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Xervous
2020-06-15, 11:33 AM
Time and again various divides come up in the course of RPG history. We have time stamps on various fallacies, release dates laying down the chronological boundaries between editions, but I’ve never seen the opinion presented in the title tied to one specific time period or system. As of late I haven’t seen it all too frequently, mostly in rolled abilities/attributes/whatever cases.

Anyone care to shed some insight on what produced the “low stats make for better creativity and/or RP” school of thought?

Dragonsonthemap
2020-06-15, 11:58 AM
I have no idea where it originated for sure. I will say that I saw it for the first time right after 5e came out, and not once in the days of 4e/Pathfinder. I sort-of got the impression it came of out backlash against the prevalence of power-gamers who seemed to view a narrow focus on mechanical optimization as the only "proper" way to play in the 3.5 days. I have a vague suspicion it may be tied to other systems whose player bases have seen better day, like WoD, but only because WoD and its cousins are popular among the people I have personally met who lean towards this idea.

Xervous
2020-06-15, 12:09 PM
In my mind I was drawing parallels to grittier and sometimes darker systems. Without exceptional familiarity with such systems or the discourse that occurs in their communities I can’t say much for certain, operating almost exclusively off hearsay.

Could it be one lens of viewing RPGs, where with incompetence or impotence the player’s only true hope for engaging with the game is through RP? I lack many of the details to understand the whole mindset and it doesn’t come across in a full, justified expression most of the time. Attempting to piece explanations together I end up with a chicken/egg conundrum.

Nifft
2020-06-15, 12:12 PM
Maybe 2e / Dragonlance?

One of the most memorable characters was memorable because he had Con 4 and was obsessed with surviving in spite of his sickly body. Eventually IIRC he either killed or replaced a god.

Xervous
2020-06-15, 12:21 PM
Why 2e if not 1e? From what I gather there were no grand paradigm shifts in that transition. Stats were still rolled merry as you please in either case. Was there a need for the existence of alternate generation methods beyond rolling in order for the low=rp mindset to express itself?

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 12:23 PM
This isn't just a D&D thing, it cuts across gaming and has for a long time -- I first came across it in the late 80s.

Democratus
2020-06-15, 12:36 PM
I've only seen it as a retort to the school of thought that high stats are necessary to have a good character - not as prerequisite for a good character.

I do recognize that overcoming obstacles makes for compelling storytelling. But these obstacles can be from a character's own limitations or from active opposition by others.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 01:03 PM
I've only seen it as a retort to the school of thought that high stats are necessary to have a good character - not as prerequisite for a good character.

I do recognize that overcoming obstacles makes for compelling storytelling. But these obstacles can be from a character's own limitations or from active opposition by others.


It's common enough that there's even a name for the "formal fallacy" that claims that roleplaying or "narrative" quality of a character is inversely proportional to their competence or power level... I'm blanking on it right now, maybe Oberoni Stormwind. As corrected below, it's Stormwind.

prabe
2020-06-15, 01:04 PM
It does seem to be a retort to feeling as though one needs awesome stats for a character to be enjoyable to play. I know there are people who feel as though having at least one substandard stat gives them a handle they can grab onto when it comes to playing the character, but that's not exactly the same thing.

Those of us who remember rolling 3d6 in order for stats (say, in older editions of D&D) almost certainly remember characters with mediocre-at-best stats.

Composer99
2020-06-15, 01:21 PM
I am sure versions of this argument, or related ones, have sprung up in many contexts. I do recall a form of it coming up in the AD&D 2e PHB.


Obviously, Rath's ability scores (often called "stats") are not the greatest in the world. Yet it is possible to turn these "disappointing" stats into a character who is both interesting and fun to play. Too often players become obsessed with "good" stats. [...]


In truth, Rath's survivability has a lot less to do with his ability scores than with your desire to role-play him. If you give up on him, of course he won't survive! But if you take an interest in the character and role-play him well, then even a character with the lowest possible scores can present a fun,
challenging, and all-around exciting time. [...]

Don't give up on a character just because he has a low score. Instead, view it as an opportunity to role-play, to create a unique and entertaining personality in the game. Not only will you have fun creating that personality, but other players and the DM will have fun reacting to him.

I would say this text, upon review, is arguing something more like "creativity and good roleplaying can make a character with poor stats worth playing", rather than saying that "poor stats make for better RP/creativity" as such. But it's not too far of a stretch to get from one to the other.

Dimers
2020-06-15, 01:26 PM
Low stats making for better RP, I find ridiculous. For in-game creativity, though, it actually makes sense. If you can't simply power through on sheer potency, you have to get creative if you want to survive and thrive. If you're talking about creativity in chargen ... again, makes no sense to me; explaining or describing a high stat is just as creative as explaining/describing a low one.

As for when and where ... I've seen hints of it as far back as the 2e PHB, in the sample character generation for Rath, the dwarf fighter. The book gives two examples of how to portray a poor stat array and no examples of how to portray an amazing one. So, creativity and RP only happen when stats are bad, I guess?

I've never played an RPG older than 2e.

EDIT: Hah! Ninja'ed on Rath the dwarf warrior specifically! :smallbiggrin:

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-15, 01:45 PM
I suspect that as point/priority buy systems came into play - as opposed to basically random chargen.

Once you could essentially build exactly the character you wanted, people began building them somewhere between "extraordinarily gifted" and "reality breaking uber-menschen" as the baseline. That created an arms race - if you didn't at least somewhat optimize, you fell behind in a genre of game that really only cared about being awesome at combat. That in turn limited what you could actually build - oh sure, you could choose not to, but when someone said "tonight we're basically going to throw dice for three straight hours to tell the tale of how awesome you are - sorry bob, your guy kind of sucks at this because I built the enemies to face your demigod friends - but I think next session we'll have three minutes of exposition?" that made it pretty clear where it all stood. In many ways, you can still see the descendants of that view point today when someone on a forum sneers because "a soul focused warlock is a better healer - why did that [name here] play a cleric if he wanted to heal? [insert derisive snickering here]." or in the multitude of balance topics that come up.

With so much effort going into mechanical optimization, it left little room for characterization. There wasn't mental effort for it. And there wasn't a mechanical reflection of anything other than a few optimized paths. You could theoretically play the awkward blacksmith's son who found out he could wield magic intuitively, but when push-came-to-dice-throwing-shove he somehow had the force of personality that would shame Stalin and the strength of an anemic 98 lb model. Or you tried to make him elsewise, but then he was dead meat when he met the same challenges that had to be in place to handle the rest of the uber-party.

This naturally also slaughtered many a GM's attempt at a story or even (within the bounds of the setting) believable world. You can guess that the Shadowrun of intrigue and betrayal didn't stand up that well to a Porno-mancer (yes, this is an actual term) throwing 38 dice at a social scene, or indeed, whenever they wanted to. As you can also guess, when players can solve everything with an overwhelming dice pool until the game becomes nothing but stacking dice against each other, well those other arts of the game tend to fade or take on a very odd tone in contrast to the dicing.

More meta, imagine the worst stereotypes of a gamer - fat, sweaty, and snorting over how his number was bigger for killing goblins with some pretty clear indicators he thought this somehow made him cool/big/whatever in real life - and you might find that the trend towards forced optimization didn't do the community any favors in that regard.

Nifft
2020-06-15, 01:48 PM
I suspect that as point/priority buy systems came into play - as opposed to basically random chargen.

Once you could essentially build exactly the character you wanted, people began building them somewhere between "extraordinarily gifted" and "reality breaking uber-menschen" as the baseline. That created an arms race - if you didn't at least somewhat optimize, you fell behind in a genre of game that really only cared about being awesome at combat. That in turn limited what you could actually build - oh sure, you could choose not to, but when someone said "tonight we're basically going to throw dice for three straight hours to tell the tale of how awesome you are - sorry bob, your guy kind of sucks at this because I built the enemies to face your demigod friends - but I think next session we'll have three minutes of exposition?" that made it pretty clear where it all stood. In many ways, you can still see the descendants of that view point today when someone on a forum sneers because "a soul focused warlock is a better healer - why did that [name here] play a cleric if he wanted to heal? [insert derisive snickering here]." or in the multitude of balance topics that come up.

With so much effort going into mechanical optimization, it left little room for characterization. There wasn't mental effort for it. And there wasn't a mechanical reflection of anything other than a few optimized paths. You could theoretically play the awkward blacksmith's son who found out he could wield magic intuitively, but when push-came-to-dice-throwing-shove he somehow had the force of personality that would shame Stalin and the strength of an anemic 98 lb model. Or you tried to make him elsewise, but then he was dead meat when he met the same challenges that had to be in place to handle the rest of the uber-party.

This naturally also slaughtered many a GM's attempt at a story or even (within the bounds of the setting) believable world. You can guess that the Shadowrun of intrigue and betrayal didn't stand up that well to a Porno-mancer (yes, this is an actual term) throwing 38 dice at a social scene, or indeed, whenever they wanted to. As you can also guess, when players can solve everything with an overwhelming dice pool until the game becomes nothing but stacking dice against each other, well those other arts of the game tend to fade or take on a very odd tone in contrast to the dicing.

More meta, imagine the worst stereotypes of a gamer - fat, sweaty, and snorting over how his number was bigger for killing goblins with some pretty clear indicators he thought this somehow made him cool/big/whatever in real life - and you might find that the trend towards forced optimization didn't do the community any favors in that regard.

That last paragraph reads like a group attack, you might want to rein that in.

Unavenger
2020-06-15, 01:50 PM
It's common enough that there's even a name for the "formal fallacy" that claims that roleplaying or "narrative" quality of a character is inversely proportional to their competence or power level... I'm blanking on it right now, maybe Oberoni.

Stormwind is the name of the closest named fallacy I can think of ("If you optimise, you must be bad at roleplaying") - Oberoni is "It's not a problem if it can be fixed."

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 02:01 PM
Stormwind is the name of the closest named fallacy I can think of ("If you optimise, you must be bad at roleplaying") - Oberoni is "It's not a problem if it can be fixed."

Thank you, yes, Stormwind.

Nifft
2020-06-15, 02:24 PM
I am sure versions of this argument, or related ones, have sprung up in many contexts. I do recall a form of it coming up in the AD&D 2e PHB.

(...)

I would say this text, upon review, is arguing something more like "creativity and good roleplaying can make a character with poor stats worth playing", rather than saying that "poor stats make for better RP/creativity" as such. But it's not too far of a stretch to get from one to the other.

Thanks for finding that.


IIRC that came out of a shift in how the game was played between 1e and 2e.

In oD&D and 1e, you rolled stats and played them for a while before you named your PC. The most popular example of this seems to have been Melf, who remained unnamed until someone needed to name a spell after him, and the player decided that the male elf which had "M. Elf" written at the top was Melf.

That's how much thought went into some of the iconic 1e characters. In many 1e games, your PC wasn't a named person until the PC had survived for a while and accumulated sufficient deeds to be worth the effort ... and in Melf's case, the effort was truly low.



Many 2e games seem to have diverged from that premise. DMs started asking for PC backstories; players started expecting their first PCs to be important to the setting or storyline, and to survive through the end of the game, or at least until some sort of important and heroic death.

I'm not sure exactly why the expectations changed, but IMHO it's this change in expectations which caused both point-buy and this idea about weakness being "more interesting".



In oD&D and 1e, weakness wasn't more interesting -- if you rolled poorly, your PC had fewer options. You couldn't be a Paladin if you didn't roll high enough. And yet, people played weak characters anyway. Why did players tolerate these imbalances in those older editions?

Perhaps because PCs died early and often.

Players might have tolerated a temporary imbalance because over time it would even out -- even a character with 18s in every stat could die to a bad saving throw, for example, or a no-save-just-die trap like a face-carving with a Sphere of Annihilation inside its mouth. The strong and the weak died alike.

Since all PCs were temporary, one being flat-out better than another was a temporary problem. The ability rolls might have been unfair at any specific moment, but across a large sample of PCs they will tend towards fairness, and since PCs die frequently the sample sizes do tend to be large.


The changed expectations around the era of 2e, whereby PCs were expected to remain for an entire campaign, changed that from being a temporary problem into a campaign-long problem.

Statistical fairness becomes irrelevant if your sample size is expected to be 1. You want to start from a position of relative fairness, because that situation was going to persist for a longer duration.

But some people were used to rolling for stats. So, DMs who grew up rolling for stats now had to convince players to accept those stats, even after the expectations around how long they'd need to keep the stats had changed.

I think that's one place where this argument about weak-is-interesting comes from.


There are some concrete examples of characters being weak and interesting, such as the one from Dargonlance (Raistlin in specific) -- but that's a character written by a successful author, so it's arguable that the character was interesting because of the author rather than the weakness.

Zarrgon
2020-06-15, 03:15 PM
This really goes back to the start. There has always been the split between players that want to play only all powerful demi god characters and players that want to play an average gritty characters. And while gritty has a set low level, the demi god side had no limit and would quickly spiral out of control in power..as after all that is what power does.

Though, there was also the role play vs roll play split that also doubled with this, almost exactly. And almost to a player, the role players wanted to role play a average gritty character and the roll players wanted to play the powerful demi god character. After all stats, class abilities and all game rules don't matter too much to a role player as they can role play just fine no matter what. But the roll players are tied to the stats, class abilities and all game rules: they can't roll play unless their character has high ability scores and other overpowered rules.

So the end result would come down to:

Player 1: Has a role playing character with a background, history, personality, goals and such making them a "real like" fictional character.

Player 2: Had a character that could do all sorts of amazing all powerful rule based things.....but mostly would just count the numbers and brag about how much damage their character could do.

So “Low Stats Make for Better RP and Creativity” was just obvious from this.

Player one would role play a clumsy character with a Dexterity of 5 and have a fun role playing time in an adventure that was a mix of role playing, roll playing, and more.

Player two would roll play a character of all high ability scores and have fun roll playing a pure all combat by-the-numbers adventure.

MeimuHakurei
2020-06-15, 03:21 PM
It's most likely an inverse that originates from the Stormwind Fallacy - if you believe that powergamers can't roleplay, this means that you believe crappy characters are inherently more interesting (nevermind that there's a whole host of strengths and weaknesses independent of stats and weaknesses need not inform a certain power level).

But what's far more likely the case is control freak DMs deriding effective play as munchkinry and antisocial so everyone stays in line by declaring that PCs that can't impact the plot in any way the DM didn't script for are more interesting in RP.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 03:49 PM
It's most likely an inverse that originates from the Stormwind Fallacy - if you believe that powergamers can't roleplay, this means that you believe crappy characters are inherently more interesting (nevermind that there's a whole host of strengths and weaknesses independent of stats and weaknesses need not inform a certain power level).

But what's far more likely the case is control freak DMs deriding effective play as munchkinry and antisocial so everyone stays in line by declaring that PCs that can't impact the plot in any way the DM didn't script for are more interesting in RP.

Those are both contributors.

But there's also a broader idea, from fiction in general and lit-fic in particular, that elevates characters like Willy Loman as "realist" and "valid", and disdains even highly competent characters as "power fantasy" / "escapism".

Xervous
2020-06-15, 04:38 PM
Those are both contributors.

But there's also a broader idea, from fiction in general and lit-fic in particular, that elevates characters like Willy Loman as "realist" and "valid", and disdains even highly competent characters as "power fantasy" / "escapism".

I find it funny that you bring up Willy of all characters when offing oneself to better the group is something that players consider for unfavorable characters.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 04:51 PM
I find it funny that you bring up Willy of all characters when offing oneself to better the group is something that players consider for unfavorable characters.


Speaking entirely of the way certain circles laud indecisive, vaguely obsequious and feckless, general mediocre characters as "realistic" and "deep".

Nifft
2020-06-15, 04:57 PM
Those are both contributors.

But there's also a broader idea, from fiction in general and lit-fic in particular, that elevates characters like Willy Loman as "realist" and "valid", and disdains even highly competent characters as "power fantasy" / "escapism".

I have never heard of Willy Loman being held up as an ideal for any type of RPG character, and googling gives me nothing but literary analysis -- nothing about him as an RPG character, even on the deep web (i.e. the second page of search results).

Can you link some examples of that?

King of Nowhere
2020-06-15, 05:00 PM
like most other fallacies, it has a root in truth, and it only becomes a fallacy if taken to the extreme.

and i think weaknesses are good for at least two reasons:
1) a boring invincible hero is just that: boring. looking at movies, pretty much any hero has weaknesses he must overcome. there's a narrative reason for it. yes, i know, d&d is not a movie or book, but still some tropes apply (and most people don't bring a TO tier 1 at the table)
2) d&d is a team game. having weaknesses means you have to rely on your teammates, it encourages teamplay. we are all thaught to not overshadow your fellow player.

i could also add another reason, this one false but enticing
3) if you have bad stats you won't be able to fight your way through everything, so you'll have to look for indirect solution, hence rp and creativity
yes, of course 3 is false, but can become true in certain conditions.

do notice that having weaknesses does not actually equate to having bad stats, or viceversa. optimization plays a much larger role than stats into it.

but yes, I think that concept can form the root of the fallacy. add also a pinch of stormwind fallacy, which is also very close in meaning (and it also has a root of truth, in that while it is possible to be good at both mechanics and roleplaying, most people only have time/interest for one of the two)

Xervous
2020-06-15, 05:02 PM
i could also add another reason, this one false but enticing
3) if you have bad stats you won't be able to fight your way through everything, so you'll have to look for indirect solution, hence rp and creativity
yes, of course 3 is false, but can become true in certain conditions.

Could it be that poor stats force the player to resort to creativity, and that some GMs might think it fine to eliminate players' other options to coerce RP they think they might not otherwise get?

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 05:12 PM
I have never heard of Willy Loman being held up as an ideal for any type of RPG character, and googling gives me nothing but literary analysis -- nothing about him as an RPG character, even on the deep web (i.e. the second page of search results).

Can you link some examples of that?

I was not citing him as an example of the RPG incarnation of this fallacy.

I was citing him as an example of the sort of character held up in the broader incarnation of this fallacy, within as you note literary circles, where mediocrity is seen as a sign of a solid fictional character, and competence is seen as a sign of "power fantasy" or "escapism" to be stamped out.

Nifft
2020-06-15, 05:18 PM
I was not citing him as an example of the RPG incarnation of this fallacy.

I was citing him as an example of the sort of character held up in the broader incarnation of this fallacy, within as you note literary circles, where mediocrity is seen as a sign of a solid fictional character, and competence is seen as a sign of "power fantasy" or "escapism" to be stamped out.

Huh.

I remember some 400-level literature seminars discussing the distinction between "everyman" stories vs. "heroic fantasy", including classical epics, but there was never a suggestion that one or the other ought to be stamped out.

It was more about how the things which authors want to talk about have changed over time.


What literary circles want to stamp out heroic fantasy? Can you link some?

Xervous
2020-06-15, 05:44 PM
I was not citing him as an example of the RPG incarnation of this fallacy.

I was citing him as an example of the sort of character held up in the broader incarnation of this fallacy, within as you note literary circles, where mediocrity is seen as a sign of a solid fictional character, and competence is seen as a sign of "power fantasy" or "escapism" to be stamped out.

If we're going to label it a fallacy I don't see much better than can be done past Rath's Fallacy, but I feel that is short circuiting some debate and recollection. That excerpt from 2e stands as a solid landmark in the D&D scape, but others are saying it may very well be independent of D&D or at least emerging in other circles prior to the debut of Rath. I am curious what others of less/non D&D backgrounds have to recall on this matter.

icefractal
2020-06-15, 06:28 PM
I think it comes from a similar cause to the Stormwind fallacy. I'm not saying this is only reason, but consider a GM who doesn't care much about the mechanics, viewing the story and/or character personalities to be infinitely more important.

That GM then encounters several types of players:
A) Good at RP, bad at mechanics - Remembered as "a good player", maybe remembered as being mechanically weaker than ...
B) Good at mechanics, bad at RP - Remembered as "that annoying guy who didn't even have a personality for his character but somehow one-shot the BBEG"
C) Good at both - Remembered primarily as "a good player". Depending how much the GM doesn't grok mechanics, maybe not even perceived as different than A, just luckier.
D) Good at neither - Fades into the background and doesn't get remembered.

So while they're two independent factors, the combination of "no goals, no personality, huge combat stats only, final destination" ends up as standing out the most and being the most memorable.


Another part is, I think, overreaction to people saying that a class or character type is worthless. In practice, a character's screen-time and perceived importance (by the rest of the group) doesn't always correspond to that character's mechanical effectiveness. And even within mechanical effectiveness, build > class. On this very board, multiple people created Monks that could solo the Elder Evils, a feat which the majority of characters being played in campaigns, even T1 casters, would be unlikely to succeed at.

So if someone says, "Monk is useless, a Monk could never be the most important character in the party," that's incorrect. What's also incorrect is to claim that the possibility of a MVP Monk means that Monks are a better class in general. But not too surprising a thing for people to claim.

