Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance

[Celebrim]

I am only responding to this because this is part of the misunderstanding.

I am only responding to this because this is part of a misunderstanding, and it's not a misunderstanding on my part. I know well what people are rerolling and never said they are rerolling only single bad numbers. I've talked about the impact (or lack of impact as the case may be) of single bad numbers at great length. I've talked about meta-game procedures at great length. There is no excuse for your claim that I'm misunderstanding what is being performed in the meta-game procedure. Yes, I understand bad numbers are being accepted in play. I've wrote pages on that by this point.

But even were I misunderstanding your tables metagame procedure, it wouldn't undermine my thesis in the slightest because rerolling whole characters or rerolling only individual results both fall under the heading of metagame procedures that mitigate against randomness to a large degree.

People are re-rolling hopeless characters. That is they are re-rolling characters that who have an entire stat set deemed non-survivable in the game. They are not re-rolling individual results. There is a big difference between chucking a character because it has four bad results and rolling a set but re-rolling each result you don't like.

For the purposes of the thesis, no there isn't.

Even if you are chucking hopeless characters, you are still getting the spikes and dips associated with a random rolling method.

As I have repeatedly suggested and discussed to the point of tedium just to try to correct this repeated assertion of yours that I don't get what you are talking about, I'm well aware of the effects of single low rolls and how high rolls in the same stat array tend to more than completely compensate. It's not like even when given choice players don't min/max and utilize dump stats. I've had point buy players buy down to single low stats to buy up their most important stat. If "chucking hopeless" characters consists of throwing out "one bad, no good" and keeping "one bad, but one or more good" it's still heavily skewing the average and mitigating against probably the one unique aspect of random chargen - large inherent imbalance.

I appreciate the good faith here. I would just add to this, these are not mutually exclusive things. I've already said part of the attraction is the hope of a good roll. I want to roll well, absolutely. Getting an 18 is exciting. But part of the requirement of that excitement is that bad results also be allowed to stand. I think the gambling comparison is a good. That is in fact one of the key draws to the random method for me. But it ceases to be exciting if I can re-roll every bad result I get. I'm fine with 4d6 drop the lowest. I am even okay with doing two sets if that is what the group really wants to do. But anything beyond that and the excitement starts to diminish considerably for me because the higher results become more of a foregone conclusion.

Hey, now we are getting somewhere. However, since I'm not writing to prove anything about you particularly, but how random chargen impacts games and social contracts generally...

when a bad result happens I can take it in good spirits and work it into the fun of the game (it is actually one of the unique challenges to rolling stats that sometimes you get stuck with this terrible number and need to make sense of it---having a 4 Dex is very different flavor wise than an 8).

A single terrible number is not a bad result. This is particularly true for 1e D&D, where all a single terrible number meant is you lost your choice over which class to be and added a character quirk to a system generally lacking in mechanical customization. Nor is having a bad number even remotely a unique aspect of rolled stats compared to chosen stats. During my open dungeon crawl days in 3e, a player bought a character down to two 3's - something illegal to play in 1e AD&D even with rolled stats - because he figured that his half orc needed neither intelligence nor charisma in a game that was almost solely about combat. Even in my present on going serious campaign, one player has a caster with like 6 or 4 strength (I forget which) so as to buy up charisma. More to the point though, go back and reread my original 'firestorm' post again regarding how people dealt with imposed imbalance at the metagame level. This applies to players playing actual hopeless characters, and not just the "I played characters with single bad stats so this proves I like randomness" shtick you seem to be focused on, as if I hadn't also played a perfectly playable character with 5 charisma and other low scores, or would be unwilling to do so again. (Ko-Ko the mutated gorilla in Gamma World remains one of my favorite characters.)

Anyway, since you find me such a cad, I'd appreciate you not responding to me

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sorry you feel that way Celebrim. I've tried to respect your position while simply asking that mine also be respected. I think if people put aside the desire to moralize over what is ultimately an issue of preference, and put aside the need to project motivations onto people and needlessly hair split definitions of words, we might get somewhere in these conversations see the tone of the hobby improved overall. But I acknowledge your request and will not respond further.

But to be clear. I don't think you are a cad Celebrim. I wouldn't think that about anyone over something like a heated internet debate about game mechanics.

 

[prosfilaes]

The array you give has an average value of 12.
4d6 drop lowest has, if I recall correctly, an average of 12.24

So, I'm not sure how that's a "stomp". Taken straight, 4d6 drop lowest is, of course, more likely to generate high numbers - but it is also more likely to generate *low* numbers.

