Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance

[Hussar]

It is so rare that I read Celebrim's points and keep nodding in agreement.

BedRockGames, I'm going to make an assumption here that you play using die rolled characters. I want you to audit the current characters that are being played. In 3e (and I assume Pathfinder) the standard point buy is 25. In 5e I forget what the value is off the top of my head. In any case, what I want you to do is audit the currently played characters in your campaign and tell us how many come in under the standard point buy value and how many come in over the standard point buy value.

Because I'll bet you dollars to donuts that not only will the majority of characters be over the standard point buy value, but, if you were to audit the PC's in every single die rolled campaign you've played in in the last ten years, the overwhelming majority would still come in over the baseline point buy value.

Now, if randomness was truly valued, that should not be true. We should see the majority of characters right in or around the point buy value. The mean should line up pretty close to the same value. But, most likely, it won't. The mean and the average will both be well above the standard point buy value.

Which pretty much demonstrates Celembrim's point that player's don't actually value randomness, they just want to have higher point buy values and still be able to say that they "earned" them.

 

[prosfilaes]

That doesnt ean your using 4d6 to somehow game a point buy you were never employing in the first place.

You said "This is why many people who use 4d6 drop the lowest, do two sets. They want characters that have a certain level of competence but they do not desire that character creation be fully predictable or controllable. Basically they want some surprises but would nothing too game breaking." Using the stats rolled up by JamesonCourage, judging by Celebrim's 32 point standard, 6 are above 32 points, 2 are at 32 points, and only 2 pairs are both below 32 points. That's not a certain level of competence; that is reliably superpowered and potentially game breaking.

If I were convinced that everyone understood that, I'd be a lot more fine with this, but I get the impression that few really do understand how ridiculously powerful 4d6 drop lowest, two sets, really is. Pointing to that guy who got stuck with the 21 point buy doesn't really solve the problem that half the players have above 32 point attributes.

(I don't know what point buy system Celebrim used to get those numbers, but under Pathfinder's system, the examples of 32 point buy translated to 25 Pathfinder point buy, plus or minus one or two points. 25 points is listed as "epic fantasy" and is the highest amount of points mentioned by the Core Rulebook.)

Why insist people who don't prefer point buy misunderstand their true motives. Isn't the more likely explanation that they simply like something different than you?

Whenever anyone proposes something that is hugely advantageous for themselves, even if you can somehow eliminate the idea they deliberately chose that for their advantage, one must seriously ponder the idea that they like it because it is advantageous, even if they don't consciously realize it. Even if he's completely honest, the roommate who is selling you on the idea that Domino's pizza is optimal in price and nutrition and thus should be had for dinner every night probably really loves pizza; if they hadn't, certain factors would have been reweighed until they came out in favor of foods the roommate liked.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

See, this is why I like the default array -- quick, simple, balanced, with enough placement variety to build different characters without accusations of extreme min-maxxage.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You said "This is why many people who use 4d6 drop the lowest, do two sets. They want characters that have a certain level of competence but they do not desire that character creation be fully predictable or controllable. Basically they want some surprises but would nothing too game breaking." Using the stats rolled up by JamesonCourage, judging by Celebrim's 32 point standard, 6 are above 32 points, 2 are at 32 points, and only 2 pairs are both below 32 points. That's not a certain level of competence; that is reliably superpowered and potentially game breaking.

If I were convinced that everyone understood that, I'd be a lot more fine with this, but I get the impression that few really do understand how ridiculously powerful 4d6 drop lowest, two sets, really is. Pointing to that guy who got stuck with the 21 point buy doesn't really solve the problem that half the players have above 32 point attributes.

not all people who do 4d6 drop the lowest do two sets though. Lots of people do one set and only eliminate characters they consider hopeless. We have been covering a lot of ground here dealing with many different takes on the method.

Whenever anyone proposes something that is hugely advantageous for themselves, even if you can somehow eliminate the idea they deliberately chose that for their advantage, one must seriously ponder the idea that they like it because it is advantageous, even if they don't consciously realize it. Even if he's completely honest, the roommate who is selling you on the idea that Domino's pizza is optimal in price and nutrition and thus should be had for dinner every night probably really loves pizza; if they hadn't, certain factors would have been reweighed until they came out in favor of foods the roommate liked.

