While these days I tend to play games where PCs are built from beginning to end, I sometimes wax nostalgic for the old days when I never knew what I was going to play. Grognards like me (okay, I’m more of a neo-grognard) can recall our earliest days of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons, when we used to roll 3d6 for each of the six ability scores in order.
Today most gamers I know tend to look back on that model as harsh and ruthless; certainly many nigh-unplayable PCs were generated that way. Yet there was something awesome about getting one or two high scores (16+), even if they didn’t fall where you wanted them to. And, just as often, you’d roll up a fairly decent PC that was stuck with a low score in one or two abilities.
It didn’t take long for my groups to use the various alternate methods of rolling up PCs to increase the chance of high scores while minimizing the pain of low ones. Rolling 4d6 six times, dropping the low die for each, and arranging in any order you like was a particularly common one at my table. Lately, the Pathfinder group in my gaming circle has taken to assigning scores from a spread determined by the GM. In addition to increasing the chances of a more robust PC, these alternate methods have something else in common: they enable you to shape the character rather than let the dice do it for you.
Upon reflection, I wonder if we haven’t lost something along the way. Reflecting on what some have termed “the iron man method,” I’ve come up with some advantages to using it.
It keeps the power level where it’s supposed to be. It may surprise some of you young whippersnappers to know that the earliest versions of Dungeons & Dragons offered no bonuses to hit or damage in melee, no matter how high your Strength score. AD&D allowed some variance, but usually you had to roll pretty high (15+) or low (7-) before you’d see a +1 or -1. Most characters were average, and that was the power level that published materials assumed.
It makes entry-level play easy. Even seasoned gamers sometimes balk at having to assign points to an unfamiliar character sheet; imagine how a newbie must feel when tasked to assign numbers to six ability scores. Yet everyone can understand “roll to see how strong/intelligent/agile your character is.”
It creates a background. One of the things I find myself doing subconsciously when rolling randomly straight through is creating my character’s life story around the rolls. “Wow, low strength? Obviously this guy wasn’t eager to sign on for guard duty. He has a high charisma, though; he’s probably used to talking his way out of trouble.” I didn’t need separate advantages or disadvantages to do that for me.
It encourages you to try new things. If you’re building a PC you may always tend towards the elven swashbuckler, but the dice may encourage you to try a dwarven priest instead. Sometimes ideas we’d never consider pop up as the result of a die roll. That’s how I created my first cleric!
Getting a high score is something special. If you max out on two ability scores for a character, you’re more invested in playing her and keeping her alive if you can’t just do the same for the next one. Additionally, there may be opportunities that only come along when the dice go your way. Sticking with AD&D, being able to play a monk or paladin necessitated a good set of rolls and insinuated that these classes were rare in the campaign world.
It forces creativity. Sure, your group intended to include the four food groups, but now you’re stuck with three warriors and a mage with no healers or experts. You’ve no choice but to compensate by thinking creatively. Three warriors are rarely going to wade into tough conflicts without enough healing powers to go around.
So what say you? Do you play in a group that uses random generation and, if so, do you use the iron man method? Would you consider it? Obviously, there are drawbacks to the iron man method; is there something in particular that keeps you from using it? As a GM, would you like to see more random generation in your games or do you find it to be too much of a headache?
By the time I started playing, it was very rare to see a group that played them as they fell and didn’t at least allow arranging them in the player’s chosen order. I do remember people eager to play classes that required high rolls in many things (monks, rangers, etc.) and being frustrated that they couldn’t pull it off with their rolls.
One of the problems I always had with rolling for stats in most D&D games was the disparity that could happen if one player got really lucky and another got really unlucky. It always seemed too unbalanced.
A bit of this idea is captured in the old Marvel SAGA supers game by TSR. Being card based, you really need to build a character to the hand you’re dealt for character creation. It’s very hard to go into it with a set concept since you’re unlikely to get the exact right card combo to pull it off (though you might be able to come up with something similar). The game also seems to be a little more forgiving in play, so a character with an unlucky draw at character creation may still be able to pull off amazing things in the game if they literally play their cards right.
Your point about the Monks & Rangers is well made. This probably more than anything else spurred the sea changes in the hobby that left us with what we have today.
I think it is interesting that D&D evolved in so many ways but kept the two most often cited reasons for not playing it: Alignments and Character Classes (as development tracks).
IN a couple of short months I’m going to be involved in the final play test campaign of a friend’s game that they’re soon going to try and get published. It has certain old school notions dotted around it, including rolling for stats. Their system uses d20s rather than d6s, but the principle they use can easily be used by any game.
Roll for stats, in order, but the amount of dice you roll differs depending on race. Average would be rolling 4d20 and taking the best three. Lower than average, you just roll three and get what you’re given, with stats that the race is generally above average in, roll an extra die, and just keep the three results you want.
