D&D General You Were Rolling Up a New Character, and Just Rolled a 3. What Is Your Reaction?

[Swarmkeeper]

For those who think a 3 doesn't really matter, what do you think it represents? Because to me it represents the spectrum of human capabilities. Some people are simply far more or less intelligent than others. That doesn't change their value as individuals and there's no way to measure it accurately in reality. But it's like not acknowledging that Peter Dinklage and Michael Jordan had very different career options.

I don’t think anyone here is saying a 3 “doesn’t really matter.” What many are saying is that is doesn’t really matter for roleplaying purposes, a position which is backed by the rules (or, more specifically, the lack of rules around how any given ability score must be roleplayed. Note, that’s for 5e. Happy to see rules quoted from other editions that insist on how stats must be roleplayed.)

At the end of the day, a 3 ability is still a -4 to any roll involving that stat (in 5e). That matters mechanically, to some extent.

How someone wishes to portray that, however, is up to them. And, it should be in good taste. You seem to be against portraying someone with a 3 INT in an insulting/socially rude manner, yet seem to think that’s the only way to roleplay a 3 INT character. Others sharing your philosophy have even called it “cheating” not to play the 3 INT character as someone who can’t “reason better than an animal” as if that is a self-evident way of interpreting ability scores in D&D. It’s entirely possible I’m misunderstanding/misinterpreting something in your position here but that’s how I’m reading your position thus far.

Notably, the insults and the rudeness can all go away when you leave roleplaying decisions up to the players at the table and not policed due to some arbitrary definition of what a 3 or a 10 or a 17 means for a mental ability score.

 

[Gimby]

I actually had this a while back - rolled up three sets of stats, two which were pretty normal and one which was 5 stats at 16+ and one 4. Just leant into it and made a fairy wizard and put the 4 into Strength. Very playable and powerful, no-one expected him to perform any feats of strength and limited flight meant he was able to ignore a lot of things you'd expect an Athletics check for. He did end up having to get stuck in a bottle to be carried through a flooded passage, but the Zelda reference was worth it

 

[Lanefan]

If they were at the rock bottom for human intellectual capacity they would be incapable of movement and on a ventilator.

Exactly. A stat of 3 indicates a character is above the movement-incapable or ventilator-required threshold but only by the slightest amount. Lose one more point on that stat and into the care home you go, because that's what you need. Lose a couple more and get down to 0 and you're either dead or a complete vegetable.

Which is to say, the difference between a 2 and a 3 should be only a bit more than the difference between a 3 and a 4. I'm fine with treating the mushy middle 9-12 range as being pretty much the same, but the degree of difference between stat points gets higher the farther away from that mushy middle you get.

This is where 3-4-5e all get it completely wrong with their inane persistence on applying linear bonuses to bell-curve stats.

What you actually mean is"they are at the rock bottom for D&D character capacity for narrowly prescribed game functions while still being fully capable of a thriving careeer as an adventurer."

So what this really seems to say is that a 3 for an adventurer translates to maybe a 7 across the general populace. When one is trying to have the PCs be directly representative of the population(s) from which they come - which for me is a non-negotiable baseline unless the PCs are specifically alien to the world they are on - that just doesn't work.

 

[Lanefan]

I view the range of 3-18 as the spectrum of humanity barring disease or accident.

Same here; with disease or accident able to expand that range down to 1 (at 0, you're dead or close) and up to wherever.

In the game, magical and other effects can also expand the range.

 

[Lanefan]

Yep. A 18 Intelligence character will pass a DC 10 Intelligence check 75% of the time, assuming no other modifiers. A 3 Intelligence character will pass that same check 30% of the time.

That tells me the range they claim to be 3-18 is functionally more like 7-14. The math is too flat.

An Int-18 character should make a DC-10 check 99% of the time, an Int-3 character should make it 1% of the time if that.

That means that 7.5% of the time (or about 1 time in 13), the 3 Int character will know or figure out something the 18 Int character doesn't. That's a lot! That's not the difference between Einstein and a housecat.

Expanding that 3-18 range, as mathematically represented by those checks, to include Einstein and a housecat would make it more like -4 to 27.