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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8415251" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean...this reads a bit like saying we must, without exception, totally abandon all ideas from the past 20 years of car engineering and design in order to make cars that appeal to the young, hip car buyer. Just because something is old does not mean it has no value. Trying to make an absolute clean break would be as bad as trying to change nothing at all--worse, most likely, since it is old hands who predominantly fill the most important role, as Dungeon Masters.There's stuff to learn from asking tough questions and getting good data about 0e. The same may be said if literally every edition. From the answers and data, you then establish clear design goals, and critically examine how to accomplish those goals. Once you have your system, actually bloody TEST it--not just by saying how it feels, but by collecting data and seeing if it does, on average and in general, do what it's supposed to do.And if it just so happens that the data leads you toward a solution that resembles a prior edition, so be it.The Banneret seemed pretty transparently an attempt to reach out to both 4e and OSR fans...but only maybe successful with the latter. The focus on popular classic adventures of yesteryear also looks rather a lot like still putting pre-WOTC fans at least reasonably high on the priority list. What things would you say they've done to OSR fans that look anything like the snubbing 4e fans got?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. 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. 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.)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.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 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.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.</blockquote>

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