So let’s assume you were rolling for stats. How bad would you generally let a player roll on a stat before they could reroll that stat? Like would you allow a player to have a 3?
Lets assume it’s a RP medium or RP heavy game (because RP light or RP none negates most of this issue).
Let me rephrase. Do you trust your players to be able to RP a character with a 3 in one of their stats? Or another way to put it. What does a character with a 3 in one of its stats, look like to you?
I don't imagine you'd have to "allow" a player to have a 3 in anything because I can't imagine a player actually wanting to play a character that has a 3 in anything. I mean, my cleric's Intelligence got knocked down to 5 a while back (I got better), but for a few months it was a real challenge to RP that. Not a bad challenge, mind you. I actually really enjoyed it, since he still had a really high Wisdom, and he wasn't the smartest guy to begin with. It was an interesting challenge. I still recognized my friends, even if I couldn't remember their names. I still knew what danger was, and I still knew how to pray for my spells each day, even though the prayers were more abstract and empathic and less scriptural. But it was a challenge even at a 5. So what would a 3 look like?
Strength - You can't support your own weight and need to be carried. You can't wear armor. You can't lift a weapon. You can't do a sit-up. You need help getting dressed and going to the bathroom. An a successful Athletics check you could probably pull yourself up into a sitting position.
Dexterity - You have little to no motor control, and may be partially paralyzed. Your hand-eye coordination is that of a drunken sailor on a ship in a storm with a concussion and two eye patches.
Constitution - You are Mr. Glass. Simple movements can break your bones. You have little to no immune system, so the common cold will probably kill you before you reach level 2.
Intelligence - You act only on instinct. You can't read, write, or speak. Your only communication is grunts and attacks. House cat, lion, jackal, octopus. Apes and dolphins are both at a 6. You cannot cast spells.
Wisdom - You are carelessly (or negligently) unaware of the most obvious things. You believe whatever you're told with little or no questioning. You cannot plan ahead. You heedlessly stumble into danger. On a good day you have object permanence. The "thumb trick" blows your mind!
Charisma - You barely recognize that other people are people like you. You barely have the force of will necessary to feed yourself. You cannot carry on a conversation. And you may be either hideously deformed, smell like an open sewer, and/or are so reticent to interact that you never leave your hovel.
It's not that I wouldn't trust someone to try to play a 3. It's just that the entire game would become the 3. The entire storyline and plot would have to be tailored to accommodate the 3. It may be an interesting challenge for one player who really wants to test the limits of their roleplaying capabilities, but it would be a serious burden on the rest of the group. When one character has a 3, every character in that group has to share in that 3.
If a player at my table were rolling stats, I would allow them to throw it all out and start over if they get anything below a 6, or if all six ability scores add up to less than 65. The standard array gives you a 72. That's why I much prefer to have everyone in the group use the point buy system. Just my 2 c.p.
I rarely fine tune the RP that precisely. If someone wanted to play with a 3, I’d just call that “comic relief” level, rather than “Helen Keller” level. I’d expect someone to play a 3 the way they’d play a 6 or a 7.
I personally will not play a character with a score below 10. As a DM, I set the number down as low as an 8, and only one of their scores can be that low. This allows for them to be flawed, but not tragically so. I can't imagine a Hero starting out lower than that. In a heavy RP game, something I have never run, the absolute minimum a character can have is a 3, and if they wish to take that, I'd let them take a 3 in as many scores as they like, but I will not allow them to raise them in any way other than ASI's or Feats that gives some. Magic of any kind would be spoiling their character concept, and in an RP heavy game, I don't think that's something a DM should do.
So let’s assume you were rolling for stats. How bad would you generally let a player roll on a stat before they could reroll that stat? Like would you allow a player to have a 3?
Well, I don't roll for stats, but how good your high stats are matters a lot more than how bad your bad stats are, so merely having a 3 is hardly disqualifying.
Let me rephrase. Do you trust your players to be able to RP a character with a 3 in one of their stats? Or another way to put it. What does a character with a 3 in one of its stats, look like to you?
If I couldn’t trust them I wouldn’t play with them. As to what that stat “looks like to me,” that’s irrelevant since I’m not the one playing that PC. As long as however they play it is believable, that’s all that matters as far as I’m concerned.
I think there's a lot of false correlation assumed by DMs and Players re: low level stats on a PC vs that found on an animal. A character with a sub 5 iNT still starts the game with the default languages etc. so attempts to correlate to beasts should be clued as off base right there.
I think the PHB doesn't provide enough in interpreting ability stats. Coincidentally I've been reading the rules for Delta Green, whose rules backbone also uses the six score on a 3-18 system (with options to roll 4d6 drop roll six times as well as some alt system for point buy and standard arrays). Since the characters most common professions and federal agents and/or military special operations types, you sort of need to have above average if not outstanding stats (but put a pin in that for s sec). What I really like about Delta Green's system is that stats outside the 9-12 range are required to be "noted" meaning there should be some notation to the how and why's the character has an outlier score. The actual rule is "spare a word or two to describe stats outside the average. These help give your character personality."
