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Message: <blockquote data-quote="random user" data-source="post: 1813390" data-attributes="member: 16581">You can make it a wash by just making encounters harder if you buff characters.The reason why I think my players would like to have enchanced stats is to have more tactical versitility.Players generally show some characteristics of roleplaying and some of tactical planning.  While it's fairly easy to make an interesting character in terms of background and personality, it's much harder to create a character that isn't one dimensional in combat and tactics when you have low stats. Now some people don't care about that, but others don't care for a game where they can predict most of their moves in advance because they are limited to a small subset of choices.This is especially true of a fighter who ends up with 1 skill point per level, or a wizard who needs a 20 to hit with either a melee or ranged weapon, etc.  As a player it's annoying to come up to an encounter and think, "well I'd like to negotiate but no one speaks sylvan.  Our rogue made a character that was a good spotter (spot/listen/search) and con artist (disguise/appraise/bluff/sense motive/sleight of hand/escape artist) so he can't even attempt to hide to ambush them.  I'd like to lay down a trap, but my character with an int of 8 would never think to attempt that.  Oh, someone else thought of a trap, but no one was able to take rope use.  Have they been here long? Doh, I would have liked to take track as a feat, but I didn't have enough skill points to advance survival so it would have been a useless feat.  etc etc"That of course is an exaggeration, but it is true that the higher the stats are, in general, the more options will be available to a party.  For a party who likes to think of non-obvious or clever ways of dealing with encounters, low stat characters are very limiting.In addition, it's very hard to use some character concepts with low stats.  A fighter that used to be a professional blacksmith? That's pretty much hard to do at low stats without also hurting your ability to fulfill your party role.  A monk who is a master of languages? Also tough to do.  Actually, if you use a low stat (like 25 point buy) you're going to have a hard time making an effective tactical monk at all.I'm not saying that this is always the case, but I do think there are reasons players might want to have higher stats aside from the obvious munchkin-ism that can be associated with it.</blockquote>

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