Stats

It does make a sizable difference.

For me, it comes down to the question: Am I willing to sacrifice long term stats for a quicker rise to coded power. If you're the kind of person to have ten characters a year, I could understand making that sacrifice. If you can keep a PC alive for six months or more, wisdom becomes irrelevant as far as the skill grind goes.

If you're having trouble getting over a hump with average wisdom, you can always pick up a spice addiction.

he didnt typo that either

Mumble sounds like serious business.

I'm just going to be the devil's advocate for "shit stats," and the GDB naysayers.

The reason my best characters had always been characters with shit stats is because once I got over the internalized butthurt of typing in that first 'score' command and seeing 'average, good, poor, average', I stopped having irrational expectations for that character. I stopped thinking, "I'm going to be the biggest, baddest MOFO in all the land and PK all those other little shits." I stopped getting bent out of shape over the hours and hours of my real life that I was prepared to piss away twinking by myself on an online video game, and most importantly, I stopped hyperventilating over losing my precious, precious character and started focusing on what I was going to do with this piece of crap I've been stuck with.

Yes, I suppose I could 'accidentally' walk off the shield wall, or bravely take on a silt horror while 'foraging'. But then I would have to sit there and write a whole new stupid description, with this whole new background, and wait with my thumb up my ass for it to get approved. I ain't got time for that.

Now, I could just *play*. If I died or made some templar angry, so what? I didn't have to miss out on plots because I needed to spend the day fisting animals. I was the throw-away character, and I could piss off anyone I wanted, kiss enemy templar butt, or fill in the role of the Adoring Fan -- CONSISTENTLY and BELIEVABLY. I admit that there was this incredible freedom is getting to tell a story and just play this side character without worrying about keeping to a strict itinerary of OOC training goals.

I guess you could say that I'm advocating people try to let those shit-stat characters go out with appropriately colorful bang, than just a quiet suicide over the shield wall.

I know.  I've actually been there, too, especially back in the day.  I don't know what changed in my life that caused my view point to shift, but it did. 

What you hit on was the resentment.  If you look at the character like something was taken away from you, and you just absolutely can't figure out how to have fun with it, then you're always going to hate it, and I get that.  But at the same time, the kind of stats that are being talked about in this thread are not *that* common.  I've seen good stats pop up at around the rate of 1-in-10 rolls.  GREAT stats seem to be a 1-in-40 thing.  At some point, I realized this, and recognized that I was spending all of my time working on a character concept (2 to 6 hours), submitting it (16-36 hour wait), realizing it sucked and then trying to suicide it (1 to 3 hours to do it 'proper'), and rinse-repeating.  You could literally go an entire real-life week or more before actually just playing the game you are so desperately trying to roll a character for, and then you still had to avoid all of the normal Zalanthan risks (PK, plot-deaths, random silt horror).  To me, that borders unhealthy.

People who tend to have long-lived characters might never see a really good roll.

Well. If you're playing a gicker, mindbender, sorc, pickpocket/burglar, crafter/merchant, f-me, most special leadership roles, a noble, or a templar...then stats don't really matter. Wisdom does for a gicker, but that's it.

Through some strange quirk of fate, the above describes a large majority of the active GDBers in the 'just be yourself man' crowd.

If you're playing a character that actually has to make a living as a merc/assassin or a grebber, and whose utility to other players more or less directly correlates to their ability at fighting and surviving, then you'll need at least 3 out of 4 stats to be well rolled, or else the juice of getting decently skilled just isn't worth the squeeze.