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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6321587" data-attributes="member: 58197">First, we have no reason to believe this will hold true in 5E. Second, that's an extreme corner case. If one of your PCs likes to challenge people to arm-wrestling contests, it might come up once every 1-2 sessions. In my experience, it's more like once every never. In 25 years of gaming I've not once seen an in-game arm-wrestling contest. On the other hand, I've seen any number of ability checks.Now, maybe my experience is an outlier and the typical campaign involves friendly athletic competitions multiple times a night. Somehow I doubt it, though.Like Ruin Explorer, I've seen this happen more than once at the table, so it's not some hypothetical concern. You can interpret this as "Those new gamers were morons" if you like. I interpret it as "Unnecessarily confusing layout is unnecessarily confusing." It's a small barrier to mastery, but there are a hundred of these little barriers and they add up to one great big honkin' learning curve. The only way to bring down that learning curve is to remove the little barriers, one at a time. This is one that can be removed without causing problems elsewhere, so why not do it? It's the same reason we got rid of THAC0.All other things being equal, a character sheet or monster statblock should be laid out so that behaving in a logical, intuitive way produces the correct result. When called upon to roll Dexterity, the logical, intuitive thing to do is look at the sheet, see the number next to "Dexterity," and use that.</blockquote>

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