Of course in Delta Green, you're never going to really win no matter how much advantage you bake into character creation. In D&D if a rolled character has two or more stats below 8 I'll allow a reroll or offer a point buy or array instead. But I don't mandate it. If they keep the "bad" scores, I'll probably provide modest rewards to acknowledge good play as an "underdog", like a character with a STR of six often invoking their rheumatism as reason they're having difficulty getting a door open, etc. I mean playing a character who is excellent at everything they need to be good at ... is just one way of playing.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I personally will not play a character with a score below 10. As a DM, I set the number down as low as an 8, and only one of their scores can be that low. This allows for them to be flawed, but not tragically so. I can't imagine a Hero starting out lower than that. In a heavy RP game, something I have never run, the absolute minimum a character can have is a 3, and if they wish to take that, I'd let them take a 3 in as many scores as they like, but I will not allow them to raise them in any way other than ASI's or Feats that gives some. Magic of any kind would be spoiling their character concept, and in an RP heavy game, I don't think that's something a DM should do.
Each to there own but you wouldn’t work on my table, I use variant fixed array, 17 is the highest, 8 the lowest spread 17, 15, 13, 12, 10, 8
If my players roll dice that’s fine but if they roll 6 rolls over 10 I tell them up front one score will be replaced with an 8 and in return if they don’t roll over a 16 there highest score becomes 17.
There are a lot of tables that I would not be welcome at. I really don't understand why my saying I don't want a score below ten draws so much resentment. If I wish, I can put something on my character sheet under "Flaws" and roleplay it. I shouldn't have to suffer a mechanical penalty that I do not like and I don't understand why people insist on that to the degree that I'm not welcome in their games.
There are a lot of tables that I would not be welcome at. I really don't understand why my saying I don't want a score below ten draws so much resentment.
On point build that comes more in the category of "you sure you want to do that?"
I use, and recommend, Point Buy for almost all my characters, unless the DM decides I should have higher scores, and that's usually so I have just as good a scores as everyone else.
In my games, I tell people in general that they may have no more than one 8. There's a technical limitation to going below that, but I am willing to let people figure out their scores somehow and manually enter them, so long as everyone ends up with scores that they like, I'm fine. I do insist that they cannot be higher in everything than anyone else at the table. I do allow them to be lower, but only in one area. It's the same problem I have myself with the scores below 10. I can't imagine a hero with multiple low scores. Perhaps this is wrong, but it's only in my games, and I am free to do as I like. I don't insist that anyone do as I do, but people do seem to insist that I do as they do.
They even tell me I can't play in their games because of it.
I really don't understand why my saying I don't want a score below ten draws so much resentment.
Pretty sure it's not resentment.
It's not that people love low ability scores; it's that your hard-line stance about negative modifiers suggests that you're a certain kind of player who would not be a good fit in some campaigns.
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
There are a lot of tables that I would not be welcome at. I really don't understand why my saying I don't want a score below ten draws so much resentment. If I wish, I can put something on my character sheet under "Flaws" and roleplay it. I shouldn't have to suffer a mechanical penalty that I do not like and I don't understand why people insist on that to the degree that I'm not welcome in their games.
No resentment I won’t say your doing your fun wrong, was simply saying I force every character to have a low stat and it is made clear at my table you would be aware before session 0 and would be free to look for another campaign if you didn’t like it.
So let’s assume you were rolling for stats. How bad would you generally let a player roll on a stat before they could reroll that stat? Like would you allow a player to have a 3?
Lets assume it’s a RP medium or RP heavy game (because RP light or RP none negates most of this issue).
To be honest, I let them roll and tell them that if they don’t like they can use Standard Array. It’s up to them to play the character, not me. It isn’t up to me to “let” them do anything like that. If they rolled absolute hot garbage for stats I’d likely allow a reroll instead of strait defaulting to standard array.
But honestly, I don’t sweat it. If someone ends up needing a boost somewhere, that’s what magic items or boons are for. The DM that says “you’re not allowed to play that crappy character” is a crappy DM. The DM that just puts things in the campaign that will allow for everyone to become epic and make their players happy is at the very least a less crappy DM.
All right. I'll take everyone's advice. I'll use my system, and people who don't like it can walk. I'll avoid any game that won't let me play a character I like, I guess there are a lot of them that won't.
Someone else put it well. A character with TRASH stats generally forces the game to be played/balanced around them instead of around the party as a whole.
