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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5846385" data-attributes="member: 4937">The first thing I do in my 3.0 campaign is give my players my 500+ page house rules document.  I just don't think you really have a clue on this line of argument.  If making up your own rules is the definition of 'strong DMing', then there is scarcely anyone who has more claim to that than me.  I can hardly pick up a game, whether its an RPG or not, without wanting to rewrite the rules.  After two games of Necromunda, for example, I produced a 30 page house rules document to make it more the game I wanted to play.  And if 'Make a throw' is the definition of a strong DM, then 1e doesn't encourage one because the system itself doesn't really have that in the rules.  "Make a throw", whether roll 3d6 under your ability score or roll d20 under your ability score, is a rule that was made up for the system because the system didn't provide for "make a throw".  So sure, I could do for 1e what I did for 3e, and years ago did, but me being able to make up enough house rules to make a system work isn't the same as the system working.  With 3e much of what I needed was rule changes to make the system balanced at all levels of play.  With 1e what I'd need was not only that, but a system itself - which you yourself admit when you say, "Make a throw" (a very 3e perspective on how propositions are resolved).  That's not been my experience.  It presumes for example that the players want to make cookie cutter characters and don't want to play with expectations, which is not necessarily true.   It presumes the system doesn't reward investing in unusual builds, for example that there are not a lot of combat feats to be had for high charisma, intelligence, or wisdom fighters.  And ultimately, I think it presumes that random isn't random in as much that random is more often than not going to kick up interesting stat arrays rather than bland ones were all the results are between 9 and 14, and that the players who are rolling up the dice don't want to have characters with optimal builds and so won't end up matching the class of the character to the abilities that they have.  Again, none of this is true, and some of it I can prove statisticly.   If you allow your players to rearrange their random rolls, roll up characters away from the table, or create new characters if they are unhappy with their stats, you really don't have a preference for randomness.  Indeed, the vast majority of random generation systems I've seen represent mostly discomfort by both players and DM's with the actual results of randomness.The con's of random generation are:1) Some characters will be much better than others.   It's those characters which are likely to survive, as well as 'shine' (contribute to party success), so a lot of times the preference for random generation is simply a disguised preference for higher point by than normal.2) Because there is often a disparity, percieved or real, between the guy who has the 'cool character' and the guy with the bland or subpar one, it tends to greatly tempt players into cheating on their die rolls.  Once this happens, then there is a pressure on the other players to match it, often leading to an escalation to the point of absurdity where everyone ends up cheating.   I've seen DMs control this by going to the UA method for generating high level NPC's and making that the default PC creation method, only to still have players cheating.  Once again, this means that a perference for random generation is often simply a disguised preference for higher point buy than normal.  In some cases its a disguised preference for wanting a higher heroic less gritty game than is being provided.3) Bad luck by multiple players can be party wrecking in the sense that actually bad stats can leave the party subpar and unable to tackle the adventure.  It's worth noting that none of the 'sample' characters in any published D&D module have stats generated randomly.  It's very clear that the stats were chosen to make for survivable and interesting characters by the module writer because if you are familiar with random generation you know that a) such constistantly good rolls are impossible without players consistantly cheating, and b) that the distribution of ability scores will look differently.  The module designers show a preference for better than random scores, which is once again, a disguised preference for higher than normal point buy.</blockquote>

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