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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9680657" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, one answer might be that ability scores don't obey a bell curve in the general population.  If there were a general lack of ability scores below 8 in the general population, then it would stand to reason that there would need to be a super abundance of characters with scores only slightly below average.  That is to say the mean might be 10.5 but the mode might only be a 9.How many NPCs have you created with an 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5 array?  Or lower.  Yet surely if there is a bell curve such arrays must be common.I'm not really trying to quarrel so much as I noticed for myself that I didn't create a lot of characters with arrays lower than 12, 11,11,10,10,9.  I wonder how many of them are actually out there.  Children certainly.  Perhaps the aged, though they tend to be more jagged, like 12,12,12,4,4,4.   Perhaps the destitute, beggars, town drunks, town fools, etc.  We can presume that there are a lot of "Mr. Not Appearing in this Story" that are below average, but the risk of that is that we end up creating the Village of Hommlet , where we are claiming that average and typical is one thing but the reality of what we actually present to players is very different.</blockquote>