But a lot of my issue comes down to the RP. I'm not going to let the player who is functionally brain dead, be played like your standard 9-11 INT character who at least understands what is happening around them. I'm also not super into rewarding my players with magic items (real or homebrew) to compensate for them being flaming dog shit terrible at something. But again it comes down to how well it's roleplayed. Like if you get a player who CAN roleplay the character who's very existence is offensive to man, woman, child, inanimate objects then sure i'd allow that. But if you choose to keep a 3-5 and play your character like they are the passable or even good at that skill, then i'm going to come down like an cartoon anvil.
This thread has made me think how interesting it would be to have a character with a 3 int put on a headband of intellect, and then take it off again. Toggling back and forth because of the attunement cap. I wonder if it would stay fun, or only be fun for a session or two.
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So let’s assume you were rolling for stats. How bad would you generally let a player roll on a stat before they could reroll that stat? Like would you allow a player to have a 3?
Lets assume it’s a RP medium or RP heavy game (because RP light or RP none negates most of this issue).
The word "allow" is doing some lifting here. I'd allow a player to have a three, but I wouldn't require them to.
Let me rephrase. Do you trust your players to be able to RP a character with a 3 in one of their stats? Or another way to put it. What does a character with a 3 in one of its stats, look like to you?
I don't imagine you'd have to "allow" a player to have a 3 in anything because I can't imagine a player actually wanting to play a character that has a 3 in anything. I mean, my cleric's Intelligence got knocked down to 5 a while back (I got better), but for a few months it was a real challenge to RP that. Not a bad challenge, mind you. I actually really enjoyed it, since he still had a really high Wisdom, and he wasn't the smartest guy to begin with. It was an interesting challenge. I still recognized my friends, even if I couldn't remember their names. I still knew what danger was, and I still knew how to pray for my spells each day, even though the prayers were more abstract and empathic and less scriptural. But it was a challenge even at a 5. So what would a 3 look like?
Strength - You can't support your own weight and need to be carried. You can't wear armor. You can't lift a weapon. You can't do a sit-up. You need help getting dressed and going to the bathroom. An a successful Athletics check you could probably pull yourself up into a sitting position.
Dexterity - You have little to no motor control, and may be partially paralyzed. Your hand-eye coordination is that of a drunken sailor on a ship in a storm with a concussion and two eye patches.
Constitution - You are Mr. Glass. Simple movements can break your bones. You have little to no immune system, so the common cold will probably kill you before you reach level 2.
Intelligence - You act only on instinct. You can't read, write, or speak. Your only communication is grunts and attacks. House cat, lion, jackal, octopus. Apes and dolphins are both at a 6. You cannot cast spells.
Wisdom - You are carelessly (or negligently) unaware of the most obvious things. You believe whatever you're told with little or no questioning. You cannot plan ahead. You heedlessly stumble into danger. On a good day you have object permanence. The "thumb trick" blows your mind!
Charisma - You barely recognize that other people are people like you. You barely have the force of will necessary to feed yourself. You cannot carry on a conversation. And you may be either hideously deformed, smell like an open sewer, and/or are so reticent to interact that you never leave your hovel.
It's not that I wouldn't trust someone to try to play a 3. It's just that the entire game would become the 3. The entire storyline and plot would have to be tailored to accommodate the 3. It may be an interesting challenge for one player who really wants to test the limits of their roleplaying capabilities, but it would be a serious burden on the rest of the group. When one character has a 3, every character in that group has to share in that 3.
If a player at my table were rolling stats, I would allow them to throw it all out and start over if they get anything below a 6, or if all six ability scores add up to less than 65. The standard array gives you a 72. That's why I much prefer to have everyone in the group use the point buy system. Just my 2 c.p.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Okay, I get what you’re saying.
I rarely fine tune the RP that precisely. If someone wanted to play with a 3, I’d just call that “comic relief” level, rather than “Helen Keller” level. I’d expect someone to play a 3 the way they’d play a 6 or a 7.
Does that make sense?
I personally will not play a character with a score below 10. As a DM, I set the number down as low as an 8, and only one of their scores can be that low. This allows for them to be flawed, but not tragically so. I can't imagine a Hero starting out lower than that. In a heavy RP game, something I have never run, the absolute minimum a character can have is a 3, and if they wish to take that, I'd let them take a 3 in as many scores as they like, but I will not allow them to raise them in any way other than ASI's or Feats that gives some. Magic of any kind would be spoiling their character concept, and in an RP heavy game, I don't think that's something a DM should do.
<Insert clever signature here>
Well, I don't roll for stats, but how good your high stats are matters a lot more than how bad your bad stats are, so merely having a 3 is hardly disqualifying.
If I couldn’t trust them I wouldn’t play with them. As to what that stat “looks like to me,” that’s irrelevant since I’m not the one playing that PC. As long as however they play it is believable, that’s all that matters as far as I’m concerned.
