Godbound wrote:Record your hero's attribute modifiers. Usually, you don't apply your whole score to a relevant die roll. Instead, you just apply a bonus or penalty. If your attribute score is 3, your modifier for the attribute is -3. For scores of 4–5, its -2, for 6–8 it's -1, for 9–12 it's +0, for 13–15 it's +1, for 16–17 it's +2, and for a mighty score of 18, it's +3.
That's a thing I can't understand.
I mean, OK, the designer want that bonus obey to a bell curve : most people have +0, many people have +1, and only 0.5% of the people have +4. No problem with that.
The issue is : rolling 3d6
already gives a bell curve. If you want to create another random variable verifying a bell curve using the result of 3d6, this new variable can simply be a
linear function of your 3d6. If you want the max result to be more exceptional, you simply use 4d6, or 3d10, or whatever. Anything else is needlessly complicated and thus, stupid: in order to make your system more transparent, it should be the simplest possible, and the simplest way to create
any probability distribution is to let the dice create the curve you want, and then use a linear function to re-scale (... or the other way around: flat RNG and arbitrary function to get the shape you want).
Therefore, why do game designers still use dice to generate some random variable, and then apply an arbitrary non-linear function to generate the actual useful result ? Because Gygax did that, so it must be good ? Are they stupid or something ? Did their brain cease to function in 1975, so they can't use any mechanic that wasn't created at that time ?