Pauly
2020-06-15, 07:44 PM
Time and again various divides come up in the course of RPG history. We have time stamps on various fallacies, release dates laying down the chronological boundaries between editions, but I’ve never seen the opinion presented in the title tied to one specific time period or system. As of late I haven’t seen it all too frequently, mostly in rolled abilities/attributes/whatever cases.

Anyone care to shed some insight on what produced the “low stats make for better creativity and/or RP” school of thought?

I've been RPing since the ‘80s. This argument has come up in every game system since year dot.

There is a tension between being able to achieve what you want and the pool of resources you use to create a character.

Some players want uber characters that ROFL stomp whatever bad guys are out there, for them it’s about how stylishly you beat the bad guys, not sweating if you can beat them Other players want to MacGayver their way to defeat the ancient red dragon with a bent fork and a cantrip. Most players are on a spectrum between the two extremes.
Neither approach is inherently wrong. However when you have the two opposite types of player in the party is that the MacGayver player thinks the RIFL stomper is being lazy and unimaginative. The ROFL stomper thinks the MacGayver is handicapping the party and selfishly hurting other people's fun.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 08:00 PM
I've been RPing since the ‘80s. This argument has come up in every game system since year dot.

There is a tension between being able to achieve what you want and the pool of resources you use to create a character.

Some players want uber characters that ROFL stomp whatever bad guys are out there, for them it’s about how stylishly you beat the bad guys, not sweating if you can beat them Other players want to MacGayver their way to defeat the ancient red dragon with a bent fork and a cantrip. Most players are on a spectrum between the two extremes.
Neither approach is inherently wrong. However when you have the two opposite types of player in the party is that the MacGayver player thinks the RIFL stomper is being lazy and unimaginative. The ROFL stomper thinks the MacGayver is handicapping the party and selfishly hurting other people's fun.

Then there's me, who doesn't understand how system mastery and optimization became dirty words, or somehow antithetical to the MacGuyver character.

You can use understanding of the rules and how they work to build a MacGuyver character who is highly capable of MacGuyvering given the character build resources you have to work with.

False God
2020-06-15, 08:04 PM
No answer to the question, the line of thought always strikes me as off, since the more certain I am in my character's capability to do a thing, the more freedom I feel I have to RP.

Lord Raziere
2020-06-15, 08:05 PM
I've been RPing since the ‘80s. This argument has come up in every game system since year dot.

There is a tension between being able to achieve what you want and the pool of resources you use to create a character.

Some players want uber characters that ROFL stomp whatever bad guys are out there, for them it’s about how stylishly you beat the bad guys, not sweating if you can beat them Other players want to MacGayver their way to defeat the ancient red dragon with a bent fork and a cantrip. Most players are on a spectrum between the two extremes.
Neither approach is inherently wrong. However when you have the two opposite types of player in the party is that the MacGayver player thinks the RIFL stomper is being lazy and unimaginative. The ROFL stomper thinks the MacGayver is handicapping the party and selfishly hurting other people's fun.

Yeah, one prefers to have it worked out in advance, the other wants to improvise. some people just don't don't find planning stuff or certainty all that fun. its something I've observed in freeform roleplay that even if you take away rules, some players will just want to plan everything in advance, and some players will just want to play everything by the ear.

so I'd say that this is an issue that universal to roleplaying, its just DnD in particular rewards the planner methodology rather than the improviser methodology.

denthor
2020-06-15, 08:22 PM
When the player dictates.

Low dex remind the DM you have a 5 ask about hazardous conditions.

Low charisma when you interact with NPC'S. I ran a 6 charisma character halfling. No small gifts ever. Talking to one I got an easy "I am not sure" response. My response well if you unsure we do not need to speak anymore turned my heels and walk away from him. He was really surprised broke character and ask what my charisma was I replied 6 he said you just proved it. Good piece of role play.

Low strength I can not move this ask for help. Have others carry your gold, weapons etc.

Intelligence say stupid things do stupid things. Walk alone impatiently are you done reading yet? What is this worth accepting answers given especially when you know they are lying.

Wisdom no planning. See above

Constitution I am sick hypochondriac every elf in existence.

icefractal
2020-06-15, 10:26 PM
Then there's me, who doesn't understand how system mastery and optimization became dirty words, or somehow antithetical to the MacGuyver character.I think in that case it's more about the power level of the PCs vs the world than about optimization specifically. It's just that D&D has an implied power level based on the published adventures and Monster Manuals, and so 'by default' the degree of optimization will change where you are relative to the rest of the world.

If you want your character's skills and competence to be demonstrated, then generally you want their "schtick" to usually be usable and often be effective. For maximum improvising/MacGuyvering though, you might want to usually be outmatched and need to pull off some unusual strategy to have a chance at success.

So for example, let's say you make a character who's good at archery,and you optimize them for that. Would you honestly be happy if most foes were basically immune to arrows, and instead your primary on-screen archery actions were things like shooting arrows into a wall as an impromptu ladder, using arrows to knock things out of people's hands or flip levers, shooting a whistling or flare arrow as a signal, and so forth? Personally, I don't think I would be. A "trick shots only" archer could be a fun concept, but it's a different one than a generally good archer, and I'd feel like the latter concept was negated by this premise.

But on the other hand, for someone who wants a focus on outside the box thinking in every battle, or at least every important battle, the ability to just win the battle by straightforward shooting (whether by themselves or another PC) would interfere with that.

Planning vs Improv has some of the same dynamics - do you love it when a plan comes together? Or are the complications the exciting part and the plan is a backdrop at best, dull filler at worst?


Personally I guess I'm on the more 'planning' side of this. If the PCs prepared for something and managed to engage the situation on favorable terms, it's totally fine for it to be a cakewalk (and I would honestly be annoyed if some complication always arose). The actual act of doing it is like the prize ceremony, the contest was being able to reach that point. But for other people, that would be a ticket to boredom.

That said, "everything will probably go wrong, fly by the seat of your pants" games can be fun too. But in that case, I want to know it ahead of time, so I don't waste time making a plan that's ultimately meaningless.

Pauly
2020-06-15, 10:26 PM
Yeah, one prefers to have it worked out in advance, the other wants to improvise. some people just don't don't find planning stuff or certainty all that fun. its something I've observed in freeform roleplay that even if you take away rules, some players will just want to plan everything in advance, and some players will just want to play everything by the ear.

so I'd say that this is an issue that universal to roleplaying, its just DnD in particular rewards the planner methodology rather than the improviser methodology.

Let me clarify. By “MacGayver” I‘M referring ti the level of resources available to the player, not the skill of how the player uses thise resources.
Resources can be their stat block as well as GP, magical equipment, allies etc which are all part of the story the players inhabit.
For example:
James Bond goes into the field with maxed stats, the best training, the best equipment and high level friendly allies to help him.
MacGayver goes into the field with lower base stats, his wits, no fancy equipment and maybe some low level allies to help him out.
Both franchises tell good stories, it’s just that the challenges the protagonist has to overcome are different.
Some players want to be in a James Bond story. Other players want to be in a MacGayver story.

Lord Raziere
2020-06-15, 11:07 PM
Let me clarify. By “MacGayver” I‘M referring ti the level of resources available to the player, not the skill of how the player uses thise resources.
Resources can be their stat block as well as GP, magical equipment, allies etc which are all part of the story the players inhabit.
For example:
James Bond goes into the field with maxed stats, the best training, the best equipment and high level friendly allies to help him.
MacGayver goes into the field with lower base stats, his wits, no fancy equipment and maybe some low level allies to help him out.
Both franchises tell good stories, it’s just that the challenges the protagonist has to overcome are different.
Some players want to be in a James Bond story. Other players want to be in a MacGayver story.

okay? I don't see how thats different. the planner I'm talking about tends to set up things and people that will give them more power later on in the story and their character tend to be incredibly intelligent and thoughtful for their age, while constantly discussing how the world works and coming up with various ideas about what their character can do and how they can be useful later on.

while the improviser outright gave their character a disability by injuring their legs so they can't walk in their backstory and needs to summon a mount to get anywhere fast and their character tends to make impulsive decisions without considering consequences, outright wanting to play an underdog character while believing that characters SHOULD experience humbling defeats now and then to make their victories better. furthermore the player just wants to take it slow and roleplay in the moment to flesh out the characters now as much as possible, and doesn't like discussing future plans and has a "burn that bridge when we get to it" attitude towards far off things.

they both play in the same game. without rules. they made these decisions without any rules about resources being involved, thus both technically have the same amount of resources in a freeform environment but they chose to use them differently.

so I don't see it as a resource thing because when given the same amount (freeform which is technically unlimited) they went different directions with it. technically any game will also give all players the same amount of resources, so I'm pretty this is down to method, because the method not only chooses how they use the resources, but also how much resources they use. one can always maximally use macgyver resources to be the closest thing to james bond and one can always minimally throw away James Bond resources to be macgyver, it makes no difference how much is given.

Lucas Yew
2020-06-16, 04:03 AM
That LSMFBRPAC idea will never work for me, as my RL scores are quite bad (below 10 for all physical scores and Charisma, mundane Wisdom, and okay Intelligence only, I guess), and I desperately want a much more fit avatar for inhabiting fiction-land at all times.

Zombimode
2020-06-16, 06:26 AM
The "low powered PCs = good" mindset is also depressingly common for DSA (Das Schwarze Auge) GMs. Not everyone thinks that way, sure, but certainly too many.

And I suspect the DSA system is at least in part to blame: in many editions completely civil skills and professions (like Baker, Cook, etc.) bought out of the same ressource pool and presented as equal to adventuring skills like fighting and magic.

To this topic in general I would include the notion that "power", most of the time meaning combat ability, is a "temptation" that the players has a moral duty to "resist".

Xervous
2020-06-16, 07:07 AM
To this topic in general I would include the notion that "power", most of the time meaning combat ability, is a "temptation" that the players has a moral duty to "resist".

Could you elaborate further on this moral duty? The main offense I can see a GM suffering is that the players are somehow competent and attain a mote of narrative agency beyond the Mother May I that low stats can enforce.

Zarrgon
2020-06-16, 08:20 AM
For example:
James Bond goes into the field with maxed stats, the best training, the best equipment and high level friendly allies to help him.
MacGayver goes into the field with lower base stats, his wits, no fancy equipment and maybe some low level allies to help him out.
Both franchises tell good stories, itÂ’s just that the challenges the protagonist has to overcome are different.
Some players want to be in a James Bond story. Other players want to be in a MacGayver story.

Well, your examples don't seem right, maybe:

James Bond goes into the field with high stats, the best training, the best equipment and high level friendly allies to don't help him directly.
MacGayver goes into the field with high base stats, his wits/experience/training, no fancy equipment and maybe some low level allies to help him out.

Both franchises tell good stories, itÂ’s just that the challenges the protagonist has to overcome are the same, but how they face and over come the challenges is different(but often very similar).

But then to compare you would really need to go Superman and Macguyver.

Superman is nearly all powerful with very high stats and powers, can do nearly anything, is nearly all knowing about everything, has the best most impossible equipment(as if he needed it) and has tons of powerful allies(that he does not really need).

MacGayver goes into the field with high base stats, his wits/experience/training, no fancy equipment and maybe some low level allies to help him out.

And everything about the franchises is different. Superman must face only world ending, galaxy ending or universe ending great powers so he can go all out and toss moons around, travel in time and drop kick the bad guy into the sun.

Macguyver is much more grounded, like just trying to stop some bank robbers or help a mom find her lost son.

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 08:37 AM
Having low stats can hinder roleplaying and creativity too. You can easily have a group in which every member has a wisdom and charisma penalty and they unable to overcome any challenge but through raw power and violence...

Xervous
2020-06-16, 08:42 AM
Having low stats can hinder roleplaying and creativity too. You can easily have a group in which every member has a wisdom and charisma penalty and they unable to overcome any challenge but through raw power and violence...

Are you excluding the case where the GM asks for no rolls but doles our success to good RP? The CHA 4 character whose player provides a riveting motivational speech can be handed success simply because the GM likes it.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-16, 08:51 AM
Are you excluding the case where the GM asks for no rolls but doles our success to good RP? The CHA 4 character whose player provides a riveting motivational speech can be handed success simply because the GM likes it.

On the other hand, there's an argument to be made that a character with CHA 4 giving a riveting motivational speech is stretching credible RP to the breaking point.

Xervous
2020-06-16, 09:09 AM
On the other hand, there's an argument to be made that a character with CHA 4 giving a riveting motivational speech is stretching credible RP to the breaking point.

Is it though when a 4 vs a 10 is only a -3 difference in the recent versions of D&D?

4 CHA with no ranks/unskilled in Diplomacy/persuasion/Bluff/con/etc paints the fuller picture, but certainly there’s a tipping point?

Psyren
2020-06-16, 09:21 AM
I am sure versions of this argument, or related ones, have sprung up in many contexts. I do recall a form of it coming up in the AD&D 2e PHB.



I would say this text, upon review, is arguing something more like "creativity and good roleplaying can make a character with poor stats worth playing", rather than saying that "poor stats make for better RP/creativity" as such. But it's not too far of a stretch to get from one to the other.


Thanks for finding that.


IIRC that came out of a shift in how the game was played between 1e and 2e.

In oD&D and 1e, you rolled stats and played them for a while before you named your PC. The most popular example of this seems to have been Melf, who remained unnamed until someone needed to name a spell after him, and the player decided that the male elf which had "M. Elf" written at the top was Melf.

That's how much thought went into some of the iconic 1e characters. In many 1e games, your PC wasn't a named person until the PC had survived for a while and accumulated sufficient deeds to be worth the effort ... and in Melf's case, the effort was truly low.

Yeah that quote was pretty eye-opening for me too. It's a far cry from 3.5 and PF telling you "if your stats are too low, you should probably reroll."

I don't think the notion that low stats are more interesting is anything approaching a majority viewpoint though. It's like the loud voices who claim that starting Dark Souls as anything but a Deprived is ez mode and players who don't need to "git gud" - people will boast loudly on any message board they can find, but actual play statistics would reveal these voices to be the minority that they are.


In oD&D and 1e, weakness wasn't more interesting -- if you rolled poorly, your PC had fewer options. You couldn't be a Paladin if you didn't roll high enough. And yet, people played weak characters anyway. Why did players tolerate these imbalances in those older editions?

Perhaps because PCs died early and often.

Players might have tolerated a temporary imbalance because over time it would even out -- even a character with 18s in every stat could die to a bad saving throw, for example, or a no-save-just-die trap like a face-carving with a Sphere of Annihilation inside its mouth. The strong and the weak died alike.

Since all PCs were temporary, one being flat-out better than another was a temporary problem. The ability rolls might have been unfair at any specific moment, but across a large sample of PCs they will tend towards fairness, and since PCs die frequently the sample sizes do tend to be large.

Yeah, I would wager that this sort of routine-rerolling play where death is both frequent and expected is what gave us the Roguelike (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Roguelike) genre (the eponymous original especially.) Now don't get me wrong, I love a good roguelike as much as anyone - but the folks who expect every RPG to be that are beyond the pale for me, and expecting one that requires detailed character-building like D&D 3e and beyond do is even greater lunacy than I can fathom.


The changed expectations around the era of 2e, whereby PCs were expected to remain for an entire campaign, changed that from being a temporary problem into a campaign-long problem.

Statistical fairness becomes irrelevant if your sample size is expected to be 1. You want to start from a position of relative fairness, because that situation was going to persist for a longer duration.

But some people were used to rolling for stats. So, DMs who grew up rolling for stats now had to convince players to accept those stats, even after the expectations around how long they'd need to keep the stats had changed.

I think that's one place where this argument about weak-is-interesting comes from.

Agreed but thankfully, we came up with ways to satisfy both those who enjoy rolling for stats and those who want characters to not be crippled at chargen - namely the various "drop lowest" rolling schema.


There are some concrete examples of characters being weak and interesting, such as the one from Dargonlance (Raistlin in specific) -- but that's a character written by a successful author, so it's arguable that the character was interesting because of the author rather than the weakness.

I'm not sure this is particularly concrete, because his weakness was compensated for in several ways that probably wouldn't fly at a game table. Raistlin had a rather heavy loadout of plot armor that, in-universe, derived in part from being watched over by an ancient archlich who may or may not have been future (past?) Raistlin himself in some ways, once you added in a heaping dose of paradox from all the time shenanigans he gets up to later - however you categorize this entity, it saves Raistlin's bacon more than once. He also walks around with an artifact that was more valuable than any of the rest of the party's gear save perhaps Goldmoon's. If you have to do all that to make someone's low stats viable, I'd argue that they aren't viable at all, and I'd further argue that you're not really roleplaying the limitations of their stats so much as bypassing them via plot device.

Xervous
2020-06-16, 10:00 AM
I don't think the notion that low stats are more interesting is anything approaching a majority viewpoint though. It's like the loud voices who claim that starting Dark Souls as anything but a Deprived is ez mode and players who don't need to "git gud" - people will boast loudly on any message board they can find, but actual play statistics would reveal these voices to be the minority that they are.

Deprived actually was its own brand of easy mode thanks to the club’s poise damage. Real hard mode was technically thief because of how unforgiving bandit’s knife was early on. But the biggest thing you see with dark souls in contrast to something like D&D is that the starting stats are a fleeting representation of your character as you swiftly morph into whatever build you desire. It’s not like picking deprived means you can’t ever hope to cast homing crystal soulmass, whereas low stats in some editions could very well deny your caster from using certain spells in absolute or in practice.

martixy
2020-06-16, 10:06 AM
To answer the original question:

It's unlikely to have a well-defined origin. More likely, it's a derivation from the pretty widespread concept that "greater limitations foster greater creativity". And its certainly not unique to D&D or RPGs. You can hear the same sentiment echoed in interviews with people in many different creative fields. Such as video games - how a certain limitation caused them to have to seek workarounds for some technical or design problem and it resulted in a clever gameplay mechanic. Or in film-making where lack of a sufficient budget forces all sorts of creative use of props or camera angles or editing.

It's also a fallacy. Of course I want a bigger budget so I can hire a VFX Artist and not have to bother with cardboard cut-outs and creative use of shadows.

It's more pervasive in RPGs likely because it can also be used as a tool for the DM to exercise more authority. A logical fallacy used to reinforce a human vice. Sounds about on par for the human condition, to be fair.

BurgerBeast
2020-06-16, 10:19 AM
Is anyone going to come forward and say that they advocate the view?

I doubt it.

I don’t think the view exists, or if it does is very popular. What is popular is the view that this view is popular, though.

It probably originated as a straw man representation of someone else’s actual claim, such as, “well, just because you have a few bad stats doesn’t mean you have to give up. Try roleplaying the character. You may come to like him.”

But as others have mentioned, there are genre-tropes. Literature is full of flawed heroes and misfits-becoming-heroes, because it’s generally not as interesting to see someone who is born awesome at everything just go be himself. - I would say this has more to do with the perpetuation of the idea that the view exists than with the actual view existing.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-16, 10:26 AM
Is anyone going to come forward and say that they advocate the view?

I doubt it.

I don’t think the view exists, or if it does is very popular. What is popular is the view that this view is popular, though.

It probably originated as a straw man representation of someone else’s actual claim, such as, “well, just because you have a few bad stats doesn’t mean you have to give up. Try roleplaying the character. You may come to like him.”

But as others have mentioned, there are genre-tropes. Literature is full of flawed heroes and misfits-becoming-heroes, because it’s generally not as interesting to see someone who is born awesome at everything just go be himself. - I would say this has more to do with the perpetuation of the idea that the view exists than with the actual view existing.

Over the course of ~35 years in gaming, I've repeatedly run into gamers who thought it was "power gaming" to give their character basic competence, let alone strong capabilities, and who insisted that it was "better roleplaying" if their character constantly struggled with everything. They'd build a character with power X that used dice from attribute Y and skill Z... but give the character a below-average in Y and nothing in Z, because if they were even kinda competent with X, they'd be "power gaming" and "not roleplaying".

Necrosnoop110
2020-06-16, 10:56 AM
I can only answer anecdotally:

Started playing AD&D 2E in high school, 3E in college, a brief time in 4E, and then 5E in adulthood. I heard nothing of this idea in 2E. Only heard it starting in the middle of the 3E life cycle. I really think a lot of it has to do the insane levels of optimization and game mastery burdens that is 3E.

In my younger days of 2E no one really knew what was powerful, what was weak, it was all essentially a crap shoot. Plus DMs back then had so much say in the rules and power levels they could, for good or for ill, swing the game anyway they wanted for any character.

3E kind of took a lot of that power from the DM and placed in the rule-set. We can debate on whether that was good or bad but I really believe it was the case. In addition, the extensive online optimization forums and websites really drove a wedge between the casual soda and pizza gamers and the hardcore gamers. I've seen the look on the face a causal player trying to use his PHB-only monk and comparing his results to a CoDzilla or worse. I think casuals and grognards feel obsolete next to optimizers and all their mountains of books and rules that they will never understand.

