you forgot about tomes and wishes they can perm increce your stats.
ah, ok.
@taepodong: That's a bit uncalled for.
To echo LazarX, misplaced venting may not be what you're looking for. My wife and I just had our first (sweet baby girl) just six months ago; I understand the pressure. Congratulations on the birth of your son!
I'd like to tell you that it gets easier, but then I'd be lying to you. Although difficult, it's pretty cool (at least, to me). It's interesting trying to find time for gaming with a new child in the house. ;)
Ability score maximums (and minimums, for that matter) have indeed changed since older incarnations of the game. In your above example (about complaints that too many rogues start with an 18 Dex), is it possible that the real complaint--not yours, but the complainant's--is about min-maxing? Some people tend to think that min-maxing is pervasive in the game.
As far as my own personal take on the matter, it hasn't been a problem in my tabletop group; we tend to read the "numbers" as a rough gauge of a PC's inherant potential, as opposed to minimums or maximums of a given race's potential. Like most of the rules in the game, ability scores are an abstraction (as opposed to hard-and-fast scientific determination), at least in my opinion. Of course, the math provides concrete mechanical benefits, but I still think "racial maximums" have pretty much fallen by the wayside in favor of "abstract potential".
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Because until recently humans couldn't have nice things.
|
I'll admit I nearly didn't read your whole post once I read e6 but I stuck it out. I'm not looking to play within the bounds of realistic human norms. I agree that if we look at an e6 game where the max human possibility is 21-24, then yes starting at 1st level at 20 seems a bit ridiculous.
If you're going to freely admit that you have no intention to play withing the bounds of any form of vague realism, then why make this topic to begin with?
Alright, I'll toss an opinion in.
Many (not all) of us who have been doing this a very long time still don't like 'Point Buy'. Personally, I can't stand it. Point Buy does two things:
1. It lends itself towards dumpstatting too much.
2. It seems to come with an assumption that everyone will have a max score
So you get a party with 5 humans and an elf, with all top scores of 20. Yay. Now, to express that in verisimilitude, the five most gifted individuals in the continent all happened to spring from the same town/area (or move there early in life) and -just happened- to not only come together as the perfect team (complete with complementary skills!), but to generally like the presence of each other and (generically) want all the same things out of life.
It's a stretch.
Complaining about a maximum of 18 is one thing, but until you can roll higher than an 18 on 3d6, I don't see much of a point in claiming that they're wrong. They're not. 18 (20 with racial mod) is the highest a starting human can have, and every character having it becomes incredibly droll.
Seriously, when a warrior has to earn 5 levels to get the BAB that you get simply for having a 20 strength, where's the contest? Random generation makes dump stats less dumped (unless you roll really poorly, and a fairminded GM will keep things in the same ballpark of scores), high scores more fun, and a sense of achievement for each thing you work for. It's not for everyone, of course -- no system of gaming is. But there's a glimpse into the mindset for you.
I removed some posts. If you don't like a thread, don't post in it. Heck, just this week we introduced the 'Hide this thread' button (looks like ∅).
Other than than, flag it and move on.
|
... but until you can roll higher than an 18 on 3d6, I don't see much of a point in claiming that they're wrong. They're not. 18 (20 with racial mod) is the highest a starting human can have, and every character having it becomes incredibly droll.
with respect, the statement above is not only irrelevant, its actually wrong. What you can roll on a 3d6 is completely irrelevant in PFRPG - it is not the norm of character building for home games or organized play. It is an optional rule system that some people like, but no more. I've been playing since 1982, and I happily abandoned the randomness of rolling for the order and balance of point buy.
EDIT: removed a redundant statement
... but until you can roll higher than an 18 on 3d6, I don't see much of a point in claiming that they're wrong. They're not. 18 (20 with racial mod) is the highest a starting human can have, and every character having it becomes incredibly droll.
with respect, the statement above is not only irrelevant, its actually wrong. What you can roll on a 3d6 is completely irrelevant in PFRPG - it is not the norm of character building for home games or organized play. It is an optional rule system that some people like, but no more. I've been playing since 1982, and I happily abandoned the randomness of rolling for the order and balance of point buy.
EDIT: removed a redundant statement
I think this is terribly off base. Purchase may be the standard for organized play, but that probably only covers a minority of games out there. Making any other assumption about whether players use rolling or purchased stat is making a pretty wild guess.
What you can roll on 3d6 (or, technically given the standard method listed in the PF core rulebook is 4d6 drop low, 3d6 skewed high) is relevant.
I was reading Carrion Hill module today. Saw something interesting.
