest man in the world wouldn't just have 18/00 Str, he'd have 18/00000 Str (I can't remember the exact number of zeroes; it was nearly forty years ago!). Even so, a guy with 19 Str would be stronger.Second, it's not trying to model real-life populations, but realistic populations for fantasy worlds. Here, the bell curve is looser than the real world.Some are much, much better at approximating realism than others. It's a valid thing to desire in a character generation system. Balance between players may also be desirable. How much priority we put on each quality varies from person to person and table to table, which is why some of us like rolling best and some prefer point-buy.I've found that there are several ways of adjusting rolling to make the results more balanced between players. I can't recall point-buy being adjusted to make it more realistic.</blockquote>