Snoweel
First Post
From this thread.
Why?
Why should adventurers be better than normal people?
I've heard this so many times and always wondered why. I always found that success was more to do with attitude and opportunity than ability. Actually, I'm an example of this - all through primary school, everybody thought I was gifted, in both sports and academia, yet a bad attitude and lack of opportunity handed to me on a platter (which a good attitude would have countered to a great extent) has seen me do very little with my life.
Likewise, I read about people (I even know some personally) who have done the absolute utmost with what they were born with and have gone from strength to strength despite lacking what we might consider in D&D terms, "uber stats". There is truly no stat for being an overachiever.
So I don't think good stats make an adventurer, neither do I think average (or even sub-par) stats can stop somebody from having an impact on the world.
The following post from Celtavian goes some way to answer my question, but in the end just raises more questions:
Yet none of these people are what we'd call adventurers. They don't risk their lives for a living, and in fact don't have to - what a waste it would be to risk their lives when they can stay safe and get rich doing whatever it is they're blessed to do.
Once again - none of these elite specimens are adventurers.
I feel they wouldn't need to "adventure". Sure some of them would be great in the practice yard or at tournaments or in the courts of kings or leading armies (and historically, few leaders of armies led from the front - hp don't exist IRL) but you'll find some of the most famous "adventurers" in history weren't that special, at least not from a D&D stats perspective. Sure they might have had one or two high stats, but they weren't the epitome of human ability in every attribute.
What set them apart, in every case, was their attitude (not Charisma).
I agree, however...
But how much fun does random dice rolls make it for the players who don't end up with the Master Race Pototype you espouse?
I mean, if you want real life, certain choices are MUCH BETTER than others, and some choices are downright foolish.
However the maxim of D&D is a resounding "all choices must be balanced (and therefore equal)".
In real life, this isn't the case. In real life, there are choices that are "so powerful as to make all other options suboptimal" - this would make those choices "broken" in D&D terms, but are Reality.
Reality has to take a back seat to fun in a group RPG. And while "balance" is mostly an illusion, intended to stop players from feeling overshadowed by others, nothing will disguise the fact that one player in a group with "astoundingly good genetics" is just better than everybody else for as long as that character is active in the campaign.
And Reality also says that such a character isn't necessarily going to have the right attitude (or even desperate determination) to make a successful adventurer. Of course, the mere fact of that character being a Player Character says that he/she will have the right attitude. Likewise for the not-quite-perfect PCs.
PCs are better than the average Joe, because they know that the average DM wants them to stay alive. They won't suffer arbitrary death (in most cases), which is what the majority of NPCs in a game world probably fear every day, regardless of their super !33t genes/stats. PCs also know that there is always a solution to their problems.
That's what separates adventurers from non-adventurers.
It's all about attitude, not genes or stats.
Why?
Why should adventurers be better than normal people?
I've heard this so many times and always wondered why. I always found that success was more to do with attitude and opportunity than ability. Actually, I'm an example of this - all through primary school, everybody thought I was gifted, in both sports and academia, yet a bad attitude and lack of opportunity handed to me on a platter (which a good attitude would have countered to a great extent) has seen me do very little with my life.
Likewise, I read about people (I even know some personally) who have done the absolute utmost with what they were born with and have gone from strength to strength despite lacking what we might consider in D&D terms, "uber stats". There is truly no stat for being an overachiever.
So I don't think good stats make an adventurer, neither do I think average (or even sub-par) stats can stop somebody from having an impact on the world.
The following post from Celtavian goes some way to answer my question, but in the end just raises more questions:
Yet none of these people are what we'd call adventurers. They don't risk their lives for a living, and in fact don't have to - what a waste it would be to risk their lives when they can stay safe and get rich doing whatever it is they're blessed to do.
Once again - none of these elite specimens are adventurers.
I feel they wouldn't need to "adventure". Sure some of them would be great in the practice yard or at tournaments or in the courts of kings or leading armies (and historically, few leaders of armies led from the front - hp don't exist IRL) but you'll find some of the most famous "adventurers" in history weren't that special, at least not from a D&D stats perspective. Sure they might have had one or two high stats, but they weren't the epitome of human ability in every attribute.
What set them apart, in every case, was their attitude (not Charisma).
I agree, however...
But how much fun does random dice rolls make it for the players who don't end up with the Master Race Pototype you espouse?
I mean, if you want real life, certain choices are MUCH BETTER than others, and some choices are downright foolish.
However the maxim of D&D is a resounding "all choices must be balanced (and therefore equal)".
In real life, this isn't the case. In real life, there are choices that are "so powerful as to make all other options suboptimal" - this would make those choices "broken" in D&D terms, but are Reality.
Reality has to take a back seat to fun in a group RPG. And while "balance" is mostly an illusion, intended to stop players from feeling overshadowed by others, nothing will disguise the fact that one player in a group with "astoundingly good genetics" is just better than everybody else for as long as that character is active in the campaign.
And Reality also says that such a character isn't necessarily going to have the right attitude (or even desperate determination) to make a successful adventurer. Of course, the mere fact of that character being a Player Character says that he/she will have the right attitude. Likewise for the not-quite-perfect PCs.
PCs are better than the average Joe, because they know that the average DM wants them to stay alive. They won't suffer arbitrary death (in most cases), which is what the majority of NPCs in a game world probably fear every day, regardless of their super !33t genes/stats. PCs also know that there is always a solution to their problems.
That's what separates adventurers from non-adventurers.
It's all about attitude, not genes or stats.