It says that 6 Intelligence makes people utterly loyal and unquestioning. And that's after taking 4 points of Int damage. If 4 points makes people go from well-functioning to extremely stupid and unquestioning, what does +4 do?
Many (not all) of us who have been doing this a very long time still don't like 'Point Buy'. Personally, I can't stand it. Point Buy does two things:
1. It lends itself towards dumpstatting too much.
2. It seems to come with an assumption that everyone will have a max score
I partially agree with what all you said, but I want to throw another point of view in the mix for you. I used to run a home game for 3.5 and I used the point buy system. Though I put restriction on it that forced the players to make choices.
1. Only one 18 and no 17's OR no 18's and two 17's
2. As many 16's or less as you desire
3. No stat below 8 without a roleplay reason approved by DM
4. Apply racial adjustments normally
I ran three group numbering between 3 and 8 each using this. No one ever complained and you'd be surprised how many player forewent the 18 to get two 17's. And while players did min/max the 8's and 6's, they made some interesting back stories to support them.
Point buy can be made less epic by splitting the options to make it more fluid.
I removed a post I missed last time.
Point buy is hit or miss with me; it kinda screws the MAD classes, which makes the SAD classes even better. BUT it makes for more balanced characters provided you don't get a total cheeser.
What gets me is the dump stating. Then the whining that goes with it.
example: The Wizard starts with a 20 INT to get it he dumped his STR to a 7. Now I tell him his spellbook weighs 16lbs.( its got brass caps, leather over oak boards, vellum pages) he hits a medium load at 25 to 27 lbs. so a light Xbow, dagger, spell component pouch, regular clothes, quiver etc. he's at medium load. Now he goes off on his first adventure and his split of loot is about 80 gp but its in silver and copper. Now he's at heavy load. Sure he gets the Barby to carry some of his stuff or he has a donkey or he brought a floating disk scroll. All of this cuts into his startng capital or puts him in debt to said barby. The problem; he just doesn't want to do the math, so I have to keep him honest. Now I could hand wave the rules; but that's not the RAI; it also screws the Pally who had to spend his points across 4 stats. I'm accused of being unfair, for penalizing his PENALTY to STR. The temerity of a DM who actually enforces the encumbrance rule.
Same player same situation this time Cleric 20 WIS 7 DEX the party is running up some stairs, I ask for a straight DEX check. "What you don't make checks to use stairs" he says,"Sure you do at a sprint when your a notorious clutz, your buddies have to make em' too cause your in the middle of the pack" I respond. Now I'm a douche because the whole party could suffer, for hanging out in dangerous situations with a guy who litterally can not walk and chew gum.
He'd tried this with our other DM but dumped his INT to 7 and got NO SKILL POINTS. Which was iffy on my POV, but I didn't argue the case for our resident min maxer. The point is this guy simply won't roleplay his characters as he built them. More to the point he is the one who insisted we try point buy in the first place. He's a fun fun guy and the best spades partner not currently serving a life sentence. But he is a rules bender or a munchkin or something, we love him but he drives the 3 GMs nutz.
I actually don't really like how you can become a demi-god through leveling, it's not my thing. Currently I'm making an RPG similar in style to the e6 variant. I also don't like how a character's intelligence, wisdom and charisma are defined. So that's gone from it too. I call it Static RPG.
Mental stats are defined by how clever the player is, any mental skills are just defined by ranks and feats.
Oh yeah and it's close to 4e in the sense that all the classes have "powers" in a similar fashion except they are all 1d6 round cooldown instead of at-will, encounter, and daily.
It's very different, and nowhere near finished
Point buy is hit or miss with me; it kinda screws the MAD classes, which makes the SAD classes even better. BUT it makes for more balanced characters provided you don't get a total cheeser.
What gets me is the dump stating. Then the whining that goes with it.
example: The Wizard starts with a 20 INT to get it he dumped his STR to a 7. Now I tell him his spellbook weighs 16lbs.( its got brass caps, leather over oak boards, vellum pages) he hits a medium load at 25 to 27 lbs. so a light Xbow, dagger, spell component pouch, regular clothes, quiver etc. he's at medium load. Now he goes off on his first adventure and his split of loot is about 80 gp but its in silver and copper. Now he's at heavy load. Sure he gets the Barby to carry some of his stuff or he has a donkey or he brought a floating disk scroll. All of this cuts into his startng capital or puts him in debt to said barby. The problem; he just doesn't want to do the math, so I have to keep him honest. Now I could hand wave the rules; but that's not the RAI; it also screws the Pally who had to spend his points across 4 stats. I'm accused of being unfair, for penalizing his PENALTY to STR. The temerity of a DM who actually enforces the encumbrance rule.
