Are characters with 3 in a stat really so bad?

[Conradine]

I was thinking...
according to the rules a STR 3, DEX 3, CON 3 characters can sit, raise, squat, walk for several hours, make a very short run, briefly hold his breath without any serious problem, open and close doors ecc.
He's a frail, weak, clumsy person but he's not disabled. Not nearly.
A Wisdom 3 person is conscious of what surrounds him. A Charisma 3 person can still make decisions. An Intelligence 3 person can still read and write.

So I have the impression that 3 does not means "disabled", but rather "a point lower and it's disabled".


In your games how do you interpret attributes at 3?

[MisterKaws]

3 str characters can barely carry their own clothes. The other ability scores also massively impair skill usage and other things. The three main save scores also make you massively shanked in terms of resisting spells. Any low ability score can also be exploited with ability damage for a quick win.

[pabelfly]

Quite aside from the obvious of low scores affecting your saves, skill checks, and so forth, having a really low score also influences role-play for that character. A low INT, WIS or CHA character, for example, would make a lot of stupid decisions, and would botch most, if not all, social interactions that even an average character would succeed at.

[Kurald Galain]

It entirely depends on whether you interpret the 3 as (a) 20% worse on all related checks, or (b) the absolute worst imaginable on the human scale, or (c) one out of every 216 humans.

[pabelfly]

It entirely depends on whether you interpret the 3 as (a) 20% worse on all related checks, or (b) the absolute worst imaginable on the human scale, or (c) one out of every 216 humans.

An intelligence score of 1 or 2 is an animal's score, and a creature of humanlike intelligence has scores of at least 3, with the average score for a human being a 10. I would imagine a score of 3 would be on the very low end - people with severe learning disorders, brain damage, strong alzheimers, and so forth.

[icefractal]

An intelligence score of 1 or 2 is an animal's score, and a creature of humanlike intelligence has scores of at least 3, with the average score for a human being a 10. I would imagine a score of 3 would be on the very low end - people with severe learning disorders, brain damage, strong alzheimers, and so forth.You do get into a bit of a disconnect with the rules though.

Like for example, take Bob the Librarian (Human Expert 2). Int 3, but he has full ranks in three Knowledge skills, and a +1 bonus on those skills, or +3 with the use of reference books. Obvious not as good a sage as if he were smarter, but he still knows more about those areas than the average person.

Or Lord Squanch (Aristocrat 3). Cha 3, but looking at a Diplomacy of +4 - so despite his off-putting appearance and/or behavior, he's noticeably above average in dealing with people.

You can definitely say they're hindered, but it doesn't really seem to be at "barely functional" levels as it's often described.

[pabelfly]

You do get into a bit of a disconnect with the rules though.

Like for example, take Bob the Librarian (Human Expert 2). Int 3, but he has full ranks in three Knowledge skills, and a +1 bonus on those skills, or +3 with the use of reference books. Obvious not as good a sage as if he were smarter, but he still knows more about those areas than the average person.

Or Lord Squanch (Aristocrat 3). Cha 3, but looking at a Diplomacy of +4 - so despite his off-putting appearance and/or behavior, he's noticeably above average in dealing with people.

You can definitely say they're hindered, but it doesn't really seem to be at "barely functional" levels as it's often described.

I don't really see a disconnect with the examples you give.

Bob the Librarian has two character levels and in spite of dedicating a significant portion of his life to study, only has a +1 total over Joe Commoner. Presuming an ordinary commoner has a flat bonus of 0 INT and no ranks, Bob has a 55% chance to roll better or equal to Joe Commoner on one of those three knowledge checks, and only a 30% chance on any knowledge check that he hasn't been studying.

Not seeing how you come up with your numbers for Lord Squanch - Six ranks for Diplomacy and a -4 to CHA should be a +2, unless I've missed something. In either case, Lord Squanch should have a bonus in dealing with people - he has power and influence and probably money as a Lord. He might be a pig that everyone hates dealing with, but people have to override their innate loathing of dealing with him, and that's represented in his +2 or +4 to his Diplomacy checks.

[Crake]

You do get into a bit of a disconnect with the rules though.

Like for example, take Bob the Librarian (Human Expert 2). Int 3, but he has full ranks in three Knowledge skills, and a +1 bonus on those skills, or +3 with the use of reference books. Obvious not as good a sage as if he were smarter, but he still knows more about those areas than the average person.

Or Lord Squanch (Aristocrat 3). Cha 3, but looking at a Diplomacy of +4 - so despite his off-putting appearance and/or behavior, he's noticeably above average in dealing with people.

You can definitely say they're hindered, but it doesn't really seem to be at "barely functional" levels as it's often described.

So... your argument is that with effort and training you can reduce the impact of your disability? I mean, kinda sounds like the real world to me? A stupid person can still learn, they just learn slower and can retain leas facts, so the same amount of time spent learning results in a lesser outcome, something thats directly supported by the numbers you just put on display.

[Asmotherion]

My personal view is that a 10 on a stat is supposed to give the average of humanoids; it's calculated by averaging many 8s and 12s and others in between. Anything above a 12 is exceptionally high and anything below an 8 is exceptionally low.

i imagin it functioning a bit as iq does.

[Biggus]

It entirely depends on whether you interpret the 3 as (a) 20% worse on all related checks, or (b) the absolute worst imaginable on the human scale, or (c) one out of every 216 humans.

This. There's a massive disconnect between what very low (and very high) ability scores mean in different contexts. If Intelligence 3 is the lowest you can be while still able to read, write or speak, it makes no sense that a question which an average person has a 50% chance to answer correctly, you still have a 30% chance, and somebody with the highest possible base Intelligence only has a 70% chance (assuming none of you have relevant special training).