The non-optomizers only defense is to attack them as power-gamers and critique their role-playing. They are never going to take the time and effort to gain that level of game mastery. So they give up on the powercurve and say that the real deal is all about the role-playing not the roll-playing. And along with that comes another move - the weaker the character the better the rolepaying! This is a move they can do that under-cuts the optimizer without having to do an equal amount of game mastery.

Obviously, there could be other motivations at play here but I really think this is a big part of the "low stats aka a mechanically weak character" is the best role-play option. I have guys at some of my gaming tables that I frequent who have expressed repeatedly that you can only role-play a weak or low powered character. And that when you optimize you eliminate the options for role-playing by definition.

(Note: Personally I think you can role-play at nearly all power levels. Although, I do think it is interesting to give a character a weakness even if the overall competence is high. But I radically disagree with the idea that low-competence is required for role-playing.)

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 11:13 AM
Are you excluding the case where the GM asks for no rolls but doles our success to good RP? The CHA 4 character whose player provides a riveting motivational speech can be handed success simply because the GM likes it.

If the player does that, then they isn't really roleplaying his character... A character CHA 4 literally has the communication skills of a fish. A character with CHA 4 should be barely able to speak at all, or if they do, nobody would listen.


Is it though when a 4 vs a 10 is only a -3 difference in the recent versions of D&D?

4 CHA with no ranks/unskilled in Diplomacy/persuasion/Bluff/con/etc paints the fuller picture, but certainly thereÂ’s a tipping point?

Yeah, a low charisma character can invest into buying a skill and become competent; that would represent a person with poor communications skills working and training to get better at it.

But many classes get pretty few skill points/skill proficiencies... what if they choose to put them into something they can actually become good at, rather than dumping them into Diplomacy/Persuasion only to become merely bad rather than disastrous at it?

A 5e 4th level character with CHA 4 who picks Persuasion as a skill proficiency is still quite bad at communication. A 8th character with CHA 4 and with the Persuasion skill proficiency is still just average.

As I said, a low ability stat can discourage you from investing in related skills...

Lord Raziere
2020-06-16, 11:17 AM
Deprived actually was its own brand of easy mode thanks to the club’s poise damage. Real hard mode was technically thief because of how unforgiving bandit’s knife was early on. But the biggest thing you see with dark souls in contrast to something like D&D is that the starting stats are a fleeting representation of your character as you swiftly morph into whatever build you desire. It’s not like picking deprived means you can’t ever hope to cast homing crystal soulmass, whereas low stats in some editions could very well deny your caster from using certain spells in absolute or in practice.

Yeah, I start Deprived for both my first runs of Dark Souls 3 and 1. still on my first Dark Souls 1 run, but the hardness of Deprived falls away as you acquire more equipment and stats to make what you want and figure out what you want to do. once you get a hang of dark soul's combat using Deprived you can do whatever, its not as if you'll be much different from any other melee starting package later on after all while spellcasters are basically entirely different games and runs to play that from my short lived attempt at a dark souls 3 mage, seems it requires thinking of the entire game as a tactical puzzle to solve rather than parry/crit fishing which I like to think I'm at least semi-competent at.

though you can morph your deprived into a spellcaster if you want, I just never attempted that because I'm too busy trying to survive and fight my way through the game to figure out how to find the mage trainer early, grind souls up to get stuff and play my new hard to get spellcaster, which I'm sure is possible if you know what your doing.

though I've personally never started with knight or any other class other than deprived or mage, so....I wouldn't know how much "easier" Dark souls gets with them.

martixy
2020-06-16, 11:28 AM
Is anyone going to come forward and say that they advocate the view?

I doubt it.

I don’t think the view exists, or if it does is very popular. What is popular is the view that this view is popular, though.

It probably originated as a straw man representation of someone else’s actual claim, such as, “well, just because you have a few bad stats doesn’t mean you have to give up. Try roleplaying the character. You may come to like him.”

But as others have mentioned, there are genre-tropes. Literature is full of flawed heroes and misfits-becoming-heroes, because it’s generally not as interesting to see someone who is born awesome at everything just go be himself. - I would say this has more to do with the perpetuation of the idea that the view exists than with the actual view existing.

You need to learn about the concept of bias. Specifically sampling bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias). More specifically as it relates to the participants of these forums.

Xervous
2020-06-16, 11:34 AM
If the player does that, then they isn't really roleplaying his character... A character CHA 4 literally has the communication skills of a fish. A character with CHA 4 should be barely able to speak at all, or if they do, nobody would listen.

What is the foundation for this? CHA 4 is only a -3 swing from the baseline. What dictates the emotional range of a teaspoon being applicable here?


Yeah, I start Deprived for both my first runs of Dark Souls 3 and 1. still on my first Dark Souls 1 run, but the hardness of Deprived falls away as you acquire more equipment and stats to make what you want and figure out what you want to do. once you get a hang of dark soul's combat using Deprived you can do whatever, its not as if you'll be much different from any other melee starting package later on after all while spellcasters are basically entirely different games and runs to play that from my short lived attempt at a dark souls 3 mage, seems it requires thinking of the entire game as a tactical puzzle to solve rather than parry/crit fishing which I like to think I'm at least semi-competent at.

though you can morph your deprived into a spellcaster if you want, I just never attempted that because I'm too busy trying to survive and fight my way through the game to figure out how to find the mage trainer early, grind souls up to get stuff and play my new hard to get spellcaster, which I'm sure is possible if you know what your doing.

though I've personally never started with knight or any other class other than deprived or mage, so....I wouldn't know how much "easier" Dark souls gets with them.

Most of them don’t shift the difficulty much, but pyromancer and sorcerer are brain=off outliers that steamroll PvE content.

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 11:46 AM
Over the course of ~35 years in gaming, I've repeatedly run into gamers who thought it was "power gaming" to give their character basic competence, let alone strong capabilities, and who insisted that it was "better roleplaying" if their character constantly struggled with everything. They'd build a character with power X that used dice from attribute Y and skill Z... but give the character a below-average in Y and nothing in Z, because if they were even kinda competent with X, they'd be "power gaming" and "not roleplaying".

And why did the short, scrawny guy decide he wanted to be Fighter? Or why did the morbidly obese, barely able to move character decide he wanted to be a Rogue? Or why did the dumb one decide he wanted to be a Wizard?

I dunno... to have a character take such unpractical, life-threatening choices, is that really good roleplaying? From our outer perspective it is just a game, but, in-world, they are pathetic and insane; they are exploring monster-infested dungeons, hunting monster, fighting fearsome foes while being very ill-equipped for it... Isn't that just suicidal? Shouldn't they leave the job for somebody who actually has a chance to survive? And, why are they given the job at all?

It can be good for a comedic game about a group of crazy chumps who think they can be adventurers, but not for your average adventure...


What is the foundation for this? CHA 4 is only a -3 swing from the baseline. What dictates the emotional range of a teaspoon being applicable here?



Most of them don’t shift the difficulty much, but pyromancer and sorcerer are brain=off outliers that steamroll PvE content.

In 5e a Reef Shark has CHA 4. In 3.5e a Toad has CHA 4.

Nifft
2020-06-16, 11:48 AM
And why did the short, scrawny guy decide he wanted to be Fighter?

Well, if he gets a super soldier serum and Shield proficiency...

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 11:52 AM
Well, if he gets a super soldier serum and Shield proficiency...

... he wouldn't begin his career as a hero with low physical stats, but with peak human ones (that is, at least 18 in every physical stat), and probably with at least WIS 18 and CHA 18 too, and with at least good INT too...

Xervous
2020-06-16, 11:55 AM
And why did the short, scrawny guy decide he wanted to be Fighter? Or why did the morbidly obese, barely able to move character decide he wanted to be a Rogue? Or why did the dumb one decide he wanted to be a Wizard?

I dunno... to have a character take such unpractical, life-threatening choices, is that really good roleplaying? From our outer perspective it is just a game, but, in-world, they are pathetic and insane; they are exploring monster-infested dungeons, hunting monster, fighting fearsome foes while being very ill-equipped for it... Isn't that just suicidal? Shouldn't they leave the job for somebody who actually has a chance to survive? And, why are they given the job at all?

It can be good for a comedic game about a group of crazy chumps who think they can be adventurers, but not for your average adventure...



In 5e a Reef Shark has CHA 4. In 3.5e a Toad has CHA 4.

Do you have any examples that aren’t swimming around with flat earthers in the low single digit int dumpster?

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 12:07 PM
Do you have any examples that aren’t swimming around with flat earthers in the low single digit int dumpster?

Do you have any example of a high INT, low CHA character or creature that is good at communication?

In not, I will assume that a PC with CHA 4 will have communication skills almost as bad as these creatures I mentioned (not quite, because a PC can at least speak, but put their persuasion skills should be abysmally low...).

Xervous
2020-06-16, 12:15 PM
Do you have any example of a high INT, low CHA character or creature that is good at communication?

In not, I will assume that a PC with CHA 4 will have communication skills almost as bad as these creatures I mentioned (not quite, because a PC can at least speak, but put their persuasion skills should be abysmally low...).

For something like 5e with its bounded accuracy I don’t see much merit to arguing contrary, but 3.5’s skill growth would certainly smooth the numbers over to the point that it’s harder to finger the character as socially inept. Perhaps that says something about the merits of each system and how they can be wielded?

Willie the Duck
2020-06-16, 12:21 PM
Time and again various divides come up in the course of RPG history. We have time stamps on various fallacies, release dates laying down the chronological boundaries between editions, but I’ve never seen the opinion presented in the title tied to one specific time period or system. As of late I haven’t seen it all too frequently, mostly in rolled abilities/attributes/whatever cases.

Anyone care to shed some insight on what produced the “low stats make for better creativity and/or RP” school of thought?

There's not going to be a smoking gun on this. Certainly threads of the concept seem to have been at work in the culture of the game before oD&D saw print. Some of the biggest 'DM screws the PCs' type effects like Mimics and Ear Seekers and Bowls of Watery Death and the like came right out of a proverbial arms race/competition between Gary and his son Ernie and friend/coworker Rob Kuntz (who consistently figured out his tricks, so he escalated the tricks). That, plus people claiming to have gotten to the high teens in level after the game being in print less than a year (and his own groups having barely cracked the teens after years) led to some unsavory exchanges about the power level that the game 'should' operate at (and later Kuntz opining at the forward to the Gods, Demigods and Heroes expansion, "This volume is something else, also: our last attempt to reach the "Monty Hall" DM's. Perhaps now some of the 'giveaway' campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are. This is our last attempt to delineate the absurdity of 40+ level characters. When Odin, the All-Father has only(?) 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?," whereupon people used it as a high level monster manual). Ever since, the game culture has tried hard to define what is acceptable accomplishment, and what is 'cheap' in some way. I think AD&D muddied the water quit a bit by offering 1) more things that stats did for you (this coming from oD&D supplement I), and 2) alternate rolling methods, which allowed various ways of getting better stats.

Regardless, stats are (usually) just pluses on dice rolls. They won't gatekeep any given creative endeavor. If I were to look at actual character power and whether it influenced creativity, I'd look to actual on-off capability (like, 'can anyone in the party fly over this pit? No. Okay, get creative!') with far more credulity.

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 12:39 PM
For something like 5e with its bounded accuracy I don’t see much merit to arguing contrary, but 3.5’s skill growth would certainly smooth the numbers over to the point that it’s harder to finger the character as socially inept. Perhaps that says something about the merits of each system and how they can be wielded?

I have answered to that earlier:


Yeah, a low charisma character can invest into buying a skill and become competent; that would represent a person with poor communications skills working and training to get better at it.

But many classes get pretty few skill points/skill proficiencies... what if they choose to put them into something they can actually become good at, rather than dumping them into Diplomacy/Persuasion only to become merely bad rather than disastrous at it?

As I said, a low ability stat can discourage you from investing in related skills...

In my first post in this thread I argued that starting the game being very bad at almost everything beyond combat can encourage characters to focus on just bashing heads as the solution to all challenges.

Yeah, with time you can eventually become decent at something despite having a low related stat, but many (most?) players will focus on becoming useful from the beginning, and will allocate their skill points accordingly.

Biffoniacus_Furiou
2020-06-16, 12:41 PM
[Thread title] originated from people who are bad at role-playing, who think playing an 'underdog' somehow makes them better at RP.

Realistically, it's the opposite of good RP. You won't have someone who's bad at math and can't even do basic addition and subtraction in their head wanting to become an accountant. You won't have someone who's never driven a car in their life getting a job as a delivery driver (yet people who are completely computer illiterate get jobs using a computer all day). Someone with an inner ear problem that causes poor balance isn't going to get a job roofing houses. Someone who isn't physically strong and has poor cardiovascular endurance isn't going to find work digging ditches or sorting and stacking shipping pallets. Each of those is going to do a poor job, they're going to struggle, and they're not going to enjoy their chosen profession.

The same goes for a warrior with low physical stats, a mage who's not very smart, an unwise cleric, etc. None of those are going to be very good at what they do, they'll likely not even graduate from whatever training is involved in becoming a member of their chosen class.

Zarrgon
2020-06-16, 03:07 PM
Is anyone going to come forward and say that they advocate the view?


As with most Old School things I will stand alone if I must and advocate this view.


Over the course of ~35 years in gaming, I've repeatedly run into gamers who thought it was "power gaming" to give their character basic competence, let alone strong capabilities, and who insisted that it was "better roleplaying" if their character constantly struggled with everything. They'd build a character with power X that used dice from attribute Y and skill Z... but give the character a below-average in Y and nothing in Z, because if they were even kinda competent with X, they'd be "power gaming" and "not roleplaying".

I have met many a player like that myself, but I don't go that far.


(Note: Personally I think you can role-play at nearly all power levels. Although, I do think it is interesting to give a character a weakness even if the overall competence is high. But I radically disagree with the idea that low-competence is required for role-playing.)

It's very true you can role play any character at any power level. It's also true that a player that is focused only on the numbers and stats and rules and mostly combat often has no wish or desire to role play: they just want to do the classic "wargame" style so they can use all the numbers.

And there is the funny bit where a great many players say that their character must have some powerful mechanical positive benefit or they "can't" role play it. Though, it's beyond funny, that at the same time they want to play a Clumsy Thief, but insist on a Dexterity of 20 because they refuse to give up even a single point of any positive mechanical benefit....but occasionally they might remember to have the character role play being clumsy.

For a LOT of role playing, it's really the characters faults and weaknesses that form the foundation of the role play. But when you play a perfect all powerful character you lack that foundation, and it shows.

Of course, also, if you play a game style that is a lot less combat and mechanical adventure, you will notice a low stat does not matter all that much.

And finally high stats are just the Easy Button for many RPGs. Your character encounters some type of mechanical game rule challenge. Well, no problem your high stat optimized character can only fail on a very low roll...so most often it is just an auto succeed vs the challenge.

On the other hand, the low stat unoptimized character can not just roll though mechanical game rule challenge, so they.....have to...role play and figure out a way to succeed.

Squark
2020-06-16, 04:04 PM
What is the foundation for this? CHA 4 is only a -3 swing from the baseline. What dictates the emotional range of a teaspoon being applicable here?

In earlier editions at least, the basic 3-18 ranged was presumed to represent a bell curve of human capability. So someone with a charisma of 4 is presumed to be in the bottom 2% of said bell curve. Similar scores for intelligence would indicate a person with severe difficulties functioning. So it's not unreasonable to assume someone with a Charisma of 4 would have significant difficulties socializing with others and processing emotions.

For comparison, the only monsters I can find in 5e with a Charisma of 4 or less that are still intelligent are;

-Manes (Lowly demons that cannot even speak)
-Retreivers (Construct powered by an enslaved demon that has had it's personality stripped away)
-Rot Trolls (Trolls that are losing their flesh as fast as they can regenerate it due to a degenerative magical condition)
-Yuan-ti Broodguard (Brainwashed humanoid turned Yuan-ti slave)
-Dretch (Damned souls consumed by self-loathing) [CHA 3]
-Skulk (No sense of self at all) [CHA 1]

So it would appear the assumption still more or less holds true.

LibraryOgre
2020-06-16, 05:47 PM
My bet? Low level AD&D mages.

AD&D mages had 1 spell at 1st level, which means that they either hoard their spell all day, or shoot it sometime in there. In the meantime, they can't really DO much. They have no weapons. They have no armor. They have to come up with some way to contribute when their one spell is shot. And the argument is always "This isn't a problem, you just have to get creative!"

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-16, 07:09 PM
I also suspect it became more pronounced as RPGs started having more and more defined world-settings beyond "this is the bad guy you fight today." After all, when all that matters is "there's a vampire here; you should kill him, because he is a vampire, and he is in the dungeon which you are dungeoning", then system optimization is perfectly sensible. Well, minus complaints about monty haul.

But once you start establishing a setting, PCs have a supposed place in relation to that setting. And in many cases by extension where they are in that system. What exactly that place is may be up for debate, but there is a place. And the GM starts building a world and story based at least roughly on those rules, finding a way to break them goes a long way to breaking the setting and the game. The verisimilitude, if you will.

Using our good friend Shadowrun, lets say that the best there ever was in human history is supposedly 15 dice; that the biggest and most individually talented actors on the world stage after magic and cybernetics came around might have 24. And the book kind of hints that while players really should have 15 dice, they get it that you'll probably end up with 18-19. They scale the opposition and the world accordingly - rent-a-cops with 7-8 dice, elite :"you should run from them fast" response teams having 18 dice per trooper, translate to lawyers and fixers and docs and so forth and so forth. Then a player manages to manipulate the system to give himself 42 dice at chargen.

Its clear that now you have broken the writers attempts to create a stable, at least minimally rationally coherent, world. And likely the GM's story. And because the writers write for the assumption that people would generally like to do cool things in a cool world, not to see if they can maintain across vast lines of splats and books an impenetrable puzzle that you will never find a loophole or kink in, it can be broken by those who want to.

So...we were at the point where you could break the story and the world/setting/story if you felt like it. And people began to say - wait, if you deliberately go out of the way to break the role-playing, the setting, the world, all so you can have a higher stat, what does that say about what type of game you're going to play? Is it going to be a cool human one which is why we're playing (insert setting here), or is it going to be a pile of dice a computer could do better and faster where you get bigger numbers?

It's a spectrum of course, but my guess is that in this case "low stats" is less "be a beggar! ha! RP!" and more "could you please not deliberately break a system we all know anyone with the inclination could break, just to have bigger numbers?"

And of course, there is that previous point about the meta. If you introduce a new player to the game, and the conversation sounds like the comic book guy from the Simpsons, you're hardly showing the hobby at it's finest.

Xervous
2020-06-17, 06:43 AM
On the theming of things like shadowrun I am not considering this through the lens of narcojet-tipped-bow adept troll or the furry (SURGE but that’s just another way of saying cat girl at the very least) pornomancer, rather the 4 AGI mundane sniper who is in most senses a double health stand in for one of the rigger’s inaccurate drones. It’s rare that I see the argument wielded in situ against a character of uniformly high stars, rather that it is dredged up for cases like Rath or our sniper. Denied competency, a player has no way to interact with the world reliably which makes appeals to DM fiat the sole avenue that might give their character some narrative authority to recoup what they might lack relative to other characters in the party.

I will contest the notion that lower stats foster better role playing in a healthy sense. It is in fact a matter of coercion if the low stats are forced upon them. The stats are an effect rather than a cause in the case of a player willfully engaging in a ‘challenge mode’, opting for a level of difficulty and/or narrative impotence above and beyond what the other players have as a default. Players may have impact in spite of these deficits, but by their very definition they will not have impact because of them. The ones that find success are just better at Mother May I?

Lacco
2020-06-17, 07:40 AM
There is this theory about limitations being very good for creativity - that if you have a free reign, it actually provides some basis for analysis paralysis, however, as soon as you get your first limitation (e.g. your character has low strength), the creativity kicks in.

With this in mind: straight 18s down the line make for really interesting character concept: Mary Sue. The opposite (straight 3s) makes for an unplayable mess.

We could discuss how this works in different RPG systems (e.g. if it is possible to actually play a physically weak fighter or a mage that has memory problems and which systems support such play versus limit effectiveness of the characters until they are actually unplayable), we could discuss what "low stats" actually are for each of us...

...or we can do the comedy act of "Powergamer! vs. Stormwind Fallacy!".

I have seen games where players bowed out unless they got 2 straight 18s or had more than single stat below 14 (begs for a question "why bother rolling anymore?"). I have seen players that took a flawed character and made them fun to play with. I think Quertus' rule (hopefully I remember correctly who stated it) of "Balance to the table." applies well here.

I agree that most players wish to play at least above averagely capable characters - and I support that. I do not understand the notion that a character is "useless" unless they "pull their weight"... as in "you do not fulfill your DPS quota, you're out of the team" :smallbiggrin:


My bet? Low level AD&D mages.

AD&D mages had 1 spell at 1st level, which means that they either hoard their spell all day, or shoot it sometime in there. In the meantime, they can't really DO much. They have no weapons. They have no armor. They have to come up with some way to contribute when their one spell is shot. And the argument is always "This isn't a problem, you just have to get creative!"

