No, because on that pit the lid closes over you and they leave you there until you starve to death, or until someone else comes and sets off the pit trap to open the lid. A PC with a party to come and rescue them may survive, a PC on their own is dead.

I could have had straight 18s, a +5 vorpal sword and +5 plate mail - somehow as a 1st level fighter - and I would still ultimately have been killed by a 20 foot pit with a lid on it.

The fault lies with me. I had subdued a kobold and used him as a negotiator, sending him in, I wanted to set the kobolds and the ogre to fight each-other so I could sweep in and steal the treasure of at least one of them. I asked for safe passage for parley.

"Kobold no stabby," they said. I went in.

And they kept their word, they didn't stab me. They just let me walk into the pit. They kept the letter, not the spirit of their promise. They are after all lawful evil.

No amount of stats and bling can save a player from their own dumb play. And a player with ordinary stats and no bling will do well if they have smart play. Players want good stats and bling because they think it will save them from their dumb play, but it won't.

I guess if the rest of your party wanders away leaving you to starve to death.

Quote from: mightybrain on July 13, 2021, 10:36:02 AM

Quote from: Omega on July 12, 2021, 10:06:51 PMum... No such restriction in BX.

Page B9. Elves, paragraph 3 in my copy.

um... That is is not a restriction. Its a listing of the prime requisite thresholds to get a bonus to EXP.

Try again please.

Quote from: Pat on July 12, 2021, 10:17:21 PM
Not that oddball. It's a very normal set of stats, and humans are good at recognizing patterns, so it's likely that a high proportion of normal rolls will seem ordered in some way. After all, one of the most common arrays is 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8.

That's very different from the the four 18s and two 17s, which is so unlikely we can safely dismiss it.

Except that is not the point. The point is that with unusual regularity I get weird roll patterns like that.
16, 14, 16, 14, 16, 14 and its reverse have popped up more than once for some reason.

Quote from: Omega on July 16, 2021, 11:50:06 PM

Quote from: Pat on July 12, 2021, 10:17:21 PM
Not that oddball. It's a very normal set of stats, and humans are good at recognizing patterns, so it's likely that a high proportion of normal rolls will seem ordered in some way. After all, one of the most common arrays is 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8.

That's very different from the the four 18s and two 17s, which is so unlikely we can safely dismiss it.

Except that is not the point. The point is that with unusual regularity I get weird roll patterns like that.
16, 14, 16, 14, 16, 14 and its reverse have popped up more than once for some reason.

That's exactly the point. Humans are amazing at noticing patterns, and because it's better to think you see a tiger when one isn't there and run away needlessly, than it is to not see a tiger that's actually there and get eaten, our pattern recognition is optimized to over match, and return false positives. Conversely, humans tend to be terrible at estimating low probability events. Unless you run an extensive test showing that yes, patterns crop up more often when you're rolling them, the overwhelmingly most probable explanation is your brain is just fixating on a selective and unrepresentative subset, and seeing something that doesn't actually exist. And by overwhelmingly, I mean overwhelmingly. Our Bayesian prior should be so close to zero as to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes.

Quote from: Omega on July 16, 2021, 11:42:58 PMum... That is is not a restriction. Its a listing of the prime requisite thresholds to get a bonus to EXP.

Try again please.

The notes about prime requisite thresholds are in paragraph 2 in my copy. I'm looking at the Moldvay 1981 first printing. Paragraph 3 says:

Quote from: B9
RESTRICTIONS: Elves use six-sided dice (d6) to determine their hit points. They may advance to a maximum of 10th level of experience. Elves have the advantages of both fighters and magicusers. They may use shields and can wear any type of armor, and may fight with any kind of weapon. They can also cast spells like a magic-user, and use the same spell list. A character must have an intelligence of 9 or greater to be an elf.

Anyone used anydice to look at the results?

3d6 gives you average 10.5, standard deviation 2.96
4d6 drop lowest gives you average 12.24, standard deviation 2.85, which is about where the newer 15/14/13/12/10/8 pattern leaves you (those numbers sum to 72).

anydice.com

Quote from: Null42 on July 24, 2021, 07:46:29 PM
Anyone used anydice to look at the results?

3d6 gives you average 10.5, standard deviation 2.96
4d6 drop lowest gives you average 12.24, standard deviation 2.85, which is about where the newer 15/14/13/12/10/8 pattern leaves you (those numbers sum to 72).

anydice.com

If you input this function into anydice...

ABILITIES: 6 d [highest 3 of 4d6]
loop P over {1..6} {
output P @ ABILITIES named "Ability [P]"
}

... it will give you the average results of the highest of the attribute rolls, then the next highest all the way down to the sixth highest and the results are damnably close to the default array in 3e-5e.

You can also switch out the brackets for other dice types [ex. 3d6, 2d10, highest 3 of 6d6, etc.] and the first 6 and the one in the {1...6} for the number of attributes in a different system to get the same sort of arrays for them.

A 74 point array would be closer to 4d6 drop the lowest, with 16 being your highest and 9 being your lowest. Something like: 16/14/13/12/10/9.

For 3d6 it's closer to a 63 point array with 14 being your highest and 7 being your lowest: 14/12/11/10/9/7.

The standard 15/14/13/12/10/8 stat array falls between. It is closer to 4d6 drop the lowest, but only in the middling numbers.

This Kotdt reminds me of this thread

Quote from: Shasarak on July 25, 2021, 04:57:13 PM
This Kotdt reminds me of this thread

Lol. I recently experienced the polar opposite. My player with an annoying gnome character ripped up his stats and re-rolled because they were "too low" for him to be properly annoying.