This gives a lot of range, and still allows for exceptions to the norm in the way of surprisingly high stats when not expected, or low rolls that you can don nothing about.
It’s not my usual favourite method, as I like a good points build, but there is something nice about not knowing exactly what you’re going to get until the dice are cast.
Having missed most of the last 15 years of RPG development, I’m still very much and Old School type player. Luckily I have found a system that I like. Lamentations of the Flame Princess does the whole “rolling 3d6 for each ability in order” thing, but does allow you to ditch the character if the total of the modifiers is less than zero.
I like the creativity and role-playing it produces. One of my players created a specialist (thief) with average dexterity, but high strength – which proved useful on more than one occasion. He showed me that if you play it right you can use your choice of class to complement your rolls. Especially as multiple classes are not permitted.
So LotFP is the modern Traveller, the game where you can die during character generation?
8oD
It’s not that bad. It normally waits until your first adventure before killing you 😉
The first time I played, the entire party ended up jumping down a bottomless pit (the zombie hoard would have been better).
Isn’t this just the D&D 3E method? Where a character isn’t considered ‘viable’ unless they have a net ability score mod of +1? So you just discard the scores and roll over again if they’re terrible? (You’re not “killing the character in chargen” or anything, you’re just re-rolling stats.)
I also miss this part of RPGs. It’s definately an unforgiving setup, like playing on “hard mode” so it’s not enjoyable for everyone. I suspect we all played this way back in the day because it was all that was available or tradition, and that the current mix of games makes it clear that most people enjoy more control over creation than this.
We all played that way because the rulebooks said to and we had not yet evolved the habit of just turning off rules we didn’t like.
Which I think is a thing that has Gone Too Far but that is a subject for a different day.
My wife and I were just talking about this the other day, actually. We both like actually rolling for stats better than a point-based character creation. We’ve been playing a lot of Savage Worlds lately, and find that being able to have a balanced character is kind of bland. I try to simulate rolling for stats by choosing one stat that I put a lot of skill points into, but it’s not really the same.
If someone figures out a way of randomly assigning attribute die types in Savage Worlds, please let me know!
Original Deadlands – which is the basis for Savage Worlds – used a basic card deck for random stat generation. And it’s a bloody good game too.
Yes, the cookie-cutter stat-blocks is for Savage Worlds has made me think about rolling for Pathfinder.
we used “3d6, any order” for stats in my last 4e game, it seemed to work out okay after the usual single-digit grousing.
I tend to cringe when I see a game where you have to roll everything at character creation. I think it was Traveller where you could die during character creation. The Lifepath tables from Cyberpunk 2020 were fun, but now that I am older I prefer to choose things that have in-game effects, such as a bonus to a skill or attribute. Although entertaining, I struggled to like creating a character in Battlelords. I like to choose what I get, and I like point-buy games for that matter.
However, even though d20 games now often have a point-buy method, the method that I used for 2nd Edition AD&D had proven to be fun for our group:
Step 1: Roll 4d6, and re-roll 1’s and 2’s.
Step 2: Do this six times and record the result.
Step 3: If you want to, roll up a few different strings of results so that you can choose.
Step 4: Pick a string and arrange them in order of preference.
Step 5: Subtract 2 to add 1.
The above method made it so that attributes had a tendency to be above average. But you did not have a +1 stat point per 4 levels. Your stats were static. It also helped you to get an 18 in (at least) your preferred stat, and it could make multi-classed characters be good at two or more if your rolled well.
The only “real” issue was if someone cheated. Maybe my memories have become golden, bit I do not recall a specific game-balance issue from rolling good stats, and I do not recall it overshadowing the game. Stats are not the be all and end all of a d20 game, as most factors come from class and your level with it. Stats are more for opening doors of opportunity and being good at skills.
The skills part is the only real issue that I can see with d20 now. One guy, Mister Cool Stats, can have a +2 to +4 to every single skill. Admittedly that is cool, but not, in my opinion game breaking. Compare it to, say GURPS, and the effect is devastating.
My son has gotten me to start playing Pathfinder. I used to play 3rd edition, but we used a point buy. However, I am seriously considering to dust off the old method (above) and see if it remains a viable method.
dying in character creation!
yes, traveller remains infamous for that.
Gad, not this again.
Traveller remains famous for being a game in which the GMs were too thick to replace “dead” with “Dishonourable Discharge” and get on with the business at hand.
Is it any wonder games now have hundreds of pages of nanny-level rules?
I wonder if the Traveller character generation rules had said “cut own hand off with cleaver” we’d be hearing from a generation of one-handed SF RPGers?
Miller on a bike.
