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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 8182655" data-attributes="member: 6799649">Let's say you are invited to play a new fantasy RPG, whose rules you don't yet know, but you are familiar with the standard fantasy races.You choose to play a human.Because you are new to the game, the DM hands you a pre-gen. The sheet says your Strength score is 35.Is 35 strong? Weak? Average?Without context, it is impossible to know!If you joined a D&D game in similar circumstances, and your pre-gen's sheet said Str 16, how would you know if that is weak, average or strong? Again, without context you could. Not. Know.But we D&D players DO have context. That context is that the bell curve of normal, unenhanced human strength is modelled by 3d6: minimum 3, maximum 18, average 10.5, with a bell curve favouring the middle 9-12.Then life happens and that strength can increase or decrease.If we want to know if humans in general are weak, strong or average, we compare them to that 3d6 bell curve. 16 is pretty strong!And we can judge if other fantasy races are, on average, stronger or weaker than humans. Humans are the average, per game design; we judge all other races (really: species) against the human norm.By that metric, minotaurs in general are stronger than humans in general. How do we know? Because minotaurs get +2 to strength.That makes sense. Conceptually, minotaurs are stonger than humans (on average), and we want our game mechanics to make sense.This has nothing to do with individuals! The strongest human is stronger than the weakest minotaur!How is this modelled in the game? Is it by taking away the +2 Str bonus from minotaurs?No. It is modelled by rolling a low strength score on 3d6 (or 4d6k3 or point buy or whatever) so that even after adding +2 the minotaur still has less than the 10 on the bell curve by which we measure these things.Saying your halfling is stronger than the strongest minotaur is fine....once you've earned that through play. At first level? Not so much.Saying that you want your starting halfling to have 24 Str, or 20 Str, and claiming that anyone saying different is wrong, is like saying that your halfling starts at eight feet tall. It doesn't make sense.If you want it to make sense, create a goliath and re-fluff it as a mutant halfling, with your DM's permission. I'd be cool with that.For me, things have to make sense. I can fluff my PC how I want as long as a.) I don't alter game mechanics without permission, and b.) it makes sense!</blockquote>

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