Same player same situation this time Cleric 20 WIS 7 DEX the party is running up some stairs, I ask for a straight DEX check. "What you don't make checks to use stairs" he says,"Sure you do at a sprint when your a notorious clutz, your buddies have to make em' too cause your in the middle of the pack" I respond. Now I'm a douche because the whole party could suffer, for hanging out in dangerous situations with a guy who litterally can not walk and chew gum.
He'd tried this with our other DM but dumped his INT to 7 and got NO SKILL POINTS. Which was iffy on my POV, but I didn't argue the case for our resident min maxer. The point is this guy simply won't roleplay his characters as he built them. More to the point he is the one who insisted we try point buy in the first place. He's a fun fun guy and...
Munchkin is a bad word to use. Maybe he just has a different view of the game. You are also making up houserules just to mess with him. There are no dex checks to run up stairs or no rules not getting skills points. Even animals get skills points and they have an int of two. You would be better of just putting a cap on the minimum score than singling a player out.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
20 is the new 18. 18 is the new 16.
Alright, I'll toss an opinion in.
Many (not all) of us who have been doing this a very long time still don't like 'Point Buy'. Personally, I can't stand it. Point Buy does two things:
I've been doing this a very long time (depending on what you call "very long" - for me, everything over a decade qualifies as very long) and I can't stand false "luck" systems like, well, every single rolling method I have ever seen.
1. It lends itself towards dumpstatting too much.
2. It seems to come with an assumption that everyone will have a max score
On the other hand, rolling lends itself to being unable to really control what character you play. Plus, it seems to come with the assumption that you will have high stats (maybe not max, but close) without any dumb stat, because every roll that isn't up to to spec will just be rerolled.
So you get a party with 5 humans and an elf, with all top scores of 20. Yay.
Really? With point buy or purchase? What point allowance? 40 points way-beyond-epic purchase? Even with the "epic" purchase we usually use (partially because I see no problem giving my players decent scores and partially because we have many people who played 2e for long times and get withdrawal symptoms if they get anything less than 25 points), the only type of character I usually see having a 20 are dedicated casters (wizards, sorcerers, witches).
For most other concepts, the price for the 18 before mods is just too prohibitive.
There is one rogue with dex 20 in one game, but the guy has crippled his character with a strength of 7 or 8. Nevermind the tacky "you need to carry stuff" thing, that's a low blow. The guy is basically useless in any situation where he can't land sneak attacks, since most of the time he'll end up with the one point non-lethal damage. And even sneak attacks with bad rolls can get extra crappy.
That will get better later on with higher levels, but personally, I don't consider sitting around playing with my toes for large parts of our sessions for months to be very exciting.
Now, to express that in verisimilitude, the five most gifted individuals in the continent all happened to spring from the same town/area (or move there early in life) and -just happened- to not only come together as the perfect team (complete with complementary skills!), but to generally like the presence of each other and (generically) want all the same things out of life.
It's a stretch.
Characters are supposed to be exceptional heroes. If they want to overspecialise, let them go ahead.
I wouldn't say that they're the only 5 characters with 20 on the continent, though. Why should they be?
Complaining about a maximum of 18 is one thing, but until you can roll higher than an 18 on 3d6, I don't see much of a point in claiming that they're wrong.
Of course they're wrong. Because this is not about rolling 20 on a 3d6. It's about rolling 18 on a 3d6 and then adding the +2 racial modifier - or would be, if anyone rolled 3d6.
In Pathfinder, 18 isn't the best possible for every race/attribute combination. The best possible starting attribute value for the core races is 20 for those stats you get a racial bonus.
And that's the problem: People seem oblivious to this fact and complain about frequent 18s. As I said: 18 is the new 16, not that big a deal. Getting 16 or better (before racial modifiers) is about 7,5% likely with 3d6 (i.e. the dinosaur hardliner way) or a bit more than 17,5% for 4d6 drop lowest (i.e. PF standard rolling). And that's per stat. Multiply by 6 to see how many characters have at least one such stat. For 3d6, it's almost half the characters, and at least statistically speaking, everyone with 4d6 has a 16 or better.
Seriously, when a warrior has to earn 5 levels to get the BAB that you get simply for having a 20 strength, where's the contest?
I don't know, what system are you speaking about? Because in PF, you only get BAB from class levels.
And even if you want to consider total attack bonuses, comparing attribute-derived bonuses and level-derived bonuses rarely yields useful insights.
