I did not previously know that those were noises you could make with a human throat.

Today has been educational on that front.

Maybe she's speaking in tongues. 

If she were speaking in tongues, we'd know what she was saying!

Don't samsaran get comprehend languages as a racial spell-like ability?

Yeah, if they have eleven charisma. What do I look like to you, a sorcerer? 

Point-buys are silly.

In your mystic past life, weren't you a summoner? 

But it's not like summoners need enough charisma to cast spells.

It's bad enough that everyone's rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest and rearranging their stats.

It fucks with verisimilitude.

Barry ran a game where he rolled stats for all the monsters.

I've heard the story.

You make it sound like I'm a freak alien.

Rolled their hitdice for hitpoints as well.

Because that's how it's supposed to be done.

Every creature in the bestiary tells you how many hitdice of what size to roll, and how much to add to the total, because the examples in the Bestiary are examples.

Conveniences.

But this game exists because we hated 4th edition. If you want to play without training wheels, no one's going to take your books away.

And I'm telling you it feels more authentic than you can possibly imagine.

It messes with the CR math.

A) the CR math is already borked, and B) it doesn't change a thing on average.

You can't average things like that! If your APL-minus-two ogre minion rolls 3s in all its stats, it doesn't really matter; it was going to be an easy fight and it was. But if it rolls all 18s, you've basically Advanced it - twice! On paper that's as bad as adding an entire extra ogre, you've literally doubled the difficulty of the encounter, and in practice it could be even worse!

And then when those lucky rolls land on something that was meant to be a hellish fight, like that goddamn planetar lich -

You weren't supposed to fight the planetar lich - 

and it's the recipe for a TPK!

Which I would have hoped was obvious from "Planetar." and "Lich."

And "Planetar Lich."

I killed that stupid zombie angel.

Well, Arthur, there's actually this funny thing about liches that you might not have heard...

How do you know what an ogre's base Strength is, to know whether 18 would be an improvement? Or, uh, I guess 18 is always an improvement, but, like, how do you know that about 16?

Creatures in the Bestiary use an ability score array of three 10s and three 11s (because 3d6 averages 10.5).

Hence why when you add class levels to a monster the Bestiary says to modify their stats with +4/+4/+2/+2/+0/-2. It moves them to the 15 point-buy array (15 14 13 12 10 8) that's usually used for NPCs with PC class levels.

Racial bonuses in Pathfinder are always even numbers, so you know that if the total is an odd number it was one of the three elevens, and if it was an even it was one of three tens.

The example ogre in the Bestiary has 21 Strength, which is an odd number, and 8 Dex, which is even. So we know that ogres have a racial modifier of +10 Strength and -2 Dexterity.

Then you replace those 10s and 11s with the results of 3d6.