I remember those times :smallbiggrin: The local go-to RPG had a spellcaster that had actually 1 spell per day unless you got 16+ on your INT. After that you had two IIRC - and yes, local mage threw a temper tantrum at the GM when he rolled 11.

Me? I was glad my thief had 11 DEX. After all, I was not going to do any thieving until level 3 or 4 (when stats became much better) and wanted to focus on lying and cheating my way around

Willie the Duck
2020-06-17, 10:12 AM
My bet? Low level AD&D mages.

AD&D mages had 1 spell at 1st level, which means that they either hoard their spell all day, or shoot it sometime in there. In the meantime, they can't really DO much. They have no weapons. They have no armor. They have to come up with some way to contribute when their one spell is shot. And the argument is always "This isn't a problem, you just have to get creative!"

That, or even older the old saw of 'back in my day, we didn't need a thief class with their rolling of dice to find a trap, instead you described how you were looking for traps and it worked great.' Which, to be clear, is how it worked, and the game did in fact work before a thief class (or generalized resolution mechanics in general). Just one more hill in the battle of when and how the game was best.:smalltongue:


There is this theory about limitations being very good for creativity - that if you have a free reign, it actually provides some basis for analysis paralysis, however, as soon as you get your first limitation (e.g. your character has low strength), the creativity kicks in.

It's certainly not a universal, but there is something to the concept. I'm thinking of (as a random example that popped into my head) ASCII art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art) -- here you have 95 different potential brush strokes, as it were, on a very limited canvas size (whatever text interface you are using), and yet people have come up with some amazing (https://www.asciiart.eu/) stuff. Limitations can foster some very amazing creations. That's not to say that I think it applies well to RPG stats (which, again, are almost always just modifications to a roll).

kyoryu
2020-06-17, 11:31 AM
There's also different types of creativity. "Make what you want" is the black canvas (or Lego Kit, really, in 3.x). OTOH, random (and bad) stats help support a different type of creativity - the "okay, you've got these elements. What are you going to make out of them?" Think of it as Iron Chef, rather than being in a fully stocked kitchen.

JadedDM
2020-06-17, 11:44 AM
Maybe 2e / Dragonlance?

One of the most memorable characters was memorable because he had Con 4 and was obsessed with surviving in spite of his sickly body. Eventually IIRC he either killed or replaced a god.

Assuming you are referring to Raistlin Majere, that's actually 1E and his CON score was 10, suggesting that the whole 'sickly' thing was entirely roleplayed flavor, and not represented in the mechanics at all.

(Also, not really important, but Raistlin did wind up killing all of the gods and taking their place, but that was an alternate timeline that was averted due to time-traveling shenanigans on the part of his brother and a kender.)

Xervous
2020-06-17, 11:52 AM
There's also different types of creativity. "Make what you want" is the black canvas (or Lego Kit, really, in 3.x). OTOH, random (and bad) stats help support a different type of creativity - the "okay, you've got these elements. What are you going to make out of them?" Think of it as Iron Chef, rather than being in a fully stocked kitchen.

Too often I’ve seen it demonstrated that low stats merely force players towards options that are stat agnostic because that’s the only place left to find baseline competency.

Good stats enable various MAD or mold breaking approaches because more tradeoffs can be made to pursue thematic choices while retaining at least baseline competency. These will bring to light rarely or never seen combinations.

Left with too few ingredients of poor quality all you’ll get is soup!

Necrosnoop110
2020-06-17, 12:14 PM
And there is the funny bit where a great many players say that their character must have some powerful mechanical positive benefit or they "can't" role play it. Though, it's beyond funny, that at the same time they want to play a Clumsy Thief, but insist on a Dexterity of 20 because they refuse to give up even a single point of any positive mechanical benefit....but occasionally they might remember to have the character role play being clumsy.
So true. I've seen permutations of that since I started rpg-ing. I also see this with the "low is how you really roleplay" characters with poor INT/WIS scores. Those players have their characters do incredibly intelligent or wise moves, way to often and way beyond what the scores would reflect. Although, some of that could be attributed to meta-gaming.




For a LOT of role playing, it's really the characters faults and weaknesses that form the foundation of the role play. But when you play a perfect all powerful character you lack that foundation, and it shows.

I largely agree with you. I would just like to clarify that for my own gaming, I really like playing a traditional hero. I find it hard to have a mechanically incompetent character be a hero in game with a crunchy rule-set. A more open ended, story-teller type system I could see it working much better.

And I see a difference between a competent character with strengths and weakness around a heroic-level "set-point" than a flawless character with no weakness. A realistic heroic character is also different than a tragically forever-incompetent character.

LibraryOgre
2020-06-17, 03:04 PM
Too often I’ve seen it demonstrated that low stats merely force players towards options that are stat agnostic because that’s the only place left to find baseline competency.


That's a very good way of putting it. "I am not good at anything, so I need to rely on things that don't rely on you being good at things."

Lord Raziere
2020-06-17, 03:49 PM
Yeah, working within limitations is often better when you have something your wildly good at to compensate. an incompetent guy who is good at nothing is not that fun, but someone who is extremely competent at something narrow that can do a lot of tricks with it to do a lot with what they got can more than make up for their weaknesses by doing what they can do well and using it in unexpected ways that more well-rounded characters can't.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-17, 04:01 PM
Although it always seems a cop out, this is probably a case where the extremes are both in the wrong.

You don’t need a crippled pre-teen to role play. And it probably hurts the group.

Carrying around a setting breaking character actively hurts role play.

If course, then we get into “well, what’s in the middle? How do you define competence versus power gaming?” Cue circular firing squad of semantics.

I would say that these days almost all RPG settings come with a good bit of fluff and a variety of statted NPCs. Many come with little guides to “what does this number represent in terms of proficiency/ability”. Some even come with specific levels and challenge ratings. How does a character stack up? There is a good bit of wiggle room of course, but it helps keep check on the extremes.

If you’re soloing a dragon at level 5 in D&D, you are probably breaking the system as a role playing system. Good luck telling any stories that rely on “you’re roughly level 5 people facing the big crisis” when players are saying “no, actually, I am unto a god, this is not a crisis at all”. We know this because dragons have levels, stats, and even these days a CR.

Likewise, if the mooks in BoIT have roughly 8 dice, and the section in back says “the mooks are scenery that’s fun to chew on”, then it’s pretty clear that castigating someone powergaming for having 12 dice would be foolish. Within the context of the setting and the players place in it, this all makes sense.

Presumably, if you are playing, say Shadowrun which is about the surviving core of an already pretty elite crew - and you’re supposedly a former commando type who looks like, well, a commando type according to the book - maybe with a little on top, because, you know, PC - then that is perfectly reasonable. And indeed, playing a marginally competent 11 year old wouldn’t make sense (in most circumstances).

Spriteless
2020-06-17, 07:51 PM
Okay, so, my sister, bless her for running, seems to think something like this, but not exactly. She and her ex admired the player who made a sorcerer with only ice spells, even though there were enemies immune to ice. Because OMG what devotion to an idea! At the same game, when I pointed out my 5 strength kobold could not actually carry that, I found a handy haversack in the very pile of loot I couldn't carry. (I had been hoping to play plucky comic relief...)

When I tried to introduce said future ex to a system without classes, he was unwilling to try something he wasn't already familiar with. Really he was very inflexable all around.

When I showed up to her game recently with a warlock who didn't know Eldritch Blast, she thought that was great too. (Look there are interesting cantrips on the warlock list, and EK doesn't outpace them by much at first level I planned to pick it up after this character had seen some fights, if my sister even put fights in the game.) In her case, it seems to be less about low stats, and more about eschewing preconceptions, and following your *heart's desire* to create a character with *themes*.

You can't fit an optomized and well rounded D&D caster into HotS, but you could build a HotS character using D&D, just as you can build Gandalf or Hawkeye. Can you play that build game, with a character that doesn't already exist? Clearly then you are creative, for creating it!

It is at least more coherent an attitude than the one in the OP. And when people take this attitude to an extreme that makes D&D worse, then I remember they are only doing it because D&D is popular. And try to talk to them about FATE.

Zarrgon
2020-06-17, 09:16 PM
Yeah, working within limitations is often better when you have something your wildly good at to compensate. an incompetent guy who is good at nothing is not that fun, .

It depends on the player. Plenty of players love the low stat character.

Though note it's not "incompetent", it's just not Demi God.


If course, then we get into “well, what’s in the middle? How do you define competence versus power gaming?” Cue circular firing squad of semantics.


The middle seems easy enough to see. It's right between Optimized and Weak. In D&D this would be a character with an 8 to 12 in their primary used stat. Like an Int 11 wizard or a fighter with a Str of 12. Though depending on the edition you might be able to go up to say 14 and still be in the middle.

And really vs the typical power gaming in D&D, the middle really is just not being optimized.

icefractal
2020-06-17, 10:56 PM
The middle seems easy enough to see. It's right between Optimized and Weak. In D&D this would be a character with an 8 to 12 in their primary used stat. Like an Int 11 wizard or a fighter with a Str of 12.I wouldn't call that "between", I'd call that either weak or unusual.

If a 12 is their best stat, that's below average, in terms of 3-18 being typical for the world at large. Alternately, if they chose (and succeeded at, at least enough to reach 1st level) a profession / skill-set that doesn't suit their strengths, that's unusual.

Not that it's wrong to have an unusual character. But calling "doing something that you're good at, while being at least average" as power gaming, that's not a useful definition of power gaming.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-17, 11:35 PM
The middle seems easy enough to see. It's right between Optimized and Weak. In D&D this would be a character with an 8 to 12 in their primary used stat.


I wouldn't call that "between", I'd call that either weak or unusual.

If a 12 is their best stat, that's below average, in terms of 3-18 being typical for the world at large.

icefractal is right. The average stat roll is 10 on 3d6 or 12 on 4d6b3 but the average stat array varies much more than that.

The average results using the 4d6-drop-lowest method are 15.7, 14.2, 13.0, 11.8, 10.4, and 8.5, hence why the 3e "elite array" is 15/14/13/12/10/8 (rounded properly it would be 16/14/13/12/10/9 and rounded down it would be 15/14/13/11/10/8, but neither has a nice pattern or comes out to a nice point buy value equivalent like the elite array does) and the 5e PC array option copies those values. Using straight 3d6, the results are 14.2, 12.5, 11.1, 9.9, 8.6, and 6.8, working out to an array of 14/13/11/10/9/7.

So in both cases the "average" character, who is not at all optimized with some crazy rolling scheme (which of course isn't actually "optimized" because the stat generation method used is something the DM determines rather than something the player chooses and is fixed for all PCs), in fact has a highest score in the 14 to 16 range, not 8 to 12.

Of all the dozens of possible DMG-suggested stat generation methods over the various editions, none of them output average arrays with a highest score less than 12. For that you'd have to roll something like 4d6-drop-two-lowest, for an average array of 11/11/10/9/8/7, and even random commoners are expected to have at least 10s across the board.

MoiMagnus
2020-06-18, 04:27 AM
Constrains force you into unusual solutions.

Those constrains can be put by yourself (E.g: "This time, I want to play a wizard that doesn't use those spells I always take"), though a lot of peoples have difficulties following the constrains they put on themselves. I've encountered players who tried to play different characters at different campaigns, but in the end still ended up with the same personality and gameplay because it was so intuitive to them they just naturally played their characters always the same way.

Those constrains can be put by something else (E.g: "My wizard has a main start too low for the my usual spell selection to be the best pick, so I have to change"). But that can be very frustrating for peoples that actually don't want to be pushed into unusual solutions, and just want to play the character they decided they want to play.

There is part of truth in "constrains increase your creativity". Constrains focus your reflection on some specific points, and a good constrain even give you inspiration on how to solve your problems. But low stats don't do that alone, they're not enough of a constraint. You're just reducing the probability of success, but you're not forcing the players into a different thinking pattern. Chances that they will just behave them same, in worse.

The constraint "your team are too weak to win the battle and they know it" is a constraint that will force the PCs to go into vastly different gameplay (doing all their battle through NPCs, or diplomacy, or ...), and will lead to much more creative sessions. But to build a situation like this, you don't need to give the PCs low stats. In fact, giving your PCs stats that are too low might also discourage them from trying other solutions, since they don't feel they're competent at anything.

The absolute prerequisite for the player to be creative is for them to feel like they can actually do something. And having on your character sheet written "your character is bad at talking" (low Cha), "your character is bad at detecting liars" (low Sag), doesn't encourage you to try anything related to diplomacy. Sure, a player might consider that "I don't care about my stats, because I know that if I RP well enough the DM will give me a success" or "Low stats just reduce the probability of success, but I still can succeed". But a lot of players just don't try things they don't feel competent in. And for those players, low stats are just creativity-destroying.

I don't remember how it is written, but the on of the Paranoia rulebook essentially says "numbers on the PCs character sheet are in practice irrelevant, but they give to your players some inspiration on what their character is supposed to be good at, and give them the little push they need to try creative solutions"

Xervous
2020-06-18, 06:44 AM
I wouldn't call that "between", I'd call that either weak or unusual.

If a 12 is their best stat, that's below average, in terms of 3-18 being typical for the world at large. Alternately, if they chose (and succeeded at, at least enough to reach 1st level) a profession / skill-set that doesn't suit their strengths, that's unusual.

Not that it's wrong to have an unusual character. But calling "doing something that you're good at, while being at least average" as power gaming, that's not a useful definition of power gaming.

Where the heroes are by definition above average as the default assumption I cannot see the justification for terming 11 int wizards as anything beyond incompetent heroes. They may be average for an NPC, but many of the systems we deal with are assuming all characters start on equal footing. Opt to play one, certainly you can. But it’s the player’s free choice that yields such a character, not the stats producing a compelling argument for playing an 11 INT wizard.

Cluedrew
2020-06-18, 07:06 AM
Is anyone going to come forward and say that they advocate the view?

I doubt it.

I don’t think the view exists, or if it does is very popular. What is popular is the view that this view is popular, though.I can argue for a something like that, in that characters with no low stats (have no weaknesses) tend not to be very interesting. Its not a hard rule of course but I notice that a lot of the time the people who are interested in characters only as a host for strong abilities don't think about the entire character. I actually don't see much min/max going on as they tend to aim for everything else being exactly mediocre. Out side of that I think considering "what is your character bad at" would round out a character which could lead to better role-playing, not creativity though (although you have been more creative with the character).

The other variant that I could argue for is that "low stats aren't strictly worse" because character power isn't the be all and end all.

Nifft
2020-06-18, 10:04 AM
... he wouldn't begin his career as a hero with low physical stats, but with peak human ones (that is, at least 18 in every physical stat), and probably with at least WIS 18 and CHA 18 too, and with at least good INT too...

The thing is, Captain America did start his military career with low physical stats, and his military career was the foundation of his hero career.

We see him with those low stats in the movie. He takes action with them. His actions are sufficiently heroic to earn him access to the super-soldier serum.


Is anyone going to come forward and say that they advocate the view?

I doubt it.

I don’t think the view exists, or if it does is very popular. What is popular is the view that this view is popular, though.

Aside from ye olde games where life was cheap and PCs were disposable, the other place where I've seen this idea is players who want to play accidental or unwilling heroes, like Bilbo, Rincewind, or Arthur Dent.

This is usually confined to new players who don't know much about gaming yet, but who might have played computer RPGs and have certainly read books.

The character concepts aren't necessarily bad, nor are they created in bad faith, but that archetype is a poor fit for D&D which is more suited to a troupe of competent professional tomb-robbers.

AFAICT new players seem to outgrow the desire to play that archetype, so how often you see it might depend on how often you game with inexperienced players. Or it might be down to luck.

Xervous
2020-06-18, 11:36 AM
The thing is, Captain America did start his military career with low physical stats, and his military career was the foundation of his hero career.

We see him with those low stats in the movie. He takes action with them. His actions are sufficiently heroic to earn him access to the super-soldier serum.



Aside from ye olde games where life was cheap and PCs were disposable, the other place where I've seen this idea is players who want to play accidental or unwilling heroes, like Bilbo, Rincewind, or Arthur Dent.

This is usually confined to new players who don't know much about gaming yet, but who might have played computer RPGs and have certainly read books.

The character concepts aren't necessarily bad, nor are they created in bad faith, but that archetype is a poor fit for D&D which is more suited to a troupe of competent professional tomb-robbers.

AFAICT new players seem to outgrow the desire to play that archetype, so how often you see it might depend on how often you game with inexperienced players. Or it might be down to luck.

In which case the players are choosing to play the underdog as an expression of their creativity. Picking low stats was the expression of their vision, not the motivation for it. Validity or applicability of the character aside, the stats are not a driving factor in these cases.

Lacco
2020-06-18, 12:29 PM
It may also be a system-related issue.

If the game gives you opportunity to shine even in spite of your terrible rolls during chargen and provides opportunities for character growth (not limited, but including raw power), maybe you will enjoy being the underdog that turns the tables on the powerhouses in front of you.

If the game plays as "you need to be this tall to feel competent/have fun/defeat the mooks/eat your cake" or you need to wait for a roll of exactly 20 to actually hit the orc, I completely understand the sentiment of "sorry, bowing out because of poor stats".

Nifft
2020-06-18, 01:07 PM
In which case the players are choosing to play the underdog as an expression of their creativity. Picking low stats was the expression of their vision, not the motivation for it. Validity or applicability of the character aside, the stats are not a driving factor in these cases. We're talking about the "unwilling / accidental hero" archetype.

Is it really an expression of creativity to force the DM and other players do all the work of keeping your character involved in the story?

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-18, 01:16 PM
I can argue for a something like that, in that characters with no low stats (have no weaknesses) tend not to be very interesting. Its not a hard rule of course but I notice that a lot of the time the people who are interested in characters only as a host for strong abilities don't think about the entire character.

I've seen this argument a bunch of times, but it doesn't really hold in either direction. There's nothing intrinsically "interesting" about having one or more low stats, and there are many more weaknesses one can have besides low stats.

For the former, a wizard with Str 6 or a fighter with Wis 6 certainly has a weakness--and a pretty crippling one, at times; better hope the wizard never gets grappled and the fighter never gets mind-controlled--but it's an expected weakness of a member of that class (the "wimpy nerd" wizard and "clueless jock" fighter stereotypes) so it doesn't actually add any new dimensions to the character, and it's not a more "interesting" weakness than that possessed by a Str 10 wizard or Wis 10 fighter because "my worst stat is Str/Wis" has essentially the same roleplaying manifestation either way.

For the latter, what are Luke Skywalker's and Indiana Jones's dump stats? They're plenty athletic all around, so probably not a physical stat; Indy is a professor and both of them are clever quick thinkers, so not Int; both are likeable and personable (though Indy's exes might disagree), so not Cha; and while Luke is somewhat naive in ANH and Indy tends to be a sucker for a pretty face in all three movies, their strength of will indicates that that's not a sign of low Wis, so not Wis either. It's pretty fair to say that neither character has a noticeable dump stat, but that doesn't mean they have no weaknesses or that they're not interesting, just that neither aspect of their characters stems directly from their respective stat arrays; in D&D terms, it's their backstory and alignment issues that round them out in that way.

In fact, I'd argue that "characters are interesting if and only if they have one or more low stats" is a crutch used by new and/or weak roleplayers because they can't look beyond the character sheet for inspiration. A high-powered character with no stat below a 16 but with a fleshed-out personality is going to be more interesting then an average character with low stats but a one-dimensional personality every single time.

prabe
2020-06-18, 01:21 PM
We're talking about the "unwilling / accidental hero" archetype.

Is it really an expression of creativity to force the DM and other players do all the work of keeping your character involved in the story?

I don't see anything about the archetype that necessitates the player being disengaged. Just because the character wants nothing more than for whatever is going on to stop, that doesn't mean the player wants that. I've played that type of character before: I was far from disengaged, and my character was far from uninvolved, and it was no additional work for the GM (or the other players).

Aeson
2020-06-18, 03:03 PM
I don't see anything about the archetype that necessitates the player being disengaged. Just because the character wants nothing more than for whatever is going on to stop, that doesn't mean the player wants that. I've played that type of character before: I was far from disengaged, and my character was far from uninvolved, and it was no additional work for the GM (or the other players).
There's also nothing about the archeytpe that necessitates that the character be mechanically weak, though. Bilbo, for example, is much more stealthy than the thirteen dwarves, at least by his own assessment, and shows a good deal of cleverness and wisdom in how he resolves a number of incidents - e.g. drawing the spiders into a wild goose chase with taunts and thrown rocks so as to create an opportunity to rescue the dwarves.

As to the "bad stats encourage creativity and good roleplaying" thing, I would argue that any spur to creativity from bad stats is almost entirely on the mechanical side; stats give you baseline mechanical strengths and weaknesses to build around, but they provide very little information about who the character is.


icefractal is right. The average stat roll is 10 on 3d6 or 12 on 4d6b3 but the average stat array varies much more than that.
icefractal is neither right nor wrong about a stat line with 12 being its best value being below average, because we don't know the generation method, the worst stat, or anything about the stat distribution aside from that 12 is the highest value. 12 / 11 / 10 / 10 / 9 / 8, for example, is not a great stat line by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also not a below-average one, under the assumption that stats range from 3 to 18 and follow a Gaussian distribution centered on 10 - more or less what you get for rolling 3d6 for each stat.