Again, not all groups do this. And two, the normal procedure is for people to agree on a single method and have all players use that, so it isn't like you would have one player doing this to get an advantage for himself over the other players.

But ultimately I think it is a bit odd to question peoples' motives here. That whole business over the pizza, is a mentality I just do not understand. First, we know they like 4d6 drop the lowest. Maybe they are more or less insightful over their own motives, I don't really care if they are or not. The key thing is folks do know what they like, so attacking the reasons they provide for them, really just seems like a sneaky way of getting them to take your method rather than the one they prefer. Like I said, I prefer 3d6, not 4d6. Yet it doesn't bother me that people want 4d6 and say they want it because it gives them that spark of random, a bit of excitement and a little cushion against weaker characters. Seems reasonable to me and I will happily adopt this method if that is what the group as a whole wants.

 

[Hussar]

not all people who do 4d6 drop the lowest do two sets though. Lots of people do one set and only eliminate characters they consider hopeless. We have been covering a lot of ground here dealing with many different takes on the method.




Again, not all groups do this. And two, the normal procedure is for people to agree on a single method and have all players use that, so it isn't like you would have one player doing this to get an advantage for himself over the other players.

But ultimately I think it is a bit odd to question peoples' motives here. That whole business over the pizza, is a mentality I just do not understand. First, we know they like 4d6 drop the lowest. Maybe they are more or less insightful over their own motives, I don't really care if they are or not. The key thing is folks do know what they like, so attacking the reasons they provide for them, really just seems like a sneaky way of getting them to take your method rather than the one they prefer. Like I said, I prefer 3d6, not 4d6. Yet it doesn't bother me that people want 4d6 and say they want it because it gives them that spark of random, a bit of excitement and a little cushion against weaker characters. Seems reasonable to me and I will happily adopt this method if that is what the group as a whole wants.

But even in single sets, you will find that the PC's in your games will almost always be higher value than the game standard. Why? Because "hopeless" is pretty subjective, and, again, funnily enough, hopeless pretty much starts at about 1 point below standard point buy.

Like I said, BRG, audit the characters in your games. Again, dollars to donuts, the characters will almost all, if not all, be higher value than standard point buy.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It is so rare that I read Celebrim's points and keep nodding in agreement.

BedRockGames, I'm going to make an assumption here that you play using die rolled characters. I want you to audit the current characters that are being played. In 3e (and I assume Pathfinder) the standard point buy is 25. In 5e I forget what the value is off the top of my head. In any case, what I want you to do is audit the currently played characters in your campaign and tell us how many come in under the standard point buy value and how many come in over the standard point buy value.

Because I'll bet you dollars to donuts that not only will the majority of characters be over the standard point buy value, but, if you were to audit the PC's in every single die rolled campaign you've played in in the last ten years, the overwhelming majority would still come in over the baseline point buy value.

Now, if randomness was truly valued, that should not be true. We should see the majority of characters right in or around the point buy value. The mean should line up pretty close to the same value. But, most likely, it won't. The mean and the average will both be well above the standard point buy value.

Which pretty much demonstrates Celembrim's point that player's don't actually value randomness, they just want to have higher point buy values and still be able to say that they "earned" them.

First off this logic is flawed. Liking randomness doesn't have to mean liking a certain overall average value. One could love randomness but want randomness that pushes things to a higher level point buy. What they want is the fun of not knowing or having control of what their final scores will be. So even if we were to accept your premise about the audit, I don't but that that somehow means people actually secretly, in their heart of hearts, would be happier with a point buy.

I also don't think averaging the number will give you a clear window into peoples' motivations. One high roll set can create a misleading impression. But even so, doing an audit of my last 3E campaign (which was an oriental adventures where I was encouraging more powerful characters than I normally do and being very lax on the whole ability score generation thing), where we were using the 4d6 method and but applying your 3.5 point buy tally to the totals we get characters with the following point buy values:

18
23
36
19
10
32

This is all over the map. Clearly we have two folks who are well above your 25 point value cap. But we also have one character who has a 10, as well as characters with an 18 and 19. This is what randomness gives you. Yes people are hoping for something beyond that cap (though to be honest the point buy cap isn't something they are even thinking about so its not like they are thinking in terms of that number) but they know they could get something much worse and accept it when that happens. Everyone had fun in this campaign. No one swapped out characters midway through for any reason other than death during combat.