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I love playing a PC with a 3-7 in one stat. Makes things fun lots of times.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I think there's a lot of false correlation assumed by DMs and Players re: low level stats on a PC vs that found on an animal. A character with a sub 5 iNT still starts the game with the default languages etc. so attempts to correlate to beasts should be clued as off base right there.
I think the PHB doesn't provide enough in interpreting ability stats. Coincidentally I've been reading the rules for Delta Green, whose rules backbone also uses the six score on a 3-18 system (with options to roll 4d6 drop roll six times as well as some alt system for point buy and standard arrays). Since the characters most common professions and federal agents and/or military special operations types, you sort of need to have above average if not outstanding stats (but put a pin in that for s sec). What I really like about Delta Green's system is that stats outside the 9-12 range are required to be "noted" meaning there should be some notation to the how and why's the character has an outlier score. The actual rule is "spare a word or two to describe stats outside the average. These help give your character personality."
Of course in Delta Green, you're never going to really win no matter how much advantage you bake into character creation. In D&D if a rolled character has two or more stats below 8 I'll allow a reroll or offer a point buy or array instead. But I don't mandate it. If they keep the "bad" scores, I'll probably provide modest rewards to acknowledge good play as an "underdog", like a character with a STR of six often invoking their rheumatism as reason they're having difficulty getting a door open, etc. I mean playing a character who is excellent at everything they need to be good at ... is just one way of playing.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Each to there own but you wouldn’t work on my table, I use variant fixed array, 17 is the highest, 8 the lowest spread 17, 15, 13, 12, 10, 8
If my players roll dice that’s fine but if they roll 6 rolls over 10 I tell them up front one score will be replaced with an 8 and in return if they don’t roll over a 16 there highest score becomes 17.
There are a lot of tables that I would not be welcome at. I really don't understand why my saying I don't want a score below ten draws so much resentment. If I wish, I can put something on my character sheet under "Flaws" and roleplay it. I shouldn't have to suffer a mechanical penalty that I do not like and I don't understand why people insist on that to the degree that I'm not welcome in their games.
<Insert clever signature here>
On point build that comes more in the category of "you sure you want to do that?"
I use, and recommend, Point Buy for almost all my characters, unless the DM decides I should have higher scores, and that's usually so I have just as good a scores as everyone else.
In my games, I tell people in general that they may have no more than one 8. There's a technical limitation to going below that, but I am willing to let people figure out their scores somehow and manually enter them, so long as everyone ends up with scores that they like, I'm fine. I do insist that they cannot be higher in everything than anyone else at the table. I do allow them to be lower, but only in one area. It's the same problem I have myself with the scores below 10. I can't imagine a hero with multiple low scores. Perhaps this is wrong, but it's only in my games, and I am free to do as I like. I don't insist that anyone do as I do, but people do seem to insist that I do as they do.
They even tell me I can't play in their games because of it.
<Insert clever signature here>
Pretty sure it's not resentment.
It's not that people love low ability scores; it's that your hard-line stance about negative modifiers suggests that you're a certain kind of player who would not be a good fit in some campaigns.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
No resentment I won’t say your doing your fun wrong, was simply saying I force every character to have a low stat and it is made clear at my table you would be aware before session 0 and would be free to look for another campaign if you didn’t like it.
To be honest, I let them roll and tell them that if they don’t like they can use Standard Array. It’s up to them to play the character, not me. It isn’t up to me to “let” them do anything like that. If they rolled absolute hot garbage for stats I’d likely allow a reroll instead of strait defaulting to standard array.
But honestly, I don’t sweat it. If someone ends up needing a boost somewhere, that’s what magic items or boons are for. The DM that says “you’re not allowed to play that crappy character” is a crappy DM. The DM that just puts things in the campaign that will allow for everyone to become epic and make their players happy is at the very least a less crappy DM.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
All right. I'll take everyone's advice. I'll use my system, and people who don't like it can walk. I'll avoid any game that won't let me play a character I like, I guess there are a lot of them that won't.
<Insert clever signature here>
Someone else put it well. A character with TRASH stats generally forces the game to be played/balanced around them instead of around the party as a whole.
But a lot of my issue comes down to the RP. I'm not going to let the player who is functionally brain dead, be played like your standard 9-11 INT character who at least understands what is happening around them. I'm also not super into rewarding my players with magic items (real or homebrew) to compensate for them being flaming dog shit terrible at something. But again it comes down to how well it's roleplayed. Like if you get a player who CAN roleplay the character who's very existence is offensive to man, woman, child, inanimate objects then sure i'd allow that. But if you choose to keep a 3-5 and play your character like they are the passable or even good at that skill, then i'm going to come down like an cartoon anvil.
This thread has made me think how interesting it would be to have a character with a 3 int put on a headband of intellect, and then take it off again. Toggling back and forth because of the attunement cap. I wonder if it would stay fun, or only be fun for a session or two.