Granted, most point-buy and random roll systems and the standard arrays carry the implicit assumption that the players' characters will tend to have stat lines above the notional average.

Zarrgon
2020-06-18, 05:14 PM
Aside from ye olde games where life was cheap and PCs were disposable, the other place where I've seen this idea is players who want to play accidental or unwilling heroes, like Bilbo, Rincewind, or Arthur Dent.

This is usually confined to new players who don't know much about gaming yet, but who might have played computer RPGs and have certainly read books.

Well also there are the player that want to play an "everyperson", players that are not obsessed with only a pure combat adventure roll playing game, and players that think role playing is more important then numbers.

You can really notice the difference between:

Player 1 "Can we fight something now, I need more XP so my awesome character build can get more stuff and more awesome abilities come on line!"

Player 2 -who is ready to role player their (NOT built) character right from the start.


I've seen this argument a bunch of times, but it doesn't really hold in either direction. There's nothing intrinsically "interesting" about having one or more low stats, and there are many more weaknesses one can have besides low stats.

Sure there are "other" weaknesses, but they mostly don't matter much.

Average or low ability scores are a huge, huge, huge big deal: just look at how many posters are very against the idea, dislike it and would refuse to play such a character. See, the huge opposition against it, makes it a big deal.

Sure a player can write down a silly "weakness" like "my character is afraid of spiders", and maybe the player might remember to say that weakness once in a while; but they will refuse to have anything except the slightest mechanical effect like "oh -1 to hit for one round as my character is so afraid...and then I activate my awesome optimize build to do 100d100 damage to all spiders!

But give the same player an average or low stat character and then will walk away from the table and refuse to play in such a game.



For the latter, what are Luke Skywalker's and Indiana Jones's dump stats?

Well Luke Skywalker being The Chosen One ArchPsiWarriorWizard is NOT an Everyman character. The examples are :Lieutenant John McClane(Die Hard), Finn(new Star Wars), Iolaus(Hercules TV show), Sam and Dean Winchester(Supernatural), and Autolycus, Gabrielle, Joxer the Mighty(Xena). And yes, Indiana Jones.


Indiana Jones's dump stats?

You might want to notice your mindset: Your saying that if a character "does something" they automatically must have a high stat to do that....like ONLY high stat characters can "do" anything.

Try this for a non demi god Indiana Jones:

Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr.
Human Rogue 4/ Fighter 1 with the Archaeologist background

Str 12, Dex 16, Con 14, Int 15, Wis 10, Cha 8

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-18, 05:20 PM
You might want to notice your mindset: Your saying that if a character "does something" they automatically must have a high stat to do that....like ONLY high stat characters can "do" anything.

Try this for a non demi god Indiana Jones:

Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr.
Human Rogue 4/ Fighter 1 with the Archaeologist background

Str 12, Dex 16, Con 14, Int 15, Wis 10, Cha 8


First, you might want to not tell other people what their mindset is, but rather engage with their actual statements.

Second, what's actually being said is that the stats on the page should reflect the actual character as consistently shown, and that these characters are consistently shown to not be weak in ways that would model as below-average characteristics.

Cluedrew
2020-06-18, 05:25 PM
I've seen this argument a bunch of times, but it doesn't really hold in either direction. There's nothing intrinsically "interesting" about having one or more low stats, and there are many more weaknesses one can have besides low stats.Consider "low stats" to be any mechanic that represents that a character is below average in some regard. I don't think how that mechanic works actually matters, maybe it does to someone.

The other bit is not that it is intrinsically interesting but just a good sign. Actually the better sign would be more nuanced details that you probably aren't going to find in your primary stats. Either way the point is that it shows the character has more depth than "this is what they do when they look cool".

Zarrgon
2020-06-18, 06:03 PM
Second, what's actually being said is that the stats on the page should reflect the actual character as consistently shown, and that these characters are consistently shown to not be weak in ways that would model as below-average characteristics.

Right, now note I have been saying average and below average and often just average. I get that many other seem to take the idea that a number lower then at the extreme high end (18 I'd guess here) that is "below average". But that is making what 16 to 18 stat average then?

For example, you would note Dr. Jones has average strength: it fits with what I've seen in the movies. His wisdom and charisma are also average, again, what we see in the movies. He is above average in his other three stats.

Also it's not "weak" to be average.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-18, 07:16 PM
Right, now note I have been saying average and below average and often just average. I get that many other seem to take the idea that a number lower then at the extreme high end (18 I'd guess here) that is "below average".

No one is saying that.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-18, 09:02 PM
Sure there are "other" weaknesses, but they mostly don't matter much.

I would argue the opposite. A low stat is merely a penalty on a roll. Some other weakness can actually change whether you get to make the roll/attempt an action at all.


Sure a player can write down a silly "weakness" like "my character is afraid of spiders", and maybe the player might remember to say that weakness once in a while; but they will refuse to have anything except the slightest mechanical effect like "oh -1 to hit for one round as my character is so afraid...and then I activate my awesome optimize build to do 100d100 damage to all spiders!

Well sure, if one deliberately games the system to choose weaknesses that have no effect, will never come up, or that one thinks their GM will forget to enforce, then the weakness stops being a weakness. That's why most open-ended-weakness-having systems like GURPS or Hero System or the like have clarifications that the GM must decide whether a weakness will actually give back any build resources.

However, most of those games have weakness on the book like blindness, combat paralysis, or heck illiteracy which will have phenomenal game effects, well and above what a low attribute provides.


Average or low ability scores are a huge, huge, huge big deal: just look at how many posters are very against the idea, dislike it and would refuse to play such a character. See, the huge opposition against it, makes it a big deal.

Only in that people don't like it. Popularity/unpopularity does not directly address how much actual in-game impact a given thing has.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-19, 02:03 AM
icefractal is neither right nor wrong about a stat line with 12 being its best value being below average, because we don't know the generation method, the worst stat, or anything about the stat distribution aside from that 12 is the highest value.

As I said, literally every published stat generation method in every edition produces average stat arrays with a higher-than-12 highest stat, as straight-3d6 produces the lowest average stat arrays and that one, as mentioned, has a 14 highest stat.


12 / 11 / 10 / 10 / 9 / 8, for example, is not a great stat line by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also not a below-average one, under the assumption that stats range from 3 to 18 and follow a Gaussian distribution centered on 10 - more or less what you get for rolling 3d6 for each stat.

Also as I said, the fact that each stat by itself follows a certain curve doesn't matter, because stat arrays involve multiple such rolls and therefore change the distribution.

To figure out the average of a 3d6 roll, you obviously figure out all possible results and total them up: there's 1 way to get a 3 (1/1/1), three ways to get a 4 (1/1/2, 1/2/1, and 2/1/1), and so on, and if you total them all up you get an average of 10.5. To figure out the average array produced by two 3d6 rolls, you do the same, but record pairs of stats: (3,3), (3,4), (3,5), ..., (4,3), (4,4), (4,5), ..., and so on--but note that e.g. (3,6) and (6,3) are the same value and can be lumped together, and when you do that the higher of the two has a higher average than 10.5 and the lower of the two has a lower average than 10.5 (specifically 12.2 and 8.8, in this case).

So even if 12, 11, 10, 9, and 8 are each individually reasonably close to the average value of a single 3d6 roll on their own, 12/11/10/10/9/8 is below average as a stat array. That's what it all comes down to, really: the people complaining about "players wanting unreasonably high stats" and "PCs with multiple 14s are munchkins" and whatever simply haven't done the math and are complaining about a nonexistent problem.


Average or low ability scores are a huge, huge, huge big deal: just look at how many posters are very against the idea, dislike it and would refuse to play such a character. See, the huge opposition against it, makes it a big deal.

No, people are against the idea of listening to fallacious arguments about big numbers inhibiting roleplaying or reducing their stats below the averages assumed by the game because people can't do math. Don't conflate legitimate concerns with petulance.


Sure a player can write down a silly "weakness" like "my character is afraid of spiders", and maybe the player might remember to say that weakness once in a while; but they will refuse to have anything except the slightest mechanical effect like "oh -1 to hit for one round as my character is so afraid...and then I activate my awesome optimize build to do 100d100 damage to all spiders!

But give the same player an average or low stat character and then will walk away from the table and refuse to play in such a game.

It's snakes, actually; Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes, not spiders.

("Why did it have to be snakes!? :smalleek:")

But really, if you have prior experience with people walking away from a game over rolling low stats, that implies to me not that they're prima donnas who refuse to have any weaknesses but that your stat generation methods are too stingy compared to the assumed average (e.g. ignoring the "reroll if you have nothing above a 13 or less than a net +1" rule) and/or too restrictive for the concepts they want to play (e.g. forcing 14/14/10/10/8/8 or something like that on someone who wants to play a paladin or monk and so needs--yes, "mechanically needs to fulfill their role in the party," not "is pointlessly whining about"--at least 3 if not 4 good stats).


Well Luke Skywalker being The Chosen One ArchPsiWarriorWizard is NOT an Everyman character. The examples are :Lieutenant John McClane(Die Hard), Finn(new Star Wars), Iolaus(Hercules TV show), Sam and Dean Winchester(Supernatural), and Autolycus, Gabrielle, Joxer the Mighty(Xena). And yes, Indiana Jones.

Firstly, Episode 4 Luke Skywalker is a farmboy with good piloting skills, nothing more--we're not talking about EU Luke here, or even post-training Episode 5 Luke--and Episode 4 Luke is indeed an everyman character, specifically the audience surrogate character used to introduce the audience to the Star Wars universe.

And secondly, not a single one of the characters you mentioned has an obvious dump stat. A lowest stat, sure, everyone has a lowest stat by definition, but not a single one of them is obviously weak, slow, sickly, dim, oblivious, or abrasive to the point of a 6 or 4 in that stat, so they don't support all the "But glaring weaknesses make good characters!" talk at all.


You might want to notice your mindset: Your saying that if a character "does something" they automatically must have a high stat to do that....like ONLY high stat characters can "do" anything.

Try this for a non demi god Indiana Jones:

Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr.
Human Rogue 4/ Fighter 1 with the Archaeologist background

Str 12, Dex 16, Con 14, Int 15, Wis 10, Cha 8

What's this? You wrote up a character that has above a 12 in something, like a damn dirty powergamer? Is it not you who said:



"well, what’s in the middle? How do you define competence versus power gaming?"The middle seems easy enough to see. It's right between Optimized and Weak. In D&D this would be a character with an 8 to 12 in their primary used stat.

Would that not imply that Indiana Jones is in fact a (*shudder*) optimized character and players wanting to play him is somehow a bad thing? :smallamused:

All sarcasm aside, you've been flip-flopping between "players refuse to accept anything below a 20 because reasons" hyperbole before and "here's a stat array that's actually noticeably above-average that I think is a good example of a good PC" in this post. If the example Indy stat array (the kind of array that most PCs will have most of the time) is something you find acceptable, then why all this blustering about powergaming?


Consider "low stats" to be any mechanic that represents that a character is below average in some regard. I don't think how that mechanic works actually matters, maybe it does to someone.

The other bit is not that it is intrinsically interesting but just a good sign. Actually the better sign would be more nuanced details that you probably aren't going to find in your primary stats. Either way the point is that it shows the character has more depth than "this is what they do when they look cool".

I'd rather not generalize "low stats" to "anything making a character below average" because my whole point in that post was that there's a huge difference between "having low stats is better for roleplaying" (a ridiculous falsehood) and "having weaknesses and not being amazing at everything is better for roleplaying" (a reasonable position). A paladin can have straight 18s across the board and be the deepest godsdamn character in the whole party through pure roleplaying, and a barbarian can have straight 12s across the board and be a one-dimensional paper cutout of Conan the Barbarian; ability scores and character depth are completely uncorrelated.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-19, 02:19 AM
I've never seen any sane individual use the phrase "low stats directly and inevitably cause good roleplay."
Which, for some reason, people take this phrase to mean.

As it so happens, that is not what the phrase the OP is talking about means or is meant to convey.

Low stats provide an opportunity for roleplay. That's it. It's not required to take. It's not inevitable. It's just an opportunity for character stuff.

Why is that controversial?

Xervous
2020-06-19, 06:29 AM
I've never seen any sane individual use the phrase "low stats directly and inevitably cause good roleplay."
Which, for some reason, people take this phrase to mean.

As it so happens, that is not what the phrase the OP is talking about means or is meant to convey.

Low stats provide an opportunity for roleplay. That's it. It's not required to take. It's not inevitable. It's just an opportunity for character stuff.

Why is that controversial?

Low stats can be used as a prompt for developing an RP outline but they are not inherently better than average or above average stats for doing so. This is different from the the general statement put forth in the OP that, when upheld as a truth, is taken to refer to a majority of cases. There are the trivial cases of the bad player who simply can’t RP worth a damn regardless of what they have before them, and the rare ego that won’t abide anything but their wildest dreams when acting as a player in games (noting these personalities tend to gravitate towards GMing as where else do you find the option for absolute control? A tangent to be sure).

The statement under discussion is that low stats rather than average or above average stats produce characters that are functionally superior for purposes of RP and/or inspiration.

As discussed in prior posts the general consensus is this is far from the truth. Lower stats meaning reduced options, players of said characters are encouraged to disengage from the various plot directing tools afforded to a average character in favor of appealing to GM fiat to attain narrative authority typically assumed in the baseline competency for an average character within the bounds of the system. Furthermore in pursuing competency a player will find their options dwindle as the given character’s stats go lower. Choice and thereby the opportunity for creativity to be expressed gets forced into known, stat agnostic baselines.

You can choose to use low stats, forgoing narrative agency as an expression of your creativity; but being denied the assumed standard of narrative agency does not better equip you for creativity and/or RP.

Cluedrew
2020-06-19, 07:29 AM
I'd rather not generalize "low stats" to "anything making a character below average" because my whole point in that post was that there's a huge difference between "having low stats is better for roleplaying" (a ridiculous falsehood) and "having weaknesses and not being amazing at everything is better for roleplaying" (a reasonable position). A paladin can have straight 18s across the board and be the deepest godsdamn character in the whole party through pure roleplaying, and a barbarian can have straight 12s across the board and be a one-dimensional paper cutout of Conan the Barbarian; ability scores and character depth are completely uncorrelated.I've played more than a few systems were there isn't a whole lot of mechanical ways to back up character weaknesses other than low stats. Not that the two options become equivalent there (there is also non-mechanical ways to do it) but I felt it was important to point out for some reason.

Other than that I would like to point out I am not arguing for "Low Stats Mae for Better RP and Creativity", rather the closest argument I thought I could defend. Which is closer to the second statement.

Pex
2020-06-19, 11:53 AM
I've experienced it since I started playing in 2E. I wouldn't doubt it started earlier. I'd say it came from adversarial DMing/Playing. I'm not blaming the DM, rather the dynamic. The DM sets the encounters. The players play them. Competition develops. DM doesn't want it too easy. Players don't want it too hard. They disagree on the difficulty because of the inherent differences in their perspectives. The rules have numbers to use. The players want to succeed so they value numbers. DM doesn't like players valuing numbers. DM thinks players don't care about the game, only to win. Players think DM doesn't care about the game, only to prevent the players from succeeding.

Where I will slightly fault the DM more is the DM who goes off on a power trip. Teenagers/college kids for the first time in their lives are given an official authority status. They didn't do anything to earn it; it's just handed to them because they want it. They don't know how to handle it, so anything that appears to threaten it, such as players wanting the numbers to defeat their monsters, is badwrongfun.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-19, 02:55 PM
Low stats can be used as a prompt for developing an RP outline but they are not inherently better than average or above average stats for doing so. This is different from the the general statement put forth in the OP that, when upheld as a truth, is taken to refer to a majority of cases. There are the trivial cases of the bad player who simply can’t RP worth a damn regardless of what they have before them, and the rare ego that won’t abide anything but their wildest dreams when acting as a player in games (noting these personalities tend to gravitate towards GMing as where else do you find the option for absolute control? A tangent to be sure).

The statement under discussion is that low stats rather than average or above average stats produce characters that are functionally superior for purposes of RP and/or inspiration.

As discussed in prior posts the general consensus is this is far from the truth. Lower stats meaning reduced options, players of said characters are encouraged to disengage from the various plot directing tools afforded to a average character in favor of appealing to GM fiat to attain narrative authority typically assumed in the baseline competency for an average character within the bounds of the system. Furthermore in pursuing competency a player will find their options dwindle as the given character’s stats go lower. Choice and thereby the opportunity for creativity to be expressed gets forced into known, stat agnostic baselines.

You can choose to use low stats, forgoing narrative agency as an expression of your creativity; but being denied the assumed standard of narrative agency does not better equip you for creativity and/or RP.

I think I've found another problem with the reading:
That "having low stats" means "all stats are low."

It can just be a couple of low stats. The whole point arises as a counter to the idea that every cool character must be good at everything. Which isn't trivial or uncommon, especially in young, new, or just... bad players. The whole point of the phrase is that "nah, being not so good at Dexterity isn't ruining your character, here's a reason why." (And one that doesn't also accuse them of wanting to be omnicapable.)

Are there people out there who think that the key to good RP is to have flat-out universally bad stats? Probably. Are they common? Not enough for me to have ever actually met one.

So, again, this entire thing seems to be taking swings at a phantom.

Aeson
2020-06-19, 03:11 PM
So even if 12, 11, 10, 9, and 8 are each individually reasonably close to the average value of a single 3d6 roll on their own, 12/11/10/10/9/8 is below average as a stat array.
What you ignore is that high rolls and low rolls are equally likely, and also that for something like 3d6 median rolls have the highest probabilities. It is just as likely that you will have one particularly high value and no particularly low values as it is that you will have one particularly low value and no particularly high values when rolling 3d6 six times for your statistics; the expected value for each of the rolls remains [10, 11], and for a large enough number of trials of 6x3d6 with 'fair' dice the average values for the statistics can be expected to be 10.5. 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 is not a below-average result, it is simply one with unexpectedly-low variance.

Zarrgon
2020-06-19, 05:52 PM
I would argue the opposite. A low stat is merely a penalty on a roll. Some other weakness can actually change whether you get to make the roll/attempt an action at all.

But it is so much more though.

Just consider how many people who have posted on this thread would absolutely refuse to even think about playing a character with an average stat in thier character classes primary ability. If it's just a a small thing that effects a roll.....then why is there so much crazy opposition to it?


No, people are against the idea of listening to fallacious arguments about big numbers inhibiting roleplaying or reducing their stats below the averages assumed by the game because people can't do math. Don't conflate legitimate concerns with petulance.

I'm just saying how odd it is that so many players demand high ability scores to play the game.



But really, if you have prior experience with people walking away from a game over rolling low stats, that implies to me not that they're prima donnas who refuse to have any weaknesses but that your stat generation methods are too stingy compared to the assumed average

Well the problem here is the assumed average. I use the by-the-rules average of 10, with the range of 8-12. The power players set their "average" at like 16 or 18 or 20. When they build a wizard character with "only" an Int of 18, they are all sad and think the character is too weak.




Firstly, Episode 4 Luke Skywalker is a farmboy with good piloting skills, nothing more--we're not talking about EU Luke here, or even post-training Episode 5 Luke--and Episode 4 Luke is indeed an everyman character, specifically the audience surrogate character used to introduce the audience to the Star Wars universe.

Your kinda mixing tropes. Luke is the simple farm boy Most Powerful Force User in the Galaxy Chosen One. It's the classic "oh you are nobody, but remember you might have a hidden secret that makes you somebody". And a lot of people identify with that, and hope someday they will get told they are a king (like Aaragon) or a Chosen One (like Luke or Neo).



And secondly, not a single one of the characters you mentioned has an obvious dump stat. A lowest stat, sure, everyone has a lowest stat by definition, but not a single one of them is obviously weak, slow, sickly, dim, oblivious, or abrasive to the point of a 6 or 4 in that stat, so they don't support all the "But glaring weaknesses make good characters!" talk at all.

Well, keep in mind "dump stat" is a thing ONLY if your building an optimized character. If you are just making a character (note NOT building) the character has no dump stat.

And why are you saying a dump stat has to be 6 or less? In the history of gaming has an optimized power player ever had an ability of less then 12, even in a "dump stat'?



What's this? You wrote up a character that has above a 12 in something, like a damn dirty powergamer? Is it not you who said:

I don't know where the idea came from that a character could not have any high stats came from, but it was not from me.




All sarcasm aside, you've been flip-flopping between "players refuse to accept anything below a 20 because reasons" hyperbole before and "here's a stat array that's actually noticeably above-average that I think is a good example of a good PC" in this post. If the example Indy stat array (the kind of array that most PCs will have most of the time) is something you find acceptable, then why all this blustering about powergaming?