EDIT
Just for fun I pulled out my old ravenloft binder with characters, where we rolled them doing 3d6 down the line. Here are the point totals from those sets:

13
14
11
19
26

So in this party we had one character above the 25 point buy.

Here is the thing though. let's assume that this wasn't the case, that yes all the totals came in above 25 (or at least most of them). That doesn't prove anything really. It just shows people like random but want it on the higher end (and this could be because the rolling method they chose rigs it for higher results, such as rolling 2 or more sets, or because they have a low threshold for hopeless and chuck characters clocking in at 24 or less). Either way, if these people really wanted higher stats, they would obviously be much better off using one of the higher value point buy options (heck nothing stopping you from doing a 38 point buy if you really want to even thought he books only go up to 32). Why would people deny themselves the option that gives them what they really want and then either lie about it or misunderstand their own motives? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is nothing to be gained here by convincing you I like random rolls over stat arrays. There are zero stakes in this debate. We are talking about which method of the 5 in the book your group goes with and all are perfectly kosher. If you want to use point buy, that is no skin off my back. I am not going to interrogate you and suggest your lying.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But either way, I think even if they were all exceptionally above the point buy, that doesn't mean people don't want random. You seem to equate wanting random with wanting low, or secretly desiring high. So your solution is give them a bunch of point buy arrays and they should be happy. I've tried giving arrays of pregen stats to my groups, they do not like it. And it doesn't matter if the stats are good or bad. You could give everyone a 32 point buy array and they would still not like it because that spark of randomness is missing, the pleasure of rolling the stats and seeing the character unfold is missing. Reducing it to a question of the overall value largely misses the point. And it is also a bit insulting to tell people that the thing they like, they actually don't because their either lying or don't understand what they really want.

 

[Janx]

Bedrock's been putting up the good fight for me

Let's look at it my way. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], who do you think you are to tell me that I don't actually like the Pepperoni Pizza that I've been enjoying eating for the last 20 years? Do you have any idea of how offensive it is to hear that I should eat a Mushroom Pizza instead because you say it is far superior when I have an extreme irrational dislike of Musrooms to the point that if I had a time machine, I'd go back in time and substitute Mushrooms for Jews and have Hitler slaughter millions of Mushrooms instead?


For better or worse, my group has played for 20+ years using 4d6, without much problem. I HAVE seen problems with cookie-cutter characters in point based stat systems (like ShadowRun). So my tastes are aligned to my experiences.

It's just that simple.

 

[SteveC]

This is a pretty interesting article, and John Wick continues to be pretty controversial. I think that's actually what he does best. I completely disagree with just about everything he writes.

John starts off with a pretty workmanlike definition for role-playing games:

Roleplaying game: a game in which the players are rewarded for making choices that are consistent with the character’s motivations or further the plot of the story.

And he then proceeds to ignore the game aspect of the definition for the rest of the article. A lot of newer "story-games" try to do this as much as possible, and I enjoy them, but they aren't the only games that represent what an RPG is.

He also says that D&D isn't a role-playing game. I have read John's commentary for a long time, and so I know he does not like D&D, so this isn't really surprising. I'll say that If your definition of a thing is such that the most widely accepted example of that thing does not qualify, the problem is with your definition, not the thing or the example.

He writes a lot about how balancing rules are simply not necessary and good parts to tell a story, and to that I'd simply say that it depends on the kinds of stories you want to tell.

I am a big fan of Larry Correia and Jim Butcher. Both make excellent "Urban Fantasy" novels, and both have RPGs about them. The two different games are very different in terms of what the consider important and how balance factors into them. Both are RPGs! I think the hobby works best when it's a big tent that has lots of different games in it.

So yeah, disagree with John pretty strongly.

 

[Celebrim]

You said "This is why many people who use 4d6 drop the lowest, do two sets. They want characters that have a certain level of competence but they do not desire that character creation be fully predictable or controllable. Basically they want some surprises but would nothing too game breaking." Using the stats rolled up by JamesonCourage, judging by Celebrim's 32 point standard, 6 are above 32 points, 2 are at 32 points, and only 2 pairs are both below 32 points. That's not a certain level of competence; that is reliably superpowered and potentially game breaking.

Crap. Yeah. I keep forgetting how much divergence there is from my game and RAW. I used my formula, but I'm not really sure what it corresponds to without doing some investigation.