I’ve certainly had multiple characters with a single very low stat that turned out to have interesting personalities that were inspired by that low stat, even though I wasn’t rolling in order, so that’s good.
I only did rolling in order a very little bit (sometimes we do it for NPC’s though). It had a certain oracular quality to it that was nice, but it seemed to be very unbalancing when your best stat was a 12 and the guy next to you had a 16 and an 18(00) strength.
Here’s something I’ve been playing with to try to address that.
Roll 72d6. Count each result of ‘1’ as a point of STR, each “2” as a point of CON and so on. This gives you the surprise, but without the imbalance. If you like, you can sell 2 of one stat to get 1 of another, that’s probably harsh enough to avoid abuse, but the pure method is to just let them stand.
You can also use other numbers of dice than 72, depending on where you want your power level. If you want the average to be 11, use 66d6. If you want 14, use 84d6.
It’s a great way to make use of the cubes I have of small d6’s. After all, it’s kind of fun rolling that many dice, right?
That sounds like a real hassle, actually. We just rerolled entirely if the rolls just did not jive with what we wanted (and the DM was okay w/ it). Roll up 3 characters and it’s still a fewer dice than 72d6 and way less to deal with at once.
In 1st Edition AD&D there was a method in Unearthed Arcana where you roll X amount of dice if you wanted to be a given class. There was a dragon magazine article that had an additional variation based on your race.
I tried that a few times. The pro was that you can play the class (and race) that you want. (Races had attribute requirements as well). But I found that I preferred the quicker 4d6, reroll 1 and 2, method.
Wow. You rerolled 1s and 2s?! That seems like it’d produce really stout character’s every time.
The Complete Paladin’s Handbook (2E) had a simple chart to roll on to assign guaranteed Paladin stats. It was pretty handy for assuring that you got to play a Paladin if you wanted. I think that there may have been something like that in the Ranger’s Handbook too.
Yeah, we rerolled both 1s and 2s. If I were to try again (which I am seriously considering) is to either have no rerolls or reroll 1s.
I started out in 2E which included the 4d6 drop lowest, 3d6 assign as you like (IIRC), and many other options for stat generation baked-in. We used the 4d6 & Drop, assign-as-you-like method. It made for a nice spread of chaos vs control. (It also allowed for some really weaksauce characters[which were often even more fun to play].) However, anytime one of us was undecided, we’d roll ’em in order and see who came out of it. Some of our best characters emerged from that method. It’s amazing how creativity actually thrives inside boundaries.
Very occasionally we’d do the 3d6 in order thing, usually it represented very young characters (sometimes 0-level). We had few* objections, and everyone really seemed to enjoy that method.
*One player saw a much more interesting character if we simply reversed the order. I allowed her to do it, and the game was better for it. For creativity to really blossom, I suspect the boundaries really need to be a bit flexible.
For Grit, the game I’m designing, I chose to do a combination of rolling and assigning points. It ensures you should always be able to create your concept, but the random will still have some influence.
More about GRIT can be found here —> http://violentmediarpg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-whys-and-heretofores-of-grit.html .
On an odd note: My favorite RIFTS character of all time was rolled 3d6 in order. I didn’t have a clue where to begin assigning shit for that ClusterF*ck of a Char Gen System so rocking them in order really helped me to latch on to the gonzo insanity.
I think that from here on out should I run anything OSR or DnD; I’ll be insistent upon 3d6 in order. ‘Cause when you finally get that Paladin, it _really_ means something.
With a year of experience running original D&D (via the Swords & Wizardry Whitebox retro-clone), there is an important difference to those early games. The ability score range 7-14 (81% of expected results!) had no modifiers. The modifiers you got were only +/−1. And the modifiers you got were almost never applied!
On one hand, this meant ability scores weren’t a big deal which meant the game was reasonably balanced. On the other hand, it meant ability scores were nearly irrelevant; they were 12 deadweight numbers on the sheet. It certainly didn’t feel right that ability scores had so little impact on the gameplay. So the changes in D&D to make them more important, to include higher bonuses, more uses for those bonuses, and more gradations of bonuses was an unsurprising evolution. At that point the game became unbalanced, as a set of good ability scores was a significant advantage. And naturally players became frustrated at being the BMX Bandit to their friend’s Angel Summoner and sought changes to add (indeed, restore) balance.
Ability scores didn’t have a small impact on the gameplay, they had a small impact on the outcome of the mechanics of the rules.
As Walt so eloquently points out, the characteristic rolls were also available for imagineering the character’s traits, the roleplaying part of the game as opposed to the roll-playing part.
In other words, the gameplay.
The issue at hand is that people proved unequal to the task, requiring more and more instructions on how to do what we found instinctive when we were kids: play at being someone else.