Indy has just an example of an everyman character: nothing else. And that character might well be just fine for some games. After all any game that focused on role play or anything else except the numbers would have no problem with the Indy character.

But a lot of players don't play the game that way: the are playing the numbers optimizing game. Just look at Indy's low Con, tons of players would refuse to play such a weak character. And they would never use just a whip and a fist to fight, they want to give Indy a elven thinblade great sword in no time.



I'd rather not generalize "low stats" to "anything making a character below average" because my whole point in that post was that there's a huge difference between "having low stats is better for roleplaying" (a ridiculous falsehood) and "having weaknesses and not being amazing at everything is better for roleplaying" (a reasonable position). A paladin can have straight 18s across the board and be the deepest godsdamn character in the whole party through pure roleplaying, and a barbarian can have straight 12s across the board and be a one-dimensional paper cutout of Conan the Barbarian; ability scores and character depth are completely uncorrelated.

It is possible, yes. It is just unlikely.

The big problem is the mechanics. When a character has high stats it's an Easy Button or most games that already on Easy Play Mode. When the character encounters any challenge, they can just roll past it with no problem. And they have no need to role play when they roll past everything.

When a player does not have an optimized superman character, then they have to try other things beyond just rolling dice(roll play)....they have the role play.


I've never seen any sane individual use the phrase "low stats directly and inevitably cause good roleplay."
Which, for some reason, people take this phrase to mean.

Well, "Cause Roleplay" yes......but it's not automatically "Good" role play. It's just role play...maybe average or bad or maybe good: but still it's all better then roll play.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-19, 06:50 PM
Just consider how many people who have posted on this thread would absolutely refuse to even think about playing a character with an average stat in thier character classes primary ability. If it's just a a small thing that effects a roll.....then why is there so much crazy opposition to it?

I mean...
If you're playing a class then generally you're wanting to do what the class does. Meeting the requirements to competently do what the class does... why is that something to be poo-pooed?

Like, "hey, this Charisma-based caster functions best with a high Charisma" isn't saying "HOW DARE YOU FAIL TO OPTIMIZE!" It's just... "hey, dunno if you know, but the stuff this class does is built around this Stat. If you wanna do what the class does and do it well, then you'll wanna swap those scores."

It's not being an idiot, sure, anyone who gets VEHEMENT is being unreasonable. But... assuming that you're playing a Wizard to do Wizard stuff is... common sense.




Well, "Cause Roleplay" yes......but it's not automatically "Good" role play. It's just role play...maybe average or bad or maybe good: but still it's all better then roll play.

I mean, no stat directly causes roleplay. I can roleplay without any stat or system, so evidently the stats are not related to the roleplaying in any causal manner.

And as much as I like Roleplay, I'm also not going to have a wee in yer wheaties if you wanna focus on mechanics. D&D is born from wargames. If peeps want to play it more like a wargame, OK. If you're going to call it Rollplay to be disperaging and project smug superiority about a gameplay preference...
That's super pathetic.
So hopefully that's not what the attempt is.

Zarrgon
2020-06-19, 07:18 PM
I mean...
If you're playing a class then generally you're wanting to do what the class does. Meeting the requirements to competently do what the class does... why is that something to be poo-pooed?

It's not being an idiot, sure, anyone who gets VEHEMENT is being unreasonable. But... assuming that you're playing a Wizard to do Wizard stuff is... common sense.

But that is two different things.

1.The Int 11 wizard and the Int 20 wizard can both cast spells the "wizard stuff that the wizard class does".

2.The whole "competently" is where things get bumpy as most players define "competence" as only higher numbers for mechanical role playing.



And as much as I like Roleplay, I'm also not going to have a wee in yer wheaties if you wanna focus on mechanics. D&D is born from wargames. If peeps want to play it more like a wargame, OK. If you're going to call it Rollplay to be disperaging and project smug superiority about a gameplay preference...
That's super pathetic.
So hopefully that's not what the attempt is.

I call it Roll Play to be descriptive of what it is. I personally dislike the roll play game style and don't play it myself and I would never run a roll play type game.

And by it's very nature a player that is roll playing does not role play. They COULD, but they most often CHOOSE not to....because after all they are roll playing. It's the exact same way a role player could roll play, but chooses not too.

Pex
2020-06-19, 08:26 PM
I've never seen any sane individual use the phrase "low stats directly and inevitably cause good roleplay."
Which, for some reason, people take this phrase to mean.

As it so happens, that is not what the phrase the OP is talking about means or is meant to convey.

Low stats provide an opportunity for roleplay. That's it. It's not required to take. It's not inevitable. It's just an opportunity for character stuff.

Why is that controversial?

Because that's not where the controversy lies. The problem lies in the assumption the player with the high stat character cannot or refuses to roleplay. Because of that assumption it's presumed players of characters with lower stats prefers and is more successful at roleplay.

There's also the assumption of cheating.

A new 5E game happens. Players are to roll stats and come to the game. Player 1 comes with a paladin with ST 18 DX 10 CO 16 WI 12 IN 10 CH 18. Player 2 comes with a monk with ST 8 DX 15 CO 13 WI 16 IN 10 CH 11. Who is the DM going to suspect something fishy is going on? Even if the DM is giving good faith no one cheated, he wants everyone to have balanced stats with each other. Is he more likely to want the Paladin player to lower his scores or the Monk player to increase his?

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-20, 12:11 AM
Because that's not where the controversy lies. The problem lies in the assumption the player with the high stat character cannot or refuses to roleplay. Because of that assumption it's presumed players of characters with lower stats prefers and is more successful at roleplay.

There's also the assumption of cheating.

I mean...outside of random rolls as you talk about, where else will obviously off-balance scores come from?

And while I agree that the assumption exists... I'd argue it's not an unreasonable or "comes from nowhere" assumption. People who go out of their way to try and make their character Super Stronk tend to be:
1. New players (they won't be succesful, really, but they're likely to try)
2. Edgelords/cringey/powerfantasy players (more out of a belief that being more powerful automatically makes the character more cool, which is kinda the inverse of the complained about thing. I know several people who think like this. They aren't fun to talk to.)
3. "Wargamers" (people who care more about the mechanical, wargaming aspect of the game than the roleplaying part, so that's where they put their energy.

Now, I'm not saying that playing a character that is competent at things puts you into one of these categories. But if the build is meant to be STRONK, especially if in an omnicapable way, it's probably one of the above. Only 1 of which is what I'd consider a bad thing.

Do exceptions exist? Yeah. Some people will both superoptimize AND do empassioned RP. But they're kinda the exception that proves the rule, in this case. They're not common.

If you want a high power playstyle, cool. I'm not gonna yuck your yum. But like... chill, guys.

Again, I've literally only ever heard this used on the first two of my listed groups as like "chillax, dude, low stats are no big deal."



A new 5E game happens. Players are to roll stats and come to the game. Player 1 comes with a paladin with ST 18 DX 10 CO 16 WI 12 IN 10 CH 18. Player 2 comes with a monk with ST 8 DX 15 CO 13 WI 16 IN 10 CH 11. Who is the DM going to suspect something fishy is going on? Even if the DM is giving good faith no one cheated, he wants everyone to have balanced stats with each other. Is he more likely to want the Paladin player to lower his scores or the Monk player to increase his?

This isn't even a power question. Regardless of which choice the DM makes, he's already made his critical mistake. Randomly rolled stats are, by their nature, not going to be balanced and will be subject to random crap just... happening.

So from where I'm sitting, the DM is wrong no matter which way he goes.

Now, as for which direction is more likely, it would probably be a shift down for the Paladin. Your assumption about the cause is erroneous, though, because you've reduced it down too far.

Most parties are not 2 people. Theyre usually 4 or more.

If I have one outlier with much better stats than the other 4, which is the most efficient fix:
"1 outlier player, tone it back a tad."
"You 3 players of more normal proportion, we're gonna boost the campaign's power level cause Jim rolled real high. All 3 of you bump your stats."

It's also easier to nerf a challenge for a weaker party than to buff it to account for one really strong character.

The problem isn't Strong Characters existing in vacuums. The problem is Strong Characters existing alongside ones that are nowhere near that level of capability and expecting everyone to feel equally useful. Either Peter Perfect has to pull his punches so the other players can have a shot at glory (thereby functionally nerfing himself) or just going full bore and likely making the game less fun for the players who just don't get to do as much stuff and who now feel like side characters.

Now, I'm expecting the backlash of "But having the one weak character doesn't get complained about!"
First, yes it does. It's a pain in the rear to have the one randomly weak character everyone has to carefully keep safe. It sucks.
Secondly, that's a problem that is much more likely than the above to just kinda... sort itself out if you change nothing. Just sayin'.

So... yeah, outside of the weird 2-player highly contrived scenario you invented, it's pretty easy to see why having the tall guy crouch is easier than getting everyone else a stool.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-20, 08:48 AM
It seems pertinent here to tell a brief tale of the last D&D game I ever played.

The DM wanted to run a shipwreck campaign in an Iron Age world, and we all agreed that to give it that scrappy feel, we would avoid anything wildly overpowered/magical(as we know in D&D these are often synonymous) and even roll stats - albeit with some generous mulligan rules and the ability to place your rolls. I was already well on my way to dropping D&D, but it was a game and a group with a friend and the scenario had its appeal.

Well, rolling time came around. Everyone more or less rolled one of the stat arrays talked about above and happily made their characters.

Except for one guy - let’s call him Ted - who wasn’t happy. He hadn’t gotten any 18s despite a stronger than average series of 13+ rolls. First the DM gave him a few more chances to re-roll the whole thing. He didn’t like that, because wouldn’t you know it, it seemed whenever he got an 18 his next highest stat had the audacity to not be above 13. After an ever spiraling series of compromises, the DM just told Ted to point buy. Obnoxious for the rest of us, but the man couldn’t live with out his treasured stats, and it got the game moving.

Ted of course ends up choosing a magical class; as in the kind where he blathers to the table for ten minutes about how awesome it’ll be when he can turn into a T-Rex. He’ll be the coolest. The rogues/monks/rangers/fighters of the world shrug.

Now, this was not exactly the table of high art RP. One of the character concepts was “monk with a cool spinny ball weapon.” But even so, Ted stood out as an aberration. Where the rest of the party paid at least lip service to dealing with the shipwreck, uniting crew, sensibly exploring the surrounds - Ted, Ted was pure murderhobo.

And not only pure murderhobo, but in a fight he was upset if things went against him. Or he wasn’t the greatest. Or his spell didn’t have the exact utility effect he wanted no matter how outlandish. And he had a tendency to get personally vested in an action, with clear overtones that it was he, Ted, who as a real world human had accomplished an amazing thing. Alright, by now Ted is getting beyond obnoxious. But the DM tolerated him because, well, players are hard to assemble.

Generally, this pattern continues to escalate with Ted behaving like a spoiled man-child. And in part, because he was. As a man somewhere in the late 20s-early 30s of most singles sitcoms, he was immature, he was beyond out of shape, he would stiff you on the pizza, his mannerisms were that of 13 year old who never grew up. You might imagine how well this played out in the other fields of his life.

Eventually the group dissolves, but to this day whenever I see someone who takes the road that they must be the most powerful, optimized, setting breaking whatever - and then of course rationalize it - I see echoes of Ted.

N=1. Causation unproven. Correlation would require more data.

But still...in the shadow of every 42 dice cat girl in shadowrun, every Dark Heresy pysker who thinks it’s ridiculous that demons might eat him, every setting breaking class build from three different splats, every D&D tier best class using an internet optimized build that insists he’s balanced and wonders why other players might ever not do as he did. There lies the reflection, however hazily, of Ted.

Kaptin Keen
2020-06-20, 10:08 AM
Anyone care to shed some insight on what produced the “low stats make for better creativity and/or RP” school of thought?

I'd say it's purely observational. It's entirely possible for high stat/high level characters to played creatively and well - and it's similarly entirely possible for low stat/low level characters to be played poorly and with little creativity. But on the whole, it's more common for low stat characters to focus on roleplay (perhaps forced) while it's more common for high stat characters to ... have a different focus.

After all, high stats - in an of themselves - serve very little purpose. The numbers are arbitrary, and only seem 'high' relative to other, 'lower' stats.

Obviously, no one who plays high stat games are going to accept a claim that they're poor roleplayers because of that (nor should they) - while someone who plays low stats will possibly nod sagely at the notion that he or she is a good roleplayer. So it's not an issue that can ever be resolved unless someone is able to accurately quantify both what high and low stats are, and what entails good or bad roleplay.

Good luck with that, I guess =)

Vahnavoi
2020-06-20, 11:44 AM
I think this mindset comes from misunderstanding the lack of correlation between different skills.

Namely: the ability to optimize simple mathematical functions is not the same ability you'd use to create interesting dialogue or narratives.

For example, a player can be very good at getting 18 charisma on their character sheet... yet still be socially awkward themselves, making them poor at portraying that 18 charisma in any way not related to rolling dice.

Since having many skills at high level takes more practice than having one, there probably are more players who are good ar number and bad at dialogue (etc.), and players who are bad at numbers and good ag dialogue, than there are people who are good at both. Through some combination of sampling bias and confirmation bias, it starts to look like playing the numbers make you bad at playing the rest of the game, and vice versa. Even if there is no real causation between the two.

Tanarii
2020-06-20, 11:55 AM
It's been around for a long time, and not just for stats, sometimes for class balance. Gygax commented on player skill extensively. Although he also included comments on survivability requiring higher ability scores (two of 15 or higher) in the AD&D PHB, and released alternate rolling methods in the DMG and Unearthed Arcana. Seimbeida/Wujcik wrote on it explicitly included it in several of their works in the 80s and 90s, both in regards to their stats, class capabilities, and their infamous MDC system.

Zarrgon
2020-06-20, 02:44 PM
.

If you want a high power playstyle, cool. I'm not gonna yuck your yum. But like... chill, guys.

There is nothing wrong with it. The thing is though: they only fit in to a game of the same playstlye. And when you have deep role playing and average role playing, they don't fit into 2/3 's of the other groups.

And far too many such players don't "get that", and worse, they will try to hide it. They will bend over backwards and pretend to be a moderate player....and then five minutes after the game starts whine that there is not enough combat in the game.....or worse.



The problem isn't Strong Characters existing in vacuums. The problem is Strong Characters existing alongside ones that are nowhere near that level of capability and expecting everyone to feel equally useful. Either Peter Perfect has to pull his punches so the other players can have a shot at glory (thereby functionally nerfing himself) or just going full bore and likely making the game less fun for the players who just don't get to do as much stuff and who now feel like side characters.


This is only a problem for the Strong game play style, of course. And it's often very exasperated by the fact that many DM's do Roll Out the Red Carpet for the Strong Characters(if they don't just Roll Over and let them run the game).


For example, a player can be very good at getting 18 charisma on their character sheet... yet still be socially awkward themselves, making them poor at portraying that 18 charisma in any way not related to rolling dice.

So true.

Telok
2020-06-20, 03:05 PM
But still...in the shadow of every 42 dice cat girl in shadowrun, every Dark Heresy pysker who thinks it’s ridiculous that demons might eat him, every setting breaking class build from three different splats, every D&D tier best class using an internet optimized build that insists he’s balanced and wonders why other players might ever not do as he did. There lies the reflection, however hazily, of Ted.

Yeah, I've had those. Occasionally with a good, patient, flexible, group you can, over some years, fix/cure/teach them.

For the op, I recall in the dim mists of ancient memory some of the same stuff here as in the pre-net advice colums in Dragon Mag. The argument is old, and the origins are likely scattered peicemeal across the early games and early players.

These days I think you could over simplify it by asking if someone plays mechanically to be challenged or to win, and if they'll do lots of voice/character acting in the process or none at all. Where conflict arises is at tables with people at the extremes, or in discussions of different systems that try to better support one end of the spectrum or another.

D&D is probably not the best system to try to settle anything with. It started at the challenge extreme, picked up role playing, then wandered into the middle of the road and got wishy-washy about wanting to have it all ways at once without 'leaving out' any possible play style.

Buy hey, that's just the opinion of some rando on the internet. You can take it or leave it, as you like.

Mutazoia
2020-06-20, 10:06 PM
As others have said, it's a concept that is probably as old as RPGs themselves and works something like this:

The lower your characters' stats are, the more creative you have to be. You can't just power through everything and expect to survive. This was especially true in 1st and second ed when your starts were generated with the old "roll 3D6 in order and play what you got." 2nd ed saw the birth of the point buy and 4D6 drop the lowest.

In this case, role play is taken to mean anything where you are not directly trying to solve a given problem by killing it (and sometimes even then) as 1st and 2nd ed players were more likely to avoid combat and find a more clever solution to most things.

So, in a nutshell, the lower stats meant you couldn't just Rambo your way through all of your encounters, so you were pretty much forced to role-play a solution (instead of or Roll Play).

Tanarii
2020-06-20, 10:41 PM
2nd ed saw the birth of the point buy and 4D6 drop the lowest.
4d6d1 and arrange in desired order was AD&D 1e Method I.

Gary's words on the matter in the DMG: "While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to quirks of the dice. Furthermore, these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy — which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she really can’t or won’t identify with."

Personally I mostly played BECMI which was 3d6 in order. And in which stats mattered more than AD&D, since bonuses and penalties started at <8 and >13 for all stats. But other than that parallel line, the D&D standard has been 4d6d1 since 1979.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-21, 01:18 PM
There is nothing wrong with it. The thing is though: they only fit in to a game of the same playstlye. And when you have deep role playing and average role playing, they don't fit into 2/3 's of the other groups.

I mean, most playstyles really only work with themselves. Playing weak-on-purpose characters and going for an RP heavy approach doesn't work if everyone else at the table isn't in on it. This is a given, my dude.



And far too many such players don't "get that", and worse, they will try to hide it. They will bend over backwards and pretend to be a moderate player....and then five minutes after the game starts whine that there is not enough combat in the game.....or worse.

I'd be more likely to attribute this to having different definitions of what a "moderate" amount of power/combat is from person to person rather than claiming malicious intent to decieve their way into a game that won't suit them.



This is only a problem for the Strong game play style, of course. And it's often very exasperated by the fact that many DM's do Roll Out the Red Carpet for the Strong Characters(if they don't just Roll Over and let them run the game).

This response is outright nonsensical to the paragraph I wrote, but as a note:
You mean "exacerbated" not "exasperated."

And really if there's nothing wrong with a strong characters playstyle why are you spending all this time accusing them of active maliciousness and game ruining when miscommunication and mismatched expectations are much better explanations for what's happening?



So true.[/QUOTE]

Zarrgon
2020-06-21, 05:08 PM
And really if there's nothing wrong with a strong characters playstyle why are you spending all this time accusing them of active maliciousness and game ruining when miscommunication and mismatched expectations are much better explanations for what's happening?


There is nothing wrong with the play style. There is something wrong when a player lies and sneaks their way into a game under false pretenses. If you have seen a post or two of mind you might see I'm a bit direct....well, I'm more so in real life, and even more so during session 0 for a RPG. The only way for such a player to get in my game is to lie.

And the tricks are endless....like making two character sheets...one moderate for the DM to see and one all power that they keep hidden. Then in the game, they will be sneaky an use the power character, hoping the DM will be to busy or distracted to notice or won't distrput the game over their actions. They find me a different type of DM.

And I have met hundreds of players who sole goal in RPGs is to ruin the fun of others

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-21, 07:48 PM
What you ignore is that high rolls and low rolls are equally likely, and also that for something like 3d6 median rolls have the highest probabilities. It is just as likely that you will have one particularly high value and no particularly low values as it is that you will have one particularly low value and no particularly high values when rolling 3d6 six times for your statistics; the expected value for each of the rolls remains [10, 11], and for a large enough number of trials of 6x3d6 with 'fair' dice the average values for the statistics can be expected to be 10.5. 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 / 10.5 is not a below-average result, it is simply one with unexpectedly-low variance.


Well the problem here is the assumed average. I use the by-the-rules average of 10, with the range of 8-12. The power players set their "average" at like 16 or 18 or 20. When they build a wizard character with "only" an Int of 18, they are all sad and think the character is too weak.

Guys. Statistics does not work that way. :smallannoyed:

The average of 3d6 6 times is not 6 times the average of 3d6, and you can't arbitrarily declare that 8 to 12 is the "correct" range around 10 (if anything, it would be 8 to 13 because the average is actually 10.5) when the actual dice rolls involved say otherwise.