Except that I was told that counting rolled characters by point buy wasn't fair because point buy stats would have higher numbers for the prime ability. And let's look at these again: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. If you're rolling 4d6 drop lowest, how many people are going to argue 14, 13, 12, 11, 9, 7 is hopeless? Heck, I can see some people arguing 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 is hopeless. Almost certainly 13, 12, 11, 10, 8, 6. That's going to move your average quite a bit upwards.

 

[X_Mythic]

i like the idea rifts RPG put forward. Life isn't balanced, why should the RPG world be?

 

[prosfilaes]

i like the idea rifts RPG put forward. Life isn't balanced, why should the RPG world be?

Life is more balanced then Rifts, at least. If you have a police squad, or SWAT team, or army squad, or motorcycle gang, they're not going to drag the vagabond aside. In the first three cases, they've all been put through the same intensive training, and in all cases, any without the attributes or alignment to work well in the team have got weeded out. There's often a leader with more experience, but players aren't into that type of hierarchy, in my experience.

And because it's a game. Games are generally balanced because nobody wants to be Russia in Axis and Allies. D&D becomes very unfun for me when I think about attacking the enemy and realize that the best thing for me to do is to stay out of the battle and not waste healing magic.

 

[Jacob Marley]

Except that I was told that counting rolled characters by point buy wasn't fair because point buy stats would have higher numbers for the prime ability. And let's look at these again: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. If you're rolling 4d6 drop lowest, how many people are going to argue 14, 13, 12, 11, 9, 7 is hopeless? Heck, I can see some people arguing 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 is hopeless. Almost certainly 13, 12, 11, 10, 8, 6. That's going to move your average quite a bit upwards.

3.5 codifies a hopeless character as one in which the sum of modifiers before adjustments is 0 or less, or if your highest score is 13 or less. IIRC, 4d6 drop the lowest should produce an average array of something like: 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 09. Removing hopeless characters, as defined by 3.5, pushes the average up somewhat - I believe you go from a 28-point buy equivalency to a 30-point buy equivalency. It's been a long time since I was a regular on the 3.5 optimization boards.

 

[Janx]

3.5 codifies a hopeless character as one in which the sum of modifiers before adjustments is 0 or less, or if your highest score is 13 or less. IIRC, 4d6 drop the lowest should produce an average array of something like: 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 09. Removing hopeless characters, as defined by 3.5, pushes the average up somewhat - I believe you go from a 28-point buy equivalency to a 30-point buy equivalency. It's been a long time since I was a regular on the 3.5 optimization boards.

Good point. 4d6 drop the lowest, and 3e's rule to reroll if the total of all the stat modifiers isn't >0 is just setting the probability range, not making the results less random. At least, not any more than deciding to use a d20 for Initiative rolls instead of a d10.

Plus, it's in the Rules. Don't harp on me for following the bloody rules.

Personally, I think maybe once or twice I whined about a char-gen result. But I've always played what I rolled and did my best to suceed with it. I never re-rolled or rolled up "practice" characters. I only roll when it is time to make a new PC that I need to play.

Part of what I like about the randomness is that it is organic and it makes the decision about the stats for me. I get 6 numbers that I have to use, instead of trying to figure out how to finagle getting an 18 on my prime stat and minimizing the consequences of that on my other stats.

Maybe my results aren't common. But my group has done it this way for 20+ years.

 

[Hussar]

But, if you reduce the probability range, aren't you, by definition, making things less random? A d6 is less random than a d100. By defining "hopeless characters" you're removing the bottom 20% or so of results while retaining the top 80%. Since the odds are pretty heavily stacked at the higher end of the scale, and because you arrange rolls to taste, you are making the results even less random as well.

So, basically, we get random characters, but, the random characters skew to the baseline presumed by the game and higher, with a pretty healthy set of rolls stacking on the high to very high end of the scale and none on the low end. If a player rolled 13, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, would you really make him keep it? Even 13, 12,10, 10, 10, 10 would be pretty rare. That last one is a 17 point character, which is as far below the baseline as a 32 point character is above. But, the 32 point character would get played 100% of the time,

 

[Bedrockgames]

If a player rolled 13, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, would you really make him keep it?

This is not a hopeless character in my book.

 

[Hussar]

This is not a hopeless character in my book.

Sure. Fine. How many players would look at that and be perfectly fine playing that character? IME pretty bloody few.