And so we end up with Feats and Skills and Synergies and all the other baggage that is very helpful for one style of play but can be total death to any other. Ask me how I know this. 8o)
I think it’s ironic that a niche in the gaming hobby which is loaded to the gunwales with people who cannot summon the wherewithal to read a couple of pages of rules got larded with rules to accommodate those same people. We all have people who cannot understand cleave or AOOs and they take less than one column to write up in the player manual.
Have you considered asking those people to get off your lawn?
Haha. Now give me a different reason why you can always get a chorus of people who want to play an RPG but getting someone else to run it is an all-but impossible task.
“Me run it? But I don’t know the rules well enough!”
It should come on a T-Shirt.
I’m using point buy system simply because I’m not with my players when they create their characters.
Now I’m reminded of something I came up with for people complaining about rules they think shouldn’t apply to them, just because they can be trusted not to abuse it: “The rule isn’t there because we can’t trust you; it’s there because we can’t trust everyone.”
You can’t trust your players not to cheat? Eurgh!
Why not use a variation of The Birthday Cake Gambit?
Everyone builds a character then, at game start, hands it to the person on their left, seating randomized by die roll.
Just the anguished cries of “Wait, WHAT?” would make it worth while.
Hey, Walt. Interesting article.
When I run a D20 game (which is less often now I stopped doing ‘Conan’) I used to offer three different rolling conventions which individual players could use or not use, but were honour bound to follow to the letter:
4D6, drop lowest, allocate at will.
3D6, Reroll FIRST one on each die, allocate at will.
D6, D4, +8 (Steve’s Heroic Scheme). No rerolls. Allocate at will.
That last one was arrived at for Conan games when I sat back and thought “What do people who play Conan usually want, and what sort of people adventure in the Conan books?” and the answer was obvious: Heroic play and Heroic characters. The Steve Heroic system guarantees that no player character will ever suffer a less than 0 modifier on any characteristic (at game commencement). The average score will be between 13 and 15. Unlucky players will get 10s, lucky ones 17s and 18s. It was very popular once I had answered a third question; “Do I care what characters people play?” with the answer : “In general, I couldn’t care less”.
I even do the 2D6 plus 6 thing across the board for newbie Call of Cthulhu players since no-one will automatically see the attraction of going up against an unbeatable Thing That Should Not Be with an uneducated, unastute, weakling dimwit. Once they’ve played a bit they often welcome the challenge of a character with 3 Strength or 5 Dexterity.
I’m not a fan of points builds unless we are talking Savage Worlds (where the character generation process is so simple it almost runs itself).
It isn’t helpful to bring AD&D/3.5/Pathfinder sensibilities to the table when we have this sort of discussion about Old School RPGs because your game of choice was developed from those old school ideas. The parent stock must be evaluated on its own merits – what did it offer, not what did it did better than Potholes and Pixies 3.5 Designer Edition because you won’t be able to take the discussion anywhere useful. It would be like trying to compare The Wright Flyer with Concord.
The main problem with random stats was that they produced random game balance. You could get seriously nerfed before you even started the campaign (as written, more than 1/3 of fighters would start with 4 or fewer hit points). A more procedural method based on balanced tables (results different but equal), and possibly allowing you to choose (or roll for) your class first, would be less wonky. Less about gambling and more about resolving writer’s block – sort of “How to Host a Dungeon”, but for characters.
I agree that the random stats mechanics makes the initial buy in on character creation easier for the new gamer, but I found it quickly got old for a lot of the gamers I played with. It’s useful when you play with kids and rules lawyers who always want the baddest thing on the block, but that wasn’t my original gaming groups scene. I’ve been lucky enough to have gamers across the past decades that were more about the characters and story than who was the suoer-badass. (When these players showed up in a group, I nearly always crafted adventures to play to the one stat they shorted…)
Personally, I always hated rolling stats — especially in the “old days” of AD&D — and quickly moved to point based systems like James Bond (just as an example) so I could build to the concept. (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying even dispensed with the points…build what you want.) Yes, there’s a certain thrill to rolling up a character to see what you will get, but it would seem, based off of game design trends for the last 30 years that most people want to control what they play.
I have characters created via 3d6 in order, no choices, that I’ve treasured. I think that my appreciation had to come about via having the other choices–the drawbacks are too obvious when you first encounter it to seem reasonable. But when you come back to it as a “hardcore option” 10 years later, it can be cool to let your character develop from the random roll.
I got to play Lamentations of the Flame Princess this last weekend. It’s a 3d6 in order game… with the little tweek that you can pick one stat and switch it with another. Also the stats are in alphabetical order for whatever reason. I chose to just keep the stats I rolled in order and created a character from there. I was a bit disappointed at first but through the session grew to really enjoy my disgusting lil’ scumbag of a cleric.