If I were convinced that everyone understood that, I'd be a lot more fine with this, but I get the impression that few really do understand how ridiculously powerful 4d6 drop lowest, two sets, really is. Pointing to that guy who got stuck with the 21 point buy doesn't really solve the problem that half the players have above 32 point attributes.

Exactly. Once you throw in, "4d6 drop the lowest and reroll hopeless characters", you have so much randomness mitigation and so much potential for high stats that is really hard to separate out "I enjoy randomness" from the mathematical fact that the sort of 'randomness' they enjoy tends to produce results so out of scale that no point buy chargen methodology would endorse them. And it turns out in practice that, "Make them play what they roll.", is impossible anyway. So as a methodology to get everyone to 34-40 point buy while still feeling like you are hardcore, it's great. But as an actual endorsement of random chargen, it's highly suspect.

One way to demonstrate this is to show just how uncomfortable those same people would be with a different methodology that produced the same results in play. Suppose we did chargen this way:

The DM secretly rolls stats for each player using 4d6 drop the lowest, and then figures out the point buy of that stat array. The DM then reports to the player total as how many points they have to spend during character creation. So, Dave gets 34 points, Anne gets 27 points, Jim gets 32 points, and Carl gets 8 points. Fair? By the definition that everyone had equal opportunity to get a large or small amount of points. Sure. Actually fair though? Ask Carl what he thinks.

Whenever anyone proposes something that is hugely advantageous for themselves, even if you can somehow eliminate the idea they deliberately chose that for their advantage, one must seriously ponder the idea that they like it because it is advantageous, even if they don't consciously realize it. Even if he's completely honest, the roommate who is selling you on the idea that Domino's pizza is optimal in price and nutrition and thus should be had for dinner every night probably really loves pizza; if they hadn't, certain factors would have been reweighed until they came out in favor of foods the roommate liked.

Pretty much. There is more too it than that, but as I said. I know lots of people who claim to love random chargen. And I'm sure that these people honestly do enjoy random chargen. But its become clear to me over the years that it isn't mainly because of the randomness that they enjoy it, and even if it were true that they did, it still wouldn't be good for the game as a whole. For those tables where it is functional, there are often elaborate social contracts around chargen that allow for the illusion of randomness, but in practice the rituals around chargen amount to means for eliminating the randomness from the chargen and keeping what they like of the process. In some cases everyone at the table actually has the same agenda, and in some cases its that a few players have that agenda and everyone else doesn't really care so its just more functional to let that player do his thing than fight it.

I used random chargen for ages. I started out with 3d6 in order, but in practice that tended to be method IV - people would roll up a bunch of characters and only play the 'keeper'. So then I went to 4d6 take the best three straight up in order, play what you get, because rearranging the scores seemed to me to defeat the good part of encouraging diversity. Then I really started to realize just how important it was to have one 16+ in order to have a playable 1e character, so I started allowing players to designate one score as their primary ability and they could roll 5d6 take the best three for it so as to allow a greater percentage of characters to be really playable. About that time I gave up on AD&D and went to GURPS. I never liked point buy per se, and when I went back to 3e my first instinct was to allow both point buy or rolling as an option. It was then that I realized as bad as point buy was, it was vastly superior to random both from a standpoint of fairness and from a stand point of simplifying the social contract of the table and eliminating all the drama and hassle I as the DM formerly had to put up with during chargen. And in particular, since 3e made stats between 8-15 vastly more differentiated than 1e, point buy turned out to be the only way to be fair. 1e characters could differ vastly in post 3e era point buy terms, without having great difference in functionality. If I came up with a 1e point buy it would look something like:

3: -6
4: -5
5: -4
6: -2
7: -1
8: 0
9: 0
10: 0
11: 0
12: 1
13: 1
14: 2
15: 4
16: 7
17: 10
18: 14

Really any character with 1 16+ and not having a noncomplimentary score below 5 was pretty much playable in 1e. A 1e character with the stat array 18, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 (14 points with the above table) is vastly more playable than one with 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13 (6 points in the same table). Vagaries in the randomness tended to be somewhat smoothed out - though again, not necessarily by a lot. Also, certain 'prestige classes' - like the ranger - tended to reward good all around stats but no normally critical 16+. But even with this organic design around random chargen and dealing with it, in retrospect it didn't work and to the extent that it did work it wasn't actually working like I thought it was. The real point is that the dice justified a certain short term memory about what was actually going on around chargen.