D&D 5E Array v 4d6: Punishment? Or overlooked data

[GMforPowergamers]

In your opinion. Which is wrong.

his opinion is no more wrong then yours...

 

[spinozajack]

I like to roll attributes

So do it

I especially like the challenge of making a viable, even potent character, with some oddball stat combos. A character that had multiple 16s would end up quite different than one with a single 17 and a bunch of 12s and 13s and a couple 7-9s. It adds variety because there is a completely different subset of optimized race / class / feat / multiclass choices for each set of stats.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

(I'm temporarily revoking my ban on responding to GMforPowergamers in this thread now that the subject is substantive instead of personal.)

I find it funny, but that is how my brother in law used to play... you could have 5 'active' and 5 'passive' characters, and they only got used when you wanted... but 9 put of 10 times it was really make X number of characters then choose 1 or 2 to play... at that point it's really just roll till your happy.

It's your way (and his old 2e DM who I think also took from darksun) and in the end it means that low rolls don't get put in play... so it really is the same end as my way, it just is different.

I see three differences between character trees and "roll till you're happy":

1.) It is substantially more work to fully create a character than to hit a "reroll" button. I can't imagine anyone creating more than 10 or so characters in a day. I think all of my players have only two or three PCs in their character tree at the moment.

2.) If someone creates hundreds of "junk" PCs during character creation and donates them all to me as NPCs, I will happily take the opportunity to showcase how some of those junk PCs are actually pretty awesome in play. Normally I keep the focus mostly on monsters and not on PC types, but if I've got dozens of NPCs that the players are already familiar with I will not feel bad in the least about setting up a crack team of player-rejected PCs to loot the lost tomb before the PCs get there. (Or maybe I would do that offscreen during the backstory, and the PCs arrive to find a whole bunch of murdered ex-PC corpses arranged in grisly poses by the skeletal warriors who haunt the tomb.)

3.) In practice, my players seem to develop emotional attachments to their PCs. As mentioned several times previously, one of my players has a Cha-11 (originally Cha-9) hobgoblin sorcerer in his stable. He is originally an NPC--has exactly average racial stats for a hobgoblin, plus free heavy armor proficiency and martial weapon proficiency and martial advantage. He is literally a bog-standard hobgoblin with Dragon Sorcerer 4 bolted on top. I've been quite frank with the players about the fact that playing with Grindle is playing D&D on Hard mode, and that if he ever becomes a full Cha-19 Sorcerer 20 it will be some kind of legendary epic event for the Hobgoblin race because they normally just aren't any good at magic at all. And yet he still gets trotted out for play occasionally. So my experience is quite different from yours--low stats characters do get put in play at my table.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

In practice it was okay; the campaign was pretty awesome though. One guy just wasn't great at describing his character like that so felt hampered by the process. Another player admitted afterwards he didn't really read the descriptions. I figured something was up with him when he assigned the described clumsy character a 17 dexterity. One of the women we game with didn't give anyone a charisma lower then 17 because she didn't want to adventure with any uglies. One player assigned some stats in the 20's because in the guidelines I wrote up I didn't limit what the attributes could be.

ok, no matter what comes out of this thread, good or bad, that story made it worth it...

I can only imagine one player saying "He said strong, I totally see that as a 25str" and another saying "I want to be surrounded by Supermodels...so cha 17 and 18 for all" (hey she was simulating a CW fantasy story...)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

(I'm temporarily revoking my ban on responding to GMforPowergamers in this thread now that the subject is substantive instead of personal.)



I see three differences between character trees and "roll till you're happy":

1.) It is substantially more work to fully create a character than to hit a "reroll" button. I can't imagine anyone creating more than 10 or so characters in a day. I think all of my players have only two or three PCs in their character tree at the moment.

2.) If someone creates hundreds of "junk" PCs during character creation and donates them all to me as NPCs, I will happily take the opportunity to showcase how some of those junk PCs are actually pretty awesome in play. Normally I keep the focus mostly on monsters and not on PC types, but if I've got dozens of NPCs that the players are already familiar with I will not feel bad in the least about setting up a crack team of player-rejected PCs to loot the lost tomb before the PCs get there. (Or maybe I would do that offscreen during the backstory, and the PCs arrive to find a whole bunch of murdered ex-PC corpses arranged in grisly poses by the skeletal warriors who haunt the tomb.)

3.) In practice, my players seem to develop emotional attachments to their PCs. As mentioned several times previously, one of my players has a Cha-11 (originally Cha-9) hobgoblin sorcerer in his stable. He is originally an NPC--has exactly average racial stats for a hobgoblin, plus free heavy armor proficiency and martial weapon proficiency and martial advantage. He is literally a bog-standard hobgoblin with Dragon Sorcerer 4 bolted on top. I've been quite frank with the players about the fact that playing with Grindle is playing D&D on Hard mode, and that if he ever becomes a full Cha-19 Sorcerer 20 it will be some kