Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6850205" data-attributes="member: 42582">What is the new information that is being arbitrarily added?All you seem to be saying here is that, as a matter of natural numbers arithmetic, 18 = 3*6. But in the same sense, 100 = 2*50.If you are also asserting that the 3d6 roll is establishing a number that measure some quantity of something, which varies in its presence in a given person between 3 and 18 units, what is that something?Let's take CON. The AD&D rulebooks (PHB, DMG) tell us that CON measures physique, fitness, health and resistance. What would it even mean (beyond loose metaphor) to say that PC A has twice or three times the physique or the health of PC B? There is no quantity of some determinable property ("health", "physique") being measured here. All there is is a chart that assigns certain mechanical consequences to certain scores, and then a device - the roll of 3d6 - that allocates those scores on a probabilistic basis (which, as I have said, also seems intended to correlate in some fashion to frequency in the population).With IQ, there are also charts that allocate certain numbers to members of the population on a frequency or likelihood basis. If someone wants to take the IQ charts with their frequencies, and the stat charts with their frequencies (as calculated via the odds of a 3d6 roll), and then match the too up where the frequencies are (more-or-less) equal, what is the objection?What information has been thrown away? Certainly not information that 18 is 6 times as intelligent as 3, because there is no such information.As I have said, the 3d6 score is not a measure of a quantity of something.This is even more obvious in Classic Traveller (which uses 2d6 rather than 3d6 but is otherwise the same in its principles and logic). In Traveller, the Education (EDU) score is an indicator of the highest level of formal education attained. A character with a 10 EDU is not, though, 5 times more formally educated than a character with a 2 EDU. That makes no sense.Likwise for Social Standing (SOC), another Traveller stat. A character with 11 or 12 social standing is a Knight or Baron respectively. There is no notion, though, that a Count has twelve elevenths of the social standing of a Knight. Again, that would not even be a coherent claim.These random state generation techniques are for assigning scores that show rankings (from low to high), where the positions in those rankings are determined by their likelihood in some (fairly loosely defined) population.EDIT: Here's another example - the MMII encounter tables are d8+d12, used to determine an entry on a chart where those entries are allocated on the basis of frequencies. There is no suggestion that the monster found on the 20 entry is 10 times as "encounter-y" as the monster found on the 2 entry.3d6 ability scores are like that, except the entries are also in a ranking.</blockquote>

Verification