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Message: <blockquote data-quote="n00bdragon" data-source="post: 6134552" data-attributes="member: 6689371">This thread assumes that adventuring parties are composed of purely random people, which is a horrible assumption. Sure, only one in 2000 some odd people has an 18 strength, but what are the odds of say... an average soldier having an 18 strength? How about a crack team of paramilitary commandos?Assuming characters are not, quite literally, random people off the street and there's some self-selection bias going on in the career field of "adventuring" I think a 15 or 16 is probably a MINIMUM for the primary stat of your chosen class.You also are looking at the extreme end of the dice in the 1/216 number. The chances of having an 18 in a particular stat are indeed 0.463%. The chances of having a 17 though are much better, 1.389%. A 16 or better is a whopping 4.63% (again, of the general population for a specific given score, the probability that any given person has at least a 16 in something is quite good). Combine this all with the self-selection bias above and it's quite silly to play a fighter with less than 16 strength or a wizard with less intelligence.This all ignores the fact that 3d6 is by no means a proper way to explain the variance between various attributes of people. It is a ridiculous abstraction and oversimplification. To read into it as some sort of law for how human attributes are actually distributed is absurd.</blockquote>