When others (this isn't my view, I VASTLY prefer point-buy) tell me what they want, many of them make it very explicit that they want true, genuine, uncurated randomness. They want a distribution which favors neither good nor bad, and which they have no way to know in advance whether it will produce excellent, mediocre, poor, or uneven results. That they must be able to be genuinely surprised by these results, and cannot, even in principle, meaningfully predict how things will end up, even with partial data.
You've somewhat misunderstood my post. I am arguing for PHB to present a number of methods, with the motives a group might have for using each method
explained either there - in the PHB - or in the DMG.
That is a pretty reasonable gloss of "true randomness," e.g., the values generated must be wholly independent from one another, each randomly generated without bias, and drawn from identical populations of possibilities.
If that is an accurate gloss, then "true randomness" is just as correctly applied to the methods I've discussed, as to 3d6 down the line. Randomly select an array would be even more accurately true random, by that definition, because the distribution is linear. However, I don't think what you are labeling "true randomness" is primarily about the randomness.
IOW, no "if you have X bad stat, you automatically get (N-X) as a good stat," and no "drawing cards without replacement," as in your example, since that means you can with high accuracy predict future values solely on the basis of the first few current values. Such fans expressly want it to be the case that the game itself is designed to support BOTH "I rolled 9, 7, 5, 8, 9, 8" AND "I rolled 18, 15, 12, 14, 17, 14," at the same time and table, no wrinkles, no hard feelings, no wildly divergent experiences. And that may be an impossible request, particularly given that many other players (such as myself) want a well-balanced experience where everyone gets an equal opportunity to excel and big numbers correspond to sizable benefits (such that one must generally focus and think about how best to use the benefits one has, rather than simply being more or less equally effective at all tasks.)
A group might like to allow low and high ranges. I'm mindful of
@Xetheral's example, where the DM thought they wanted to do that, but when it came down to it, didn't want characters with nothing better than 10. I have never met a player who genuinely wanted to be overshadowed. I have met many who wanted to be surprised. It is easily possible to have the latter without the former. We can consider features such as -
- volatility or swinginess (distribution, e.g. does the method produce spiky arrays?)
- overshadowing (range from highest array to lowest array)
- control versus surprise (decks resist analysis quite well until you're down to the last few cards*, but not as well as independent rolls, standard array is an open book, assign in order is more surprising than allocate as desired)
- relationship with system baselines (i.e. the impact the expected modifiers will have during play)
Deck-generated characters can be volatile and surprising, while avoiding overshadowing. What you have described seems to include overshadowing as a
necessary quality of surprise: I don't think it is.
Okay. How do we then square the fact that there are (quite a few, apparently) people who want the spread to be "I literally have no idea whether the result will suck or be amazing but overall it will average low to weak benefits" with the fact that there are people who don't want it to vary at all because such variance is unfair? That is, there seem to be dramatic disagreements about whether there should be allowance for variation at all, or whether variation should be hard-required and dramatic.
Why not continue to offer more than one method? In the current PHB, the standard array is 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 (76pts), the probable array for 4d6k3 is 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9 (74pts) , a middle-ground point buy array might be 14, 13, 13, 12, 12, 10 (74pts). I believe adding a deck-generation method, and slightly down-tuning the other three methods, would give four extremely solid methods that would serve almost any group. But why use one over another? Groups would benefit from better explanations.
Unless we have a literal actual split in the fanbase as to whether characters should even BE expected to be "good" at character creation. Which, well, people tell me is the case. People claim to want to not know for sure whether their character will be good at anything at all.
I've
never heard that, but mileages vary. What I most frequently hear from players is a desire to have flaws as well as strengths. I'd say they have been about split on control. Perhaps two thirds in my experience would be happiest if they can allocate at least three of their scores as desired. Less than a third prefer to let the scores fall where they may. That said, almost all have been happy to go with DM preference.
I can only go by what people explicitly say, and people have told me many, many times that methods like yours are insufficiently random--that they just look/feel like (effectively) drawing an array out of a hat, not truly making a character that is unexpected. The high, even extreme emphasis is not just simplicity, though simplicity is in there, but rather that being fed an expected character, even one that is not absolutely foreknown, ruins the experience. I believe the phrase used in a thread either this year or last year was that such characters are "born lucky" in such players' eyes, and playing someone "born lucky" just feels like a foregone conclusion of success.
Our experiences diverge, in that regard. However, I am not advocating for all groups to use the same method. What I'm advocating is the addition of a method, and proper explanation in the books of the motives for choosing each. Generally, the argument is over the distributions rather than the ranges. Meaning that the methods can be tuned to distribute in different ways within the same range.
Whereas to again to compare to me, someone who deeply values balance and equal opportunity, I consider essentially all forms of rolled stats to be "ability roulette" and rather hate them a lot, ESPECIALLY when they theoretically produce better average stats. I feel I am going to he punished no matter what, either I accept "weak" PB stats or I accept that my awful luck will give me technically, theoretically viable but crappy results, worse than if I'd just settled for PB. Or, if you prefer, rolling stats at all makes me feel "born unlucky." And even if I get great stats (which does, rarely, happen) I'll feel terribly guilty if even one person has demonstrably worse stats than I do.
It's worse than that, even, in that the baseline system does not tolerate well some of the extremes possible with 4d6k3. Point-buy gives strong arrays that also work well with the baseline system. I believe both methods are over-tuned by a few points, especially considering it is now the norm to give players 3pts to distribute. From an average of 10.5 we now have averages of 13!
*The array is still surprising, even if the last draw is not: one can differentiate between surprise per roll, and surprise about the array. And design for either.
