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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7234764" data-attributes="member: 996">Rolling is not needed, it is an underlying model, and an historical context. Rolling (4d6) is the default to create PCs, with standard array and point-buy as alternatives.  The commoner, the entry presumably most representative of the general population, is not consistent with any of those PC-creation methods, it is consistent with 3d6. Realistically, human abilities, when arbitrarily sorted into only 6 boxes like D&D does, aren't independent random variables.  Some things, like strength & overall health are strongly influenced by the environment, and/or are linked to eachother.  An athlete is likely to have higher scores in all three physical stats, in large part due to intentional training, for instance.  The degree of unrealism would be out there, but if that hypothetical single set of stats were very near the average, it might be less unrealistic than the comparatively tail-heavy 3d6 distribution.  :shrug:  It would be a good deal less absurd, since at least they wouldn't all be identical. Similar to rolling 4d6 for the whole population, yes, you'd have a world that was, on average, well above average.   3d6 would work better, though it'd give you too much on the very high & low ends.  But, you could have an 'mundane array' of 10,10,10,11,11,11 (which'd have the opposite problem, /no/ high or low end!), or a 15-point buy (the point cost of that very average array) with more variation depending on exactly how you used it.  You could get much closer to realistic (or what you considered realistic or even just desirable for the world you had in mind) by not using any PC-generation method (nor variation thereof) uniformly through the population, at all. It's neither default, nor an assumption in 5e - it was way back in 1e, and it hasn't been changed or dismissed, it's merely been ignored since then.  There's a whole morass of tribal knowledge, unquestioned traditions, and unstated assumptions underlying D&D, like a castle built on a swamp, the stone parapets are no indication of the foundation. That's how it seems to me.  The 1e DMG went further than any other D&D book before or since in spelling out all sorts of bizarre minutia, philosophies, and rationalizations for D&D, and most of that strangeness hasn't been explicitly 'changed,' just quietly ignored... It's hard to fathom, but yes.  Obviously, D&D is a game (and in particular, ENWorld a community) where the past is extremely relevant.</blockquote>

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