I mean, sure, if you consider a warrior with Str 10 and another with Str 20, the weakling needs to be 5 levels ahead to get the same attack bonus (but then he'll have more HP, and more feats, and one more attack, but he will deal less damage per attack, but his Power Attack will be better, but...... More buts than you'll find in a naughty magazine).
But the real question is: Why is a guy with 10 strength a warrior? It's likely (going with 4d6) that he has at least one 16+. So if he's quite weak for a warrior, he's real pretty or smart or wise. Why not gravitate towards a profession he can shine in?
If we are talking about a human who chooses an occupation where his strengths will be useful, he'll likely one who put the 16 he rolled into strength. Even if he didn't assign his human bonus to strength (which would be the most logical choice, but let's say he wanted to have decent dexterity and thus starts only with a 16), we are suddenly talking about a guy who "only" needs two extra levels to get the same attack bonus (again, ignoring Feats and all the other stuff).
Random generation makes dump stats less dumped (unless you roll really poorly, and a fairminded GM will keep things in the same ballpark of scores), high scores more fun, and a sense of achievement for each thing you work for.
How? It puts a certain amount of chance into dump stats. I say certain because those rolling systems tend to have their safety nets to reduce the likelihood for low stats. It means that while with purchase, you'll have, say, a wizard with strength 8 or even 7 because the player chose to, with rolling you'll get a wizard with 8, or 7, or 5, because the player rolled a 8 (or 7, or 5 etc.) and put it there because everything else would have hurt worse.
High scores are fun no matter what. The difference is that it's unlikely or even impossible to have several really high stats. With rolling, it all depends on how you roll. I saw several characters in roll-based games with 2 18s each - and that was in 3e, before every race got +2 to two stats or one free-floating +2.
In PF, that would be equal to characters with 2 20s. You could only get that in Purchase with either a really nice allowance of points (beyond the options the system recommends) or cripple yourself in basically all 4 other stats.
Needless to say that the two characters' other 4 stats weren't bad, either.
Sure, I've seen (or, rather, read about) people doing stuff with Point Buy or Purchase that are simply ridiculous (I simply can't read certain optimisation threads. As soon as I read something "You don't need int or wis to maximise your damage, so put 7s in each of those" I have enough), and seen games where dice rolling was reasonable, but I've also seen many, many characters made with Point Buy or Purchase that were perfectly reasonable, and heard many people demand rolling not because they want "more organic" characters or something like that (though that was usually what they said they wanted), but because they want stats that can't be had with Purchase because there aren't enough points around.
I've also seen games and characters ruined because of rolling - games because certain players had fiendish luck while rolling while others rolled just well enough to not be allowed to re-roll, and characters of course because the stats the player rolled didn't fit the character he wanted to play.
One thought I've had is to run two point buys. 10 or 12 or 15 points each for the physical and mental stats. That lets the player balance between eg. strength and dex, but not to buy either at the expense of int or cha. Slightly higher PB than normal compensates for not being able to dump mental or physical in favor of the other since most builds do so.
I really like this one. Let's say you have 10 points to spend on one set and 15 to spend on the other with 2 bonus points that can go in either. You can pick which set gets which.
===
Human Wizard: 15 mental, 10 physical, 2 floating (Str and Wis)
Str 11 (10 + 1)
Dex 14
Con 14
Int 20 (18 + 2)
Wis 13 (12 + 1)
Cha 7
That's actually close to what my current Wizard has as his stats. He's a know-it-all that isn't exactly charismatic. Easy to roleplay. : P
===
Human Fighter: 10 mental, 15 physical, 2 floating (Con)
Str 18 (16 + 2)
Dex 12
Con 14 (13 + 1)
Int 12
Wis 16
Cha 8
That's a decently acceptable set of ability scores, particularly for a heavily armored Fighter that doesn't need Dex. Or you could switch Str and Dex for an archer.
===
Human Cleric: 15 mental, 10 physical, 2 floating (Dex)
Str 12
Dex 14 (13 + 1)
Con 14
Int 10
Wis 18 (16 + 2)
Cha 14
===
Human Cleric: 10 mental, 15 physical, 2 floating (Con)
Str 18 (16 + 2)
Dex 12
Con 14 (13 + 1)
Int 8
Wis 14
Cha 12
==================================
That's just with a quick off the top of my head thing there. It sounds like a good idea. Thoughts?
I like the idea of separate pools. But just for the rare player that wishes to roleplay a character with less than average stats in one of the groups, make it 'you may spend up to 10/15 points'. While it's rare to find someone that wants to dump stats for no gain, only spending 7 or 8 points in a category might fit a character background better.