NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 5060123" data-attributes="member: 29398">A few months ago, out of a chat amongst our crew, I ran some numbers on just this.  I dug up lots and lots of old dusty character sheets and checked the starting stats (after racial adjust), then checked how long their careers were (measured by number of adventures appeared in).  I did not cross-correlate deaths whether revived or not.To avoid getting into too much number-crunching, I just used the average of the 6 starting stats.  We've always used 5d6 drop lowest 2, so our stats are on the high side; but within that the data is very consistent.  An average of 11 is awful, an average of 16 is spectacular.At the time, we'd had something like 72 characters appear in 10 or more adventures (remember, this is over almost 30 years) - amazingly, I was able to find character sheets for 69 of them.  I then pulled a control group of 70-odd random characters from various of the same campaigns, whose careers had been less than 10 adventures.The difference was surprisingly small.  And, among the control group, the only real difference was between those of 3 or more adventures and those of less than 3; the stat average for the very short-lived was about .6 lower.  The stat average for the 3-9 group and for the 10+ group was essentially the same.  Individually, there was wide variance in all groups.So, while the rest of the system may or may not have been designed for balance, random stat generation plays little if any role in unbalancing things at least from the data I've seen.One oft-forgotten balancing mechanism here over the long term is that magic items were much easier to break in 1e than in 3-4e.  I can chuck a +3 Frost Brand into a low-level dungeon in the safe knowledge that sooner or later the chances are high that it'll break, or melt, or blow up; and in the meantime someone's gonna have a rockin' weapon!  (that said, you're right about not much guidelines; I think many DMs just used the published modules as a rough guide)Which reflects the general system-wide idea of short-term imbalance, long-term balance.Lanefan</blockquote>

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