Likewise it makes no sense that the minimum and maximum ability scores top out at the 1 in 216 level, if that were the case there'd dozens of people with close to Olympic-weightlifter-level Strength in every town.

So yeah, there's a major handwave going on with what ability scores mean.

[Maat Mons]

It may be worth noting that the physical ability scores of 70-year-old humans average out to 4. And assuming it's not too uncommon for someone to start with an 8, it won't be too uncommon for someone to wind up with a 2 at age 70.

So I guess our hypothetical Str 3 / Dex 3 / Con 3 character can accurately boast "I have all the vigor and vitality of a below-average elderly man!"

[Kayblis]

I believe the first disconect happens when you generalize rules as fact. Sure, when you create a character you roll 3d6, average 10.5, lowest 3 and highest 18. That's how dice work. The normal distribution for this dice roll is the bellcurve everyone knows. But let's think for a second here - Standard Array is 11, 11, 11, 10, 10, 10. Common people use these as a general rule. Elite Array is 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. Special NPCs and relevant people use these as a way to simulate well above-average characters. Only player charaters roll for 3d6 by default, and that's because players play as a character that's usually very outside the norm. When you use the Elite Array as a high standard, and assume there'll only be a handful people like that in any smaller town of 200~500 people, you can see that the 18s some players sport from level 1 is exceedingly rare. Conversely, the other extreme of the spectrum is probably just as rare, even more so if you run your game anywhere close to medieval times, in which children died in droves and it was considered lucky to survive to adolescence. A person with Con 3 would have died of preventable diseases much earlier than adulthood.

What I'm saying is that the distribution for players don't work for NPCs. Masters in their field usually start with a 15 in the relevant stat. 18 as the highest a human being can naturally be is much further than that. The rules don't reproduce that impact much, but statistically they should be absurdly rare.

And for someone with a mental stat of 3, the mechanical penalties are not too big, and can be overcome with training. That sounds realistic for me, and mimics what we have seen before. Imagine a guy that's socially inept and can't hold a thought in his head for longer than a minute, but has obsessively played chess for 25 years since childhood. He's no grand master material, but he sure can beat FirstTimer Joe in a match most of the time, simply because he played so much. We have many many examples like this in both board games and videogames today.

[ZamielVanWeber]

The really big stat disconnect is that these stats are all "working fine" and a magnitude. They have no means of mapping a disability or variability. If someone is paralyzed from the waist down and can bicep curl a 100 lbs and manipulate a deck of cards with a single hand that person clearly has high Str and Dex but they also cannot stand or do gymnastics, which means low Str and Dex. The rules just have no idea what to do in that scenario because they were abstracted to "the best possible specimen of this number."

[Crake]

This. There's a massive disconnect between what very low (and very high) ability scores mean in different contexts. If Intelligence 3 is the lowest you can be while still able to read, write or speak, it makes no sense that a question which an average person has a 50% chance to answer correctly, you still have a 30% chance, and somebody with the highest possible base Intelligence only has a 70% chance (assuming none of you have relevant special training).

Likewise it makes no sense that the minimum and maximum ability scores top out at the 1 in 216 level, if that were the case there'd dozens of people with close to Olympic-weightlifter-level Strength in every town.

So yeah, there's a major handwave going on with what ability scores mean.

Well, considering that NPCs typically use the commoner array, the standard array and the heroic array, which have no variation higher/lower than 15/8, the whole 1 in 216 thing is pretty patently incorrect. It's only special characters that are expected to use rolled arrays, including PCs and specific NPCs, generally ones of great importance, so I think it's quite clearly intended that someone with a 3 or an 18 is less common than one in 216, especially so when you consider that most characters with rolled stats in fact use PC generation methods, meaning 4d6 drop lowest, and that particularly bad rolls (no stat higher than 13, total sum of modifiers less than +1) result in a re-roll, and a 3 would almost certainly drag any set of rolls down into this category unless the other rolls are particularly good, we also need to realise that the majority of 3s will in fact be re-rolled.

On the note of "20% worse", we need to also understand that that's an additive 20%, which makes for tricky calculations. Sure, a 50/50 becomes 30% chance of success, but something that one in five (20%) could do, suddenly that 3 means they're simply incapable. That becomes even worse when considering that it's something that can be repeatedly attempted. For example climbing over a short wall, typically has DC15, but for the purpose of this discussion, lets pretend that it's DC 17, maybe it's a bit wet and slippery. A normal person would take a few attempts to climb over it, but eventually be able to get over, while someone with 3 strength could never actually pull themselves over that wall.

Lets look at another example, searching for something. Someone with 3 int could never find something with DC17, no matter how hard they tried, but the average person could take 20 and find it with a bit of effort. Here's another example: The average person can care for themselves out in the wild by taking 10 on survival, that person with 3 wisdom on the other hand will go 13/20 days without enough food to not go hungry. Taking 10 does poke a huge hole in the argument as well, because something that's 50/50 is ACTUALLY 100% while not under stress (ok fine, technically it's something that's 55/45, but the point still stands), so acting like "oh, it's just 20%, that's not THAT big a difference" is incorrect, because that "20%" may actually be the difference between "absolutely incapable of completing the task" vs "having to spend a few tries to get it done", or "reliably able to perform the task under normal conditions" vs "unable to perform the task the majority of the time".

So I think really that leaves the only reasonable interpretation of what a 3 means as the last one, the worst imaginable on a (functional) human scale. I add in functional, because scores of 1 and 2 are still possible (not by regular ability score generation methods, but through other means), but aren't suitable for viable PCs. If we assume that PCs must be, at a minimum, functional members of their race, then that is clearly what a 3 denotes.