clearstream
(He, Him)
Coming out of a few threads on generating ability scores, and in particular conversation with @EzekielRaiden I came up with an interesting tweak to the deck-based score generation that I'd like to share. @EzekielRaiden made an argument for surprise - i.e. for not knowing what your total scores would be, and for each score being unpredictable. Dice achieve that through the independence of each result. I came up with another solution, as follows...
Make a 20-card deck from which you will draw 3 cards for each score without replacement, leaving 2 cards in the deck. For example - 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2. This deck has interesting features -
Make a 20-card deck from which you will draw 3 cards for each score without replacement, leaving 2 cards in the deck. For example - 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2. This deck has interesting features -
- The range for the sum of scores is 60 to 66
- The range for an individual score is 6 to 15
- A character can have no more than one 15, and no more than one 6
- Scores will average to at least 10, and at most 11, i.e. 10.5
- The range for sum of scores is 54 to 66
- For an individual score is 4 to 16
- A character can have no more than one 16, and no more than one 4
- Scores will average to at least 9, and at most 11, i.e. 10 (for a 'harder' baseline difficulty)
- Mitigates overshadowing - you cannot get a character more than several points better than another (although precisely where points fall can feel more or less exciting)
- Unpredictable (suprising) - the distributions are 'hard' to analyse, and the draw is quite random seeing as you don't know which cards will be left in the deck
- System-friendly, tunable range - the deck can be tuned to place scores inside the range your group find right, for eample 6 to 15 for the 20-card deck above
- Fair - per another thread that makes a point I agree with, characters generated this way will feel fair compared with one another; a character with flaws more likely has strengths in compensation