As a simplified example, instead of 6 sets of 3d6, let's take 2 sets of 1d6. Here are the possible results you can get with those rolls:

1, 1
1, 2
1, 3
1, 4
1, 5
1, 6
2, 1
2, 2
2, 3
2, 4
2, 5
2, 6
3, 1
3, 2
3, 3
3, 4
3, 5
3, 6
4, 1
4, 2
4, 3
4, 4
4, 5
4, 6
5, 1
5, 2
5, 3
5, 4
5, 5
5, 6
6, 1
6, 2
6, 3
6, 4
6, 5
6, 6

First column average = 1*6 + 2*6 + 3*6 + 4*6 + 5*6 + 6*6 / 36 = 126/36 = 3.5
Second column average = 1*6 + 2*6 + 3*6 + 4*6 + 5*6 + 6*6 / 36 = 126/36 = 3.5

If you look at each column individually, yes, the average comes out to 3.5 in both cases, the expected average for a single 1d6 roll. But we care about the array, not individual rolls, and if you sort pairs in descending order and group identical pairs, you get this:

1, 1 (1 time)
2, 1 (2 times)
2, 2 (1 time)
3, 1 (2 times)
3, 2 (2 times)
3, 3 (1 time)
4, 1 (2 times)
4, 2 (2 times)
4, 3 (2 times)
4, 4 (1 time)
5, 1 (2 times)
5, 2 (2 times)
5, 3 (2 times)
5, 4 (2 times)
5, 5 (1 time)
6, 1 (2 times)
6, 2 (2 times)
6, 3 (2 times)
6, 4 (2 times)
6, 5 (2 times)
6, 6 (1 time)

First column average = 1*1 + 2*3 + 3*5 + 4*7 + 5*9 + 6*11 / 36 = 161/36 = 4.472
Second column average = 1*11 + 2*9 + 3*7 + 4*5 + 5*3 + 6*1 / 36 = 91/36 = 2.527

So while the average results of two independent rolls of 1d6 are 3.5 and 3.5, the average array of two 3d6 rolls is in fact [4.5, 2.5]. And if you do the same process with 6 sets of 4d6b3 (here's (https://anydice.com/program/5866) a nice example, click the Graph button for a good illustration), you will find that the average array for that setup is in fact [15.7, 14.2, 13.0, 12.8, 10.4, 8.5], as I said above.

Thus, 10.5s across the board is a below-average result--by a considerable margin; 10.5 is above 8.50 by about 1 standard deviations but it's below 15.66 by about 4.6 standard deviations!--and a high score of 16 is not a "power player move," it's perfectly average in both senses of the term and getting a highest score of 18 on a 4d6b3 array is actually more likely than getting a highest score of a 12.


Your kinda mixing tropes. Luke is the simple farm boy Most Powerful Force User in the Galaxy Chosen One. It's the classic "oh you are nobody, but remember you might have a hidden secret that makes you somebody". And a lot of people identify with that, and hope someday they will get told they are a king (like Aaragon) or a Chosen One (like Luke or Neo).

You're the one mixing tropes here, assuming that "Chosen One" and "all-around badass from the start of the story" are the same thing. Whether or not a character is a Chosen One (and Luke is not at all the Chosen one in the same way that Anakin, Aragorn, Neo, Rand al'Thor, etc. are, by the by) doesn't impact their competence and badassery.

Luke and Aragorn may both be destined to craft their own awesome swords and kill a scary evil guy in black armor, but Episode 4 Luke has more in common with start-of-Fellowship Frodo than with start-of-Fellowship Aragorn in terms of badassery and "stat arrays" so if you're going to argue that "powergame-y" characters have less roleplaying potential, using Luke as an example of a powerful character is counterproductive.


Well, keep in mind "dump stat" is a thing ONLY if your building an optimized character. If you are just making a character (note NOT building) the character has no dump stat.

And why are you saying a dump stat has to be 6 or less? In the history of gaming has an optimized power player ever had an ability of less then 12, even in a "dump stat'?

Every character who can choose how to arrange their stats has a dump stat, 'cause you have to put your lowest stat somewhere. And I used 6 instead of 12 because we were talking about whether popular and well-rounded characters had an obvious dump stat to correlate with their being "better roleplayed" (or the movie equivalent), and if your dump stat is average or above-average then it's not obvious what your dump stat is; if Indiana Jones had a Con of 6 and was huffing and puffing through action sequences it would be clear that that's his weak spot, but as it is you can't tell if he has a stat array of e.g. 13/14/13/12/15/11 or 14/15/11/13/12/13 or whatever.


The big problem is the mechanics. When a character has high stats it's an Easy Button or most games that already on Easy Play Mode. When the character encounters any challenge, they can just roll past it with no problem. And they have no need to role play when they roll past everything.

When a player does not have an optimized superman character, then they have to try other things beyond just rolling dice(roll play)....they have the role play.

If you've observed that having higher-than-average stats means that they're playing on "Easy Mode" and that "real roleplayers" have lower stats, that doesn't mean that's universally true, it means that any DMs you've played with are bad DMs because apparently the instant characters can reliably achieve moderate success they roll over and let players automatically succeed at everything.

I'd argue precisely the opposite of what you have here: having higher stats and/or an optimized character allows for greater creativity and roleplaying because if a PC is only mechanically good at 1 thing (or has terrible stats and is mechanically good at 0 things) then he's going to be worse at pulling off whatever clever improvised plans the player comes up with and will have lower chances of success with those plans than a PC who's mechanically good at 3 or 5 or 8 things. And, further, a DM can include more interesting challenges when the PCs are more capable of taking on challenges, because they can roll with the punches more easily and have a greater margin for error with their tactics.


4d6d1 and arrange in desired order was AD&D 1e Method I.

Gary's words on the matter in the DMG: "While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to quirks of the dice. Furthermore, these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy — which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she really can’t or won’t identify with."

Personally I mostly played BECMI which was 3d6 in order. And in which stats mattered more than AD&D, since bonuses and penalties started at <8 and >13 for all stats. But other than that parallel line, the D&D standard has been 4d6d1 since 1979.

I'd argue that AD&D stats mattered more than BECMI in that respect. AD&D stats had basically the same "no bonuses in the 7ish to 14ish range and minimum prime requisites of 9+" thing BECMI did, and then added in things like bonus XP for a prime requisite of 15+, bonus cleric spells at Wis 13+ and cleric spell failure chance below that, thief skill percentage bonuses at Dex 16+ and penalties at 12 and below, and so on that made outlier stats very impactful.

But your overall point is correct, 3d6-in-order was never one of the rolling methods suggested for 1e; while it did become Method I in 2e, that's because the methods were rearranged in order of increasing average scores, and not only was I not the "default" over II through VI, it has the largest number of disadvantages listed in that section and so wasn't exactly recommended.


There is nothing wrong with the play style. There is something wrong when a player lies and sneaks their way into a game under false pretenses. If you have seen a post or two of mind you might see I'm a bit direct....well, I'm more so in real life, and even more so during session 0 for a RPG. The only way for such a player to get in my game is to lie.

And the tricks are endless....like making two character sheets...one moderate for the DM to see and one all power that they keep hidden. Then in the game, they will be sneaky an use the power character, hoping the DM will be to busy or distracted to notice or won't distrput the game over their actions. They find me a different type of DM.

And I have met hundreds of players who sole goal in RPGs is to ruin the fun of others

I am fortunate enough to have never seen even a single example of the kind of behavior you're describing here. If you keep running into players like that, either you managed to piss off Olidammara or Tyche in a previous life and are now the focus of a highly disproportionate amount of bad luck, or you're drawing all the terrible players to you so the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with them, and in either case the rest of us are all incredibly grateful. :smallbiggrin:

Tanarii
2020-06-21, 08:07 PM
I'd argue that AD&D stats mattered more than BECMI in that respect. AD&D stats had basically the same "no bonuses in the 7ish to 14ish range and minimum prime requisites of 9+" thing BECMI did, and then added in things like bonus XP for a prime requisite of 15+, bonus cleric spells at Wis 13+ and cleric spell failure chance below that, thief skill percentage bonuses at Dex 16+ and penalties at 12 and below, and so on that made outlier stats very impactful.

But your overall point is correct, 3d6-in-order was never one of the rolling methods suggested for 1e; while it did become Method I in 2e, that's because the methods were rearranged in order of increasing average scores, and not only was I not the "default" over II through VI, it has the largest number of disadvantages listed in that section and so wasn't exactly recommended.
Sorry, it was meant to be less than or equal and greater than or equal. BECMI starts providing penalties or bonuses as closer to the average of 10.5 than AD&D. Of course, the average for AD&D isn't 10.5 because the standard is 4d6d1, so it was a moot point / I was wrong. AD&D characters don't start getting bonuses until higher scores but they're more likely to have higher scores.

Also heads up you just told two posters the average stat array isn't 10.5 for the 3d6 they were talking about, because you started talking about 4d6b3. The 'expected' array for 3d6 is 14.25 / 12.5 / 11 / 9.75 / 8.5 / 6.75. So it's more or less 7-14, not including standard deviation. With SD 5-16. (Edit: okay, well one of them was talking about 3d6.)

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-21, 08:22 PM
Also heads up you just told two posters the average stat array isn't 10.5 for the 3d6 they were talking about, because you started talking about 4d6b3. The 'expected' array for 3d6 is 14.25 / 12.5 / 11 / 9.75 / 8.5 / 6.75. So it's more or less 7-14, not including standard deviation. With SD 5-16. (Edit: okay, well one of them was talking about 3d6.)

Yeah, I was responding to both at the same time because "10.5 across the board is average for 3d6" and "a score of 16 is powergaming for 4d6b3" use the same (incorrect) underlying logic and I'd already laid out the math for both cases in a previous post, I wasn't trying to imply that 16 is the average for a 3d6 array or that 10.5 is the average for 4d6b3, but that could have been clearer.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-21, 09:21 PM
There is nothing wrong with the play style. There is something wrong when a player lies and sneaks their way into a game under false pretenses. If you have seen a post or two of mind you might see I'm a bit direct....well, I'm more so in real life, and even more so during session 0 for a RPG. The only way for such a player to get in my game is to lie.

And the tricks are endless....like making two character sheets...one moderate for the DM to see and one all power that they keep hidden. Then in the game, they will be sneaky an use the power character, hoping the DM will be to busy or distracted to notice or won't distrput the game over their actions. They find me a different type of DM.

And I have met hundreds of players who sole goal in RPGs is to ruin the fun of others


Then kick 'em and move on. Maybe it's because I've been a forever GM for 13 years and spend a lot of time establishing expectations, but I've genuinely never had this problem.

The one time someone tried to powergame in a way that was detrimental to the game I shut it down in that first session and he stopped coming after that so problem solved.

You're painting it like it's some endemic, giant problem when, in all likelihood, you've met maybe 3 people who wanted to destroy a game and spend a lot of time on /tg/ as if that's a reasonable sample of what the average d&d experience is. That or you listen to/read too many D&D Horror Stories.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-22, 07:15 AM
I actually find that characters who are capable and competent are easier to roleplay, because they can actually do what their "concept" says they can do, and because taking risks or engaging in "non-optimal" actions in order to adhere to the concept isn't a short road to failure or death for the character.

Cluedrew
2020-06-22, 07:39 AM
As a simplified example, instead of 6 sets of 3d6, let's take 2 sets of 1d6. Here are the possible results you can get with those rolls:

1, 1
1, 2
1, 3
1, 4
1, 5
1, 6
2, 1
2, 2
2, 3
2, 4
2, 5
2, 6
3, 1
3, 2
3, 3
3, 4
3, 5
3, 6
4, 1
4, 2
4, 3
4, 4
4, 5
4, 6
5, 1
5, 2
5, 3
5, 4
5, 5
5, 6
6, 1
6, 2
6, 3
6, 4
6, 5
6, 6

First column average = 1*6 + 2*6 + 3*6 + 4*6 + 5*6 + 6*6 / 36 = 126/36 = 3.5
Second column average = 1*6 + 2*6 + 3*6 + 4*6 + 5*6 + 6*6 / 36 = 126/36 = 3.5

If you look at each column individually, yes, the average comes out to 3.5 in both cases, the expected average for a single 1d6 roll. But we care about the array, not individual rolls, and if you sort pairs in descending order and group identical pairs, you get this:

1, 1 (1 time)
2, 1 (2 times)
2, 2 (1 time)
3, 1 (2 times)
3, 2 (2 times)
3, 3 (1 time)
4, 1 (2 times)
4, 2 (2 times)
4, 3 (2 times)
4, 4 (1 time)
5, 1 (2 times)
5, 2 (2 times)
5, 3 (2 times)
5, 4 (2 times)
5, 5 (1 time)
6, 1 (2 times)
6, 2 (2 times)
6, 3 (2 times)
6, 4 (2 times)
6, 5 (2 times)
6, 6 (1 time)

First column average = 1*1 + 2*3 + 3*5 + 4*7 + 5*9 + 6*11 / 36 = 161/36 = 4.472
Second column average = 1*11 + 2*9 + 3*7 + 4*5 + 5*3 + 6*1 / 36 = 91/36 = 2.527

So while the average results of two independent rolls of 1d6 are 3.5 and 3.5, the average array of two 3d6 rolls is in fact [4.5, 2.5]. And if you do the same process with 6 sets of 4d6b3 (here's (https://anydice.com/program/5866) a nice example, click the Graph button for a good illustration), you will find that the average array for that setup is in fact [15.7, 14.2, 13.0, 12.8, 10.4, 8.5], as I said above.That's a pretty good explanation about how average arrays are created. I had never looked into it before it all makes sense reading this. So thank-you.

prabe
2020-06-22, 08:03 AM
I actually find that characters who are capable and competent are easier to roleplay, because they can actually do what their "concept" says they can do, and because taking risks or engaging in "non-optimal" actions in order to adhere to the concept isn't a short road to failure or death for the character.

I mostly agree. I think it's easier for everyone at the table to roleplay if all their characters are roughly at the same level of competence; I also think it's easier for the GM to work out scenarios if that's the case. I think having at least a point of relative weakness can serve as a handle for the player, something to grab onto, to figure out how to play that character--at least as much as a point of relative strength can, anyway. The relative weakness doesn't have to interfere with the concept--it probably shouldn't, in fact.

Segev
2020-06-22, 10:22 AM
So while the average results of two independent rolls of 1d6 are 3.5 and 3.5, the average array of two 3d6 rolls is in fact [4.5, 2.5]. And if you do the same process with 6 sets of 4d6b3 (here's (https://anydice.com/program/5866) a nice example, click the Graph button for a good illustration), you will find that the average array for that setup is in fact [15.7, 14.2, 13.0, 12.8, 10.4, 8.5], as I said above.

Nice use of anydice's code! That'll be helpful as an example for me in the future.

I am having difficulty parsing how it generates different results for each 6 d [highest 3 of 4d6] in the loop, though. Can you explain what in the syntax is telling it to generate them in such a way as getting different averages, please?

Willie the Duck
2020-06-22, 11:41 AM
You're painting it like it's some endemic, giant problem when, in all likelihood, you've met maybe 3 people who wanted to destroy a game and spend a lot of time on /tg/ as if that's a reasonable sample of what the average d&d experience is. That or you listen to/read too many D&D Horror Stories.

This seems to be an ongoing theme.

Zarrgon
2020-06-22, 12:02 PM
You're painting it like it's some endemic, giant problem when, in all likelihood, you've met maybe 3 people who wanted to destroy a game and spend a lot of time on /tg/ as if that's a reasonable sample of what the average d&d experience is. That or you listen to/read too many D&D Horror Stories.

More like 3,000....

It's odd you see my description as an "endemic"....wonder what you'd call it if that is what I really typed. What is beyond an endemic? Apoplectic?


I actually find that characters who are capable and competent are easier to roleplay, because they can actually do what their "concept" says they can do, and because taking risks or engaging in "non-optimal" actions in order to adhere to the concept isn't a short road to failure or death for the character.

Well, I wonder why you find it easy to role play a character when you make a mechanical roll? Are you saying you can only role play success?

And why is roleplay so hard if your character is not a "competent" mechanincal demi god?


I mostly agree. I think it's easier for everyone at the table to roleplay if all their characters are roughly at the same level of competence

I don't think that is true, and it's a good thing that most groups are never even close to that.

Though I do guess it depends on what "competence" means here? I suspect it means mechanical maxed out over optimized character, right?

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-22, 12:34 PM
More like 3,000....

It's odd you see my description as an "endemic"....wonder what you'd call it if that is what I really typed. What is beyond an endemic? Apoplectic?


So... you DO spend way too much time on /tg/ and are trying to double down.

Ok.



Well, I wonder why you find it easy to role play a character when you make a mechanical roll? Are you saying you can only role play success?

And why is roleplay so hard if your character is not a "competent" mechanincal demi god?

Ok. Maybe stop being toxic and dismissive for a post or two and consider:
There exist many points between "weak to the point of uselessness" and "maximally optimized beyond all reason." "Competent" is the point where the character can reliably (though not without failure or flaw) accomplish the thing it is made to do.

Ie, fighters are made to hit things until they die. A Competent fighter will be able to successfully hit things until they die more often than not.



I don't think that is true, and it's a good thing that most groups are never even close to that.

Though I do guess it depends on what "competence" means here? I suspect it means mechanical maxed out over optimized character, right?

*deep sigh*

>It's Ok to play with strong characters
>I'm gonna hurl abuse and accusations of misleading, dishonest discussion at you if you even seem to wanna be anything other than weak on purpose, though.


:annoyed:

I don't endorse these unreasonable views. And hold that they aren't reasonable. As much as the sentence itself is innocuous, when used as ammunition for this sort of behavor I cringe deeply.

On behalf of players who lean more towards roleplay, this guy doesn't speak for us.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-22, 12:36 PM
Well, I wonder why you find it easy to role play a character when you make a mechanical roll? Are you saying you can only role play success?

And why is roleplay so hard if your character is not a "competent" mechanincal demi god?


That comment excludes a vast middle of characters who are competent without being "demi gods", pushes a false dichotomy between incompetence and near-perfection, and conflates "good RP" with incompetence and "power gaming" with competence in the process. "Competent and capable" does not mean never failing, never being challenged, or never having to work for success, and at some point it becomes disingenuous, an act of arguing in bad faith, to continue to respond to other posters as if anyone who wants their character sheet and resulting mechanical abilities to reflect the basic idea that their characters are all at least minimally suited for going on these adventures.


I'm saying that it becomes much harder to just naturally go with the flow of a character's personality and tendencies when every roll is a looming chance of abject failure at something the character should, by the game's own flavor-text and the setting's own conceptual standards, be good at.

"I could do what the setting and flavor and everything tell me this character should be good at and would do in this situation, but the dice say there's a 50% chance of abject failure and a real chance of character death, so I'm going to do something else."

It has NOTHING to do with not being able to roleplay failure, and everything to do with characters, as people-who-could-be-real, not being blithering idiots who blindly walk into coin-flips of failure and death. "But that's what my character would do" is the rallying-cry of fools.




Though I do guess it depends on what "competence" means here? I suspect it means mechanical maxed out over optimized character, right?


No. It does not.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-22, 12:39 PM
Literally the post above

I wish it wouldn't be considered spamming for me to just post the word THIS in giant letters in response to this post.

I'll still do it though:
THIS.

prabe
2020-06-22, 12:58 PM
Though I do guess it depends on what "competence" means here? I suspect it means mechanical maxed out over optimized character, right?

It means that the characters are each roughly equally good at doing what the players built them to do (in a class-based system, choosing a class can be considered "building" for the purposes of this). It doesn't inherently mean they're all equally good at a specific task; there's a presumption that the characters are built to do different things. So the character who's built to know things, knows things, roughly as well as the character who's built to shoot things, shoots things. Doesn't seem to matter as much if the PCs are all rookies or hardened veterans, however that's reflected in their builds; the problems seem to arise when you have one character built as a rookie in a squad of veterans, or the other way around.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-22, 01:59 PM
Ok. Maybe stop being toxic and dismissive for a post or two

That seems that it would be going exactly against the persona being conveyed here. I do not remember them from before, despite them apparently joining in 2012, but the last six moths or so have been a repeated drumbeat about how others are mewling whiners, who want things spoon fed to them (on a silver platter), how the game and gamers have gone soft since the glory days of pre-mid 90s, and how people even slightly younger were incapable of dealing with character loss because (get this) said other people would have watched GI Joe as kids instead of Mazinger. It's clearly a form of performance art, and if the goal was to impress people, they've gotten a failing grade and must know it. So it almost has to be an attempt to piss people off.

DrMartin
2020-06-22, 03:45 PM
it's like speed running a video game with an in-built progression. In these you are usually under leveled for whatever challenge the game is throwing at you, so you have to be creative to overcome them.

In a tabletop rpg, if you are facing greater odds but still want to accomplish your goals, you need to find way to sidestep the traditional wargame aspects of the game - that often means engaging on a deeper level with the environment, the NPCs, fling around elements from your backstory and the setting's history - whatever it takes to save the princess, even if you can't kill the dragon.

These are all things that land in the general vicinity of what is called good roleplaying and being creative. Having low stat is not a requirement for these behaviors - but being creative is sort of a requirement to be able to have fun when you're dealt a bad hand and still want to play.

Mr Beer
2020-06-22, 04:01 PM
You're painting it like it's some endemic, giant problem <snip>


It's odd you see my description as an "endemic"....wonder what you'd call it if that is what I really typed. What is beyond an endemic? Apoplectic?

This is a weird paragraph. It resembles something a person would say if they believed that "endemic" means something different like "pandemic" and imagined that the appropriate response would be to mock ImNotTrevor for misusing words.

