D&D 5E (2024) 4e design in 5.5e ?

[overgeeked]

Ugh, relax, I’m just posting I’m not challenging you or anything.

I am relaxed and I didn't take your post as challenging me. I think you're reading something that isn't there into my post.

 

[Xetheral]

Ah. So the DM's a pushover. Got it. You roll six times. That's it. Can't handle those scores for your character? Then you're really not going to be able to handle playing in one of my games. Bye.

My very first DM told me to roll 3d6 six times, and that, no matter what, he wouldn't let me reroll. I proceeded to roll all six stats under 10. He watched the rolls, looked at me in horror, and told me to reroll.

 

[overgeeked]

My very first DM told me to roll 3d6 six times, and that, no matter what, he wouldn't let me reroll. I proceeded to roll all six stats under 10. He watched the rolls, looked at me in horror, and told me to reroll.

We use those characters as mine sweepers. It's best not to get too attached. But, to be fair, we roll 4d6, drop the lowest.

 

[Lanefan]

But not all of us. I got lots of flexibility from them and 5e.

Yes, 5e has some flexibility; but nowhere near to the degree that was promised during the playtest period.

Put another way: we were promised a 10 and ended up with a 3.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Another thing is 4e put alot of thought into epic level play with epic destinies and such, 5e doesn't even do Tier 4 very well and doesn't give much guidance on how to do it well or cool T4 adventures and even less for levels 21+. No wonder so few folks play T4 and beyond, WotC could do better exploring DM advise for it, and better rules and adventure support.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My very first DM told me to roll 3d6 six times, and that, no matter what, he wouldn't let me reroll. I proceeded to roll all six stats under 10. He watched the rolls, looked at me in horror, and told me to reroll.

We use those characters as mine sweepers. It's best not to get too attached. But, to be fair, we roll 4d6, drop the lowest.

Which shows the two breakdown cases quite clearly: either (1) you aren't actually strict about it, so the (arbitrary) bottom of the bell curve is cut off and usually power creep slowly raises what "the bottom of the bell curve" looks like, or (2) you keep these horrible numbers and almost always die, except in the rare cases where you get lucky. The former means abandoning true randomness (consider the rather complicated, and no longer all that random, default rolling method of 3e), while the latter means forcing players through repeated failure states before a success state appears. Neither is all that good today.

OSR games with modern design have found solutions, but even those have issues. DCC, frex, has the "character funnel": you skip over the process of waiting to get a character that survives by running a large number simultaneously through a meatgrinder. Any that survive thus already either have reasonably good stats, or have gotten lucky, and either option is generally acceptable. However, such things risk showing their gamist edge (after all, such a funnel is inherently dissociated, for anyone who cares about that sort of thing), and ultimately still devalue randomness by ensuring selective pressure that favors characters with actual bonuses.

Ultimately....I don't really know if there is a true solution to this problem. It very much seems like the two desired things--effective characters and easily-generated, truly random characters--are truly at odds. Being effective generally means falling in a certain range of power. Being truly random requires not falling in any particular range of power. Trimming the randomness to guarantee some competence either sacrifices simplicity and ease of use, or breaks the feeling of randomness, or (often) both.

I think, in the end, they either need to be just marked as distinct approaches with a warning label on the random-gen option, or D&D needs to decide which matters more. Because forcing the appearance of randomness while actually, in the end, forcing pretty non-random results is not really tenable long-term.

 

[Mordhau]

In most of the old school games I remember when people made truly bad characters they played them as recklessly as possible so they would get killed and they could roll again. It's the kind of solution that's fine for people with time on their hands, but most people have no use for. Yet, if people aren't playing the truly bad characters, why exactly are you rolling?

I added a rule when running B/X that every time you roll a D20 against each ability score, and if you roll higher it goes up by 1. This does a lot to mitigate the biggest issues of random ability scores as it tends to even things out in the end.

In any case, if you want random character creation wouldn't it be better to randomly generate race and class rather than ability scores? These are the things that would have the most impact*. This means you get people playing things they otherwise might not play rather than the same characters but at different levels of effectiveness. (You sort of get this I guess if you assign ability scores in the order they're rolled, but the standard method seems to be assign as you like which is truly pointless!)

 

[Campbell]

Most OSR games use more B/X style modifiers which generally make ability scores a far smaller piece of the puzzle. 3d6 in order matters a lot less with the following sort of table (taken from Worlds Without Number):

• 3 /-2
• 4-7/-1
• 8-13/0
• 14-17/+1
• 18/+2

Ability Scores generally matter a good deal more in the modern game than they ever have, especially in 5e with bounded accuracy.

 

[overgeeked]

However, such things risk showing their gamist edge (after all, such a funnel is inherently dissociated, for anyone who cares about that sort of thing), and ultimately still devalue randomness by ensuring selective pressure that favors characters with actual bonuses.

Or, you know, simply accept that it actually is a game and as such accept that the game will feature “gamist” elements. I never really understood the need to pretend we’re not playing a game whilst actually playing a game.

 

[overgeeked]

Most OSR games use more B/X style modifiers which generally make ability scores a far smaller piece of the puzzle. 3d6 in order matters a lot less with the following sort of table (taken from Worlds Without Number):

• 3 /-2
• 4-7/-1
• 8-13/0
• 14-17/+1
• 18/+2

Ability Scores generally matter a good deal more in the modern game than they ever have, especially in 5e with bounded accuracy.

B/X is slightly different, but your point is still correct.

In B/X it’s:
3, -3.
4-5, -2.
6-8, -1.
9-12, 0.
13-15, +1.
16-17, +2.
18, +3.