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General Tabletop Discussion
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Ability score generation: "buy your dice roll"
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8520293" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>It's cute but it fundamentally doesn't make sense.</p><p></p><p>It looks like one of those things someone came up with by themselves and absolutely never tested - the initial concept re: paid rolls isn't terrible though I'd argue the numbers/rolls, but the concept of "reserving" points to shore up bad rolls is frankly idiotic. The return is extremely poor, mathematically, and it requires you to essentially assume you'll get a crap roll, which is let's be clear - NOT HOW HUMANS WORK - sorry for the all caps but I've been talking about RPGs for what, 30 years now, on the internet, and one leading cause of truly bad system design is people don't understand how humans work, don't understand like the basic psychology involved.</p><p></p><p>And the reserve concept is a prime example of that.</p><p></p><p>The other two main causes, btw, are "bad math/didn't bother to do any math", and "doesn't understand the rules to start with, but has decided to change them". This also has the "bad math/no math" problem. Like there's no way these numbers are the result of anything but some dude's "gut feeling". Which is why the reserve boost numbers are so low.</p><p></p><p>For once I don't have a ton of time, but in short it doesn't make mathematical sense to reserve stuff, the odds strongly favour rolling 6+2d6 over reserving any points, and the players aren't going to reserve anything even when they don't immediately realize that, because again, it requires them to assume they'll get terrible rolls, which players do not.</p><p></p><p>And in the end, what it's trying to achieve is essentially the same as 4d6DtL and standard array, but it's considerably more complicated also has more potential to produce outright unplayble characters than either. So yeah I'd this is one of thousands of stat gen methods destined for and deserving of the scrapheap of history.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8520293, member: 18"] It's cute but it fundamentally doesn't make sense. It looks like one of those things someone came up with by themselves and absolutely never tested - the initial concept re: paid rolls isn't terrible though I'd argue the numbers/rolls, but the concept of "reserving" points to shore up bad rolls is frankly idiotic. The return is extremely poor, mathematically, and it requires you to essentially assume you'll get a crap roll, which is let's be clear - NOT HOW HUMANS WORK - sorry for the all caps but I've been talking about RPGs for what, 30 years now, on the internet, and one leading cause of truly bad system design is people don't understand how humans work, don't understand like the basic psychology involved. And the reserve concept is a prime example of that. The other two main causes, btw, are "bad math/didn't bother to do any math", and "doesn't understand the rules to start with, but has decided to change them". This also has the "bad math/no math" problem. Like there's no way these numbers are the result of anything but some dude's "gut feeling". Which is why the reserve boost numbers are so low. For once I don't have a ton of time, but in short it doesn't make mathematical sense to reserve stuff, the odds strongly favour rolling 6+2d6 over reserving any points, and the players aren't going to reserve anything even when they don't immediately realize that, because again, it requires them to assume they'll get terrible rolls, which players do not. And in the end, what it's trying to achieve is essentially the same as 4d6DtL and standard array, but it's considerably more complicated also has more potential to produce outright unplayble characters than either. So yeah I'd this is one of thousands of stat gen methods destined for and deserving of the scrapheap of history. [/QUOTE]
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