Zarrgon
2020-06-22, 04:27 PM
So... you DO spend way too much time on /tg/ and are trying to double down.

Guess it's a good thing I don't know what a tg is?




Ok. Maybe stop being toxic and dismissive for a post or two and consider:
There exist many points between "weak to the point of uselessness" and "maximally optimized beyond all reason." "Competent" is the point where the character can reliably (though not without failure or flaw) accomplish the thing it is made to do.

Ie, fighters are made to hit things until they die. A Competent fighter will be able to successfully hit things until they die more often than not.

Well, sure, but the points are: fail most of the time, fail/succeed 50% of the time and succeed most of the time. And I'm pretty sure that everyones idea of "compliance" is not failing 50% of the time.

So given your fighter example, it does seem to me like your saying: succeed most of the time. And that is a mechanically optimized powerful character.



*deep sigh*

>It's Ok to play with strong characters
>I'm gonna hurl abuse and accusations of misleading, dishonest discussion at you if you even seem to wanna be anything other than weak on purpose, though.

Ok, I've said it many times myself. But a strong or powerful or competent character are all the same thing...right?


That comment excludes a vast middle of characters who are competent without being "demi gods", pushes a false dichotomy between incompetence and near-perfection, and conflates "good RP" with incompetence and "power gaming" with competence in the process. "Competent and capable" does not mean never failing, never being challenged, or never having to work for success, and at some point it becomes disingenuous, an act of arguing in bad faith, to continue to respond to other posters as if anyone who wants their character sheet and resulting mechanical abilities to reflect the basic idea that their characters are all at least minimally suited for going on these adventures.

So where is this middle though. I can say I just about never see it, and the few times I have are rare.

If the scale is--> incompetent---average--competent--powerful, what is the difference between competent and powerful? I'd also note that saying minimal is going down to average, not competent.

The powerful character has at least an 18 in their primary used ability and must have a Con of at least 16 as they "need" hit points. And chances are they will also "need" a high dexterity and at least one other ability. So they will only have one...maybe two...low "dump stats".

Ok...so a character that is ONLY competent has to be weaker then that. If they are at the same level of power as a powerful character....then they ARE a powerful character.





I'm saying that it becomes much harder to just naturally go with the flow of a character's personality and tendencies when every roll is a looming chance of abject failure at something the character should, by the game's own flavor-text and the setting's own conceptual standards, be good at.

"I could do what the setting and flavor and everything tell me this character should be good at and would do in this situation, but the dice say there's a 50% chance of abject failure and a real chance of character death, so I'm going to do something else."

So it sounds to me like your saying a character must succeed at things all most all the time. And you don't like the 50% mark....so what is your percentage? 75%? 85%? 95%?

I'd also question what "setting" and "flavor" told you the game should be an easy cake walk?




It has NOTHING to do with not being able to roleplay failure, and everything to do with characters, as people-who-could-be-real, not being blithering idiots who blindly walk into coin-flips of failure and death. "But that's what my character would do" is the rallying-cry of fools.

So having any low stats makes a character a "blithering idiot"?


It means that the characters are each roughly equally good at doing what the players built them to do

Once you take away the modifiers, you have: easy-avarage-hard. So a competent character should have no problem doing and easy thing, 50% to the average one, and only a small chance of doing the hard one.

Yet that is not what is posted, it's more like: easy 100%, average 75% and hard 50%.

prabe
2020-06-22, 05:28 PM
Once you take away the modifiers, you have: easy-avarage-hard. So a competent character should have no problem doing and easy thing, 50% to the average one, and only a small chance of doing the hard one.

Yet that is not what is posted, it's more like: easy 100%, average 75% and hard 50%.

I don't see the relevance to what I said, here. I said "equally competent." That in itself says nothing about how good any of the characters are at anything.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-22, 05:53 PM
So where is this middle though. I can say I just about never see it, and the few times I have are rare.


Then you need better gamers.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-22, 05:56 PM
This whole thing is really starting to remind me of other arguments in the past with a certain since-gone poster who insisted on distorted peculiar absolutes, and constantly talked about how awful all the players he had were, and regarded any agency or ability to succeed for the players as a threat to "good gaming".

Cluedrew
2020-06-22, 06:54 PM
This whole thing is really starting to remind me of other arguments in the past with a certain since-gone poster who insisted on distorted peculiar absolutes, and constantly talked about how awful all the players he had were, and regarded any agency or ability to succeed for the players as a threat to "good gaming".Even how everyone is dragging the thread down by spending more time engaging with them rather than the actual topic of the thread is reminiscent of the old days. We have multiple posts now not about the topic but how one poster is discussing it. And please don't quote this to defend the use of posts. Just because its further off topic.

… Speaking of which I think the myth came from the dungeon diving days when if you had low stats you had to turn to role-playing and creative solutions to problems instead of relying on their character abilities.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-22, 07:07 PM
Even how everyone is dragging the thread down by spending more time engaging with them rather than the actual topic of the thread is reminiscent of the old days. We have multiple posts now not about the topic but how one poster is discussing it. And please don't quote this to defend the use of posts. Just because its further off topic.

… Speaking of which I think the myth came from the dungeon diving days when if you had low stats you had to turn to role-playing and creative solutions to problems instead of relying on their character abilities.

Yeah, reaching the point of disengaging pretty quick, thus the shorter replies over time, and probably the ignore list soon. Clearly it's not a matter of unintentional poor delivery, but rather one of deliberate bad faith.

:smallfrown:

Anyway, back to the topic, I think there's probably no single origin. I think every idea we've listed -- misperception or malice -- could play a role, and that over time it congealed out of the mess, rather than having a single point of creation.

ImNotTrevor
2020-06-22, 07:25 PM
Edit:

I'm gonna choose to instead join in on the stonewall. Let's all just ignore the obvious troll, eh?

I still think the origin is as a reason to not freak out if the stats don't work out. But that problem is less and less common nowadays.

AvatarVecna
2020-06-22, 07:56 PM
No doubt it originated in whatever system first put forth the idea that your figures represented a person rather than a unit, and that these individuals could be customized. As soon as it's personalized, it gets a personality, and that personality can guide how mechanical choices are selected in-universe - and those choices most likely don't line up with the most optimal strategy.

You're building a barbarian, and you're rolling stats. You get 18/16/14/12/10/8 (weird coincidence). Now of course, any optimization guide will tell you that the 18 goes in Str (maybe in Con), and the 8 goes in Int. Str is the offense stat for barbarian, and the best defense in D&D is murdering the other guy so hard he doesn't get a chance to attack you back; meanwhile, you're not a wizard or one of the third-casters using the wizard list, so you basically don't actually need Int at all. Objectively speaking, Int is where the 8 should go. Your barbarian is looking for a good race to pick. V human is always great for picking a feat early, half-orc is a strong choice for any meleer, dwarf gets useful stat bumps and has a bunch of useful racial abilities besides. There's a few pretty good choices. You reach lvl 4, and you've got to settle on some kind of feat or ASI. Conventional wisdom is either you bump your attack stat to 20 ASAP, or you take a feat that's absolutely direly critical to your build (Sharpshooter, Sentinel, Heavy Armor Mastery, whatever). Needless to say, of course, you took Totem Barbarian - there's some decent UAs, but non on Totem's level, and certainly if you're limited to physical books no way you'd ever touch Berserker.

...but what if you ignore conventional wisdom? What if you pick a lightfoot halfling, put the 8 in Str and the 18 in Int, focus your skills on pretending to be a rogue, and take the Skilled feat to facilitate that? What if you did go Berserker? All of these are decisions that actively make your build worse at fulfilling its role...but they're a fantastic way to represent a character who used to be an assassin or stealth-focused battlemaster who's since gotten PTSD and is a shadow of their former self, trying their best to guide their new allies tactically and strategically during their more lucid moments.

...

...when it comes time to make a choice, there's rarely an objectively correct choice to make, but there's usually conventional wisdom guiding you in using this choice to optimize your build. Sometimes, your choice will veer off-course, which is fine, just means you need to pick up some slack elsewhere or accept that you won't be performing where guides seem to expect you will. But when you seem to be going directly against that conventional wisdom in a number of ways? That's not you being bad at optimizing...well, it might be that, but it's not just that. Nobody makes a Str 8 halfling barbarian because they honestly think that's how you're supposed to make a barbarian. They're doing it on purpose, and "optimizing your combat stats" clearly isn't the reason.

It's not that possessing low stats makes you better at roleplaying. It's that players who lean more towards roleplaying are more likely to be fine playing a character who has low stats. This isn't to say that roleplayers will reject good stats, or that optimizers are incapable of roleplaying because they're too restricted by wanting to play the "optimal build". But the link exists because when you look at underaverage builds, more often than not you find a roleplayer behind the sheet.

Zarrgon
2020-06-22, 09:02 PM
I'm all for the Stonewall too.

I will just post the obvious example of why Low Stats Make for Better RP and Creativity is a Thing:

So we have two groups, both of them are in the middle ground of they want the game to be half roll play and half role play.

*Group 1- is a group of four high stat characters with at least moderate optimization, though likely much more. So each character has a huge positive modifier to set actions under their expertise.

In this game, the DM will describe a mechanical challenge with a DC, and the player with the best mechanically made character will move up to do the challenge. As the character has a huge positive modifier, the player only needs to roll more then a very, very, very low number. The chances of rolling a very, very, very low number are small, so basically this is "DM describes challenge, player beats challenge" very quickly. And then this can quickly be the whole game play: "DM describes challenge, player beats challenge", then repeat.

There is no need, reason or incentive to Role Play at all, as all challenges can just be rolled right past. At best Role Playing is a fluff side trek to the main adventure as it rolls onward.

*Group 2-is a group of low stat characters with little or most likely no optimization. So each character has a low positive modifier, or even a negative one for set actions under their expertise.

In this game, the DM will describe a mechanical challenge with a DC, and the group will need to figure out something to do. The chance of even the character with the highest positive modifier beating the challenge is low, but they can try and hope for the best. And when they most likely fail, then the group has to figure something out. Such as a way to get a bonus to the roll, or get the opposing side a penalty or even just find a way around the challenge. This makes every challenge unique as the players must get creative and role play to over come challenges.

This game has the huge incentive to role play and be creative as the players can not simply roll past anything.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-22, 09:04 PM
It's not that possessing low stats makes you better at roleplaying. It's that players who lean more towards roleplaying are more likely to be fine playing a character who has low stats. This isn't to say that roleplayers will reject good stats, or that optimizers are incapable of roleplaying because they're too restricted by wanting to play the "optimal build". But the link exists because when you look at underaverage builds, more often than not you find a roleplayer behind the sheet.


So a classic case of inverting cause and effect?

prabe
2020-06-22, 09:15 PM
So a classic case of inverting cause and effect?

If you mean the cause to be "crappy scores" and the effect to be "roleplaying like a mofo" then yes, I think the inversion is "If you wanna roleplay like a mofo, you gotta have crappy scores," which is the trope the OP references. I think that particular trope is false--there's nothing about building in a point-based system that requires you to have crappy scores to make an interesting character (as opposed to having to make choices to get the scores important to the concept where they need to be).

AdAstra
2020-06-23, 05:19 AM
As has been noted by other posters, it's pretty much just an inversion of the fact that crappy scores/unoptimized characters usually need good roleplaying to still get something interesting out of the character. It's also affected heavily by survivorship/confirmation bias. An unoptimized character that approaches every problem in a "conventional" way is likely not going to live very long, and at the very least will not stick out much to anyone, while severely unoptimized characters that actually live long enough to have adventures usually only get there through a combination of incredible luck and/or guile, which of course tends to be rather memorable to most people. Either that or they lean on stronger characters to succeed, in which case it still has more or less the same result: The poorly roleplayed ones fade into the background, while the well-roleplayed ones stand out.

Most of my DnD experience has been with store games, so I tend to see a lot of people of widely varying levels of system knowledge/experience, at least in comparison to the time I spend playing. And at least as far as I can tell, there is very little correlation between good roleplaying and non-optimized characters, whether that lack of optimization was a deliberate choice or simply insufficient system-mastery. I've seen people play weaker characters that mostly just annoyed other people with poor decisions, and I've seen people be very clever and interesting with strong characters, even optimized pre-gens. Heck, I've seen the same guy do both.

Unoptimized characters can do more to force roleplaying creativity, and you could conceivably get better at roleplaying by playing a weaker character, but a weaker character isn't automatically more interesting.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-23, 11:43 AM
<The whole post>

That's a good analysis of what I think the... what I will call 'the primary situation I think actually happens frequently in the wild.' I think there are other possible edge cases. Another is that there certain is a RP opportunity for certain low stats. Playing a clumsy cleric or knight or a rude character that always fails horribly at bargaining with the store clerks or even a dimwitted character can be an interesting challenge. Mind you, that again is just an RP opportunity, rather than supports the thread-title notion that it makes the RP better.

noob
2020-06-23, 03:31 PM
Low stats can help players to role-play perfectly.
For example a 0 int character will behave like a vegetable(not do anything at all) and you will always be able to role-play a vegetable perfectly(just stand still and stop speaking: it is not that hard).
Likewise for a 0 charisma or a 0 wisdom character.
For a 0 con character you just have to play dead(0 not _ since _ is not low: it can not be compared), a 0 dex character can not move or talk likewise for a 0 str character but you might have to think to roleplay if weird stuff like telepathy or brain scans are involved.

So in conclusion sufficiently low stats makes for easy and perfectly accurate roleplaying (thus better since you do not make mistakes).
Also it is original because very few players plays perfectly inactive characters.

Aeson
2020-06-24, 08:00 PM
Yeah, I was responding to both at the same time because "10.5 across the board is average for 3d6" and "a score of 16 is powergaming for 4d6b3" use the same (incorrect) underlying logic and I'd already laid out the math for both cases in a previous post, I wasn't trying to imply that 16 is the average for a 3d6 array or that 10.5 is the average for 4d6b3, but that could have been clearer.
The point where our communication failed is that I was looking at the average stat array as something like the average result for 6x3d6 in order whereas you're looking at the average stat array as something like the average array for 6x3d6 arrange highest to lowest.

Regardless, you have still failed to show that an array about which nothing is known but that its maximum value is 12 is 'below average.'
- Do you know the specific stat generation method in use? No. So how do you know what the 'average' array for this should look like?
- Do you know anything about the distribution of values within the array? Even as little as the minimum value, or the average across all stats? No. So how do you know that this array is not, say, 12 / 12 / 12 / 12 / 12 / 12 - an array which is very definitely above average for 6x3d6, whether in order or highest-to-lowest, even though it is simultaneously probably less ideal for most builds than an array with a more normal distribution of values?

Beyond that, how are you deciding whether an array is "above" or "below" 'average' when all you know about the array is its maximum value - which in this case is not sufficiently low as to guarantee that the other values in the array are likewise below the expectation, nor even sufficiently low as to guarantee that none of the other values in the array can be above the expectation to a degree similar to or perhaps even greater than the maximum is below the expectation - anyways? It seems that for you knowing that the maximum value of the array is below the expected maximum value (and, again, I'll note that you do not know the stat generation method in use here, so you're going to have to assume a stat generation method in order to assert this to be the case, though as it would need to be a fairly unusual stat generation method for a 12 to be less than the expected maximum value of the array this at least is a fairly safe assumption) is sufficient to declare the array 'below average,' but this ignores that the maximum being a 12 doesn't force the other values to be sufficiently low as to guarantee that none of them will be above average, or even insufficiently above-average to offset the degree by which the 12 is below average - 12 / 12 / 11 / 11 / 10 / 10 might not be a particularly optimal stat array, but if it's 6x3d6 highest-to-lowest and we take 14 / 12 / 11 / 10 / 9 / 7 as the 'average' array then it has -2 / 0 / 0 / +1 / +1 / +3 on the average array - above average overall, probably even after you take a closer look at the statistics of the distribution to determine how far away from 'average' this happens to be, despite 12 being the maximum value in the array.

icefractal
2020-06-25, 05:49 PM
A 12 is below average as the highest stat in the array. It doesn't matter what the rest of the array is like, because that's not the question.

And I'm defining it as simply: "Of all the possible sets of 6x 3d6, in how many is the highest stat greater than 12?" With other generation methods like 4d6b3, it's even more below average.

And no, a character with, say, 12,12,12,10,10,8 isn't incapable. But neither are they the peak of what's reasonable for a "normal person". And if you look at RL people in highly competitive fields, most often they do have significantly above-average capability in the areas most crucial to that field.

This whole thing started with the statement that having a high-stat of 12 is the "middle ground" between inept characters and the powergamer realm of 16+. If you've reconsidered that, then fine, but that is what I was responding to.

HeraldOfExius
2020-06-25, 07:30 PM
The point where our communication failed is that I was looking at the average stat array as something like the average result for 6x3d6 in order whereas you're looking at the average stat array as something like the average array for 6x3d6 arrange highest to lowest.

Regardless, you have still failed to show that an array about which nothing is known but that its maximum value is 12 is 'below average.'
- Do you know the specific stat generation method in use? No. So how do you know what the 'average' array for this should look like?
- Do you know anything about the distribution of values within the array? Even as little as the minimum value, or the average across all stats? No. So how do you know that this array is not, say, 12 / 12 / 12 / 12 / 12 / 12 - an array which is very definitely above average for 6x3d6, whether in order or highest-to-lowest, even though it is simultaneously probably less ideal for most builds than an array with a more normal distribution of values?

Beyond that, how are you deciding whether an array is "above" or "below" 'average' when all you know about the array is its maximum value - which in this case is not sufficiently low as to guarantee that the other values in the array are likewise below the expectation, nor even sufficiently low as to guarantee that none of the other values in the array can be above the expectation to a degree similar to or perhaps even greater than the maximum is below the expectation - anyways? It seems that for you knowing that the maximum value of the array is below the expected maximum value (and, again, I'll note that you do not know the stat generation method in use here, so you're going to have to assume a stat generation method in order to assert this to be the case, though as it would need to be a fairly unusual stat generation method for a 12 to be less than the expected maximum value of the array this at least is a fairly safe assumption) is sufficient to declare the array 'below average,' but this ignores that the maximum being a 12 doesn't force the other values to be sufficiently low as to guarantee that none of them will be above average, or even insufficiently above-average to offset the degree by which the 12 is below average - 12 / 12 / 11 / 11 / 10 / 10 might not be a particularly optimal stat array, but if it's 6x3d6 highest-to-lowest and we take 14 / 12 / 11 / 10 / 9 / 7 as the 'average' array then it has -2 / 0 / 0 / +1 / +1 / +3 on the average array - above average overall, probably even after you take a closer look at the statistics of the distribution to determine how far away from 'average' this happens to be, despite 12 being the maximum value in the array.

With 3d6, getting a value of 9, 10, 11, or 12 (the most common results) is expected to happen roughly 48% of the time. When you're rolling once, you can reasonably expect to get one of those, since those 4 results are about as common as the other 12 combined. When you roll more than once, however, you'll need to get that 48% chance each time in order to have a completely "average" array. Getting 12/12/11/11/10/10 isn't average, it's flipping a coin and getting heads six times in a row. It could happen by chance, but your results are unexpectedly consistent.

Looking at 12 as an absolute maximum for any ability score, you have about a 74% chance of that happening on a single roll of 3d6. Do this six times and you have about a 16.5% chance that you didn't get higher than a 12 on any of those rolls. You are more than 4 times more likely to have at least one result higher than 12 than you are to have only scores 12 or lower. If that doesn't meet your criteria of being "below average," then what does?

Aeson
2020-06-25, 07:44 PM
With 3d6, getting a value of 9, 10, 11, or 12 (the most common results) is expected to happen roughly 48% of the time. When you're rolling once, you can reasonably expect to get one of those, since those 4 results are about as common as the other 12 combined. When you roll more than once, however, you'll need to get that 48% chance each time in order to have a completely "average" array. Getting 12/12/11/11/10/10 isn't average, it's flipping a coin and getting heads six times in a row. It could happen by chance, but your results are unexpectedly consistent.

Looking at 12 as an absolute maximum for any ability score, you have about a 74% chance of that happening on a single roll of 3d6. Do this six times and you have about a 16.5% chance that you didn't get higher than a 12 on any of those rolls. You are more than 4 times more likely to have at least one result higher than 12 than you are to have only scores 12 or lower. If that doesn't meet your criteria of being "below average," then what does?
If your minimum is as far or further above average as your maximum is below it, are you really below average? No.

Unavenger
2020-06-26, 04:35 PM
If your scores are all individually equal to the average, you can legitimately feel that your stats are worse than the totally average array, particularly in a world where a 14 and a 10 means that you put the 14 in something useful and a 10 in something less useful, for a total +2 bonus to useful, and two 12s means that you put one of them in something useful and one of them in something less useful, for a total +1 bonus to useful.

So while an array where all the results are equal to the mean may not be below average (it's within standard deviation, but not actually below the mean), it is worse than the expected array in terms of utility, which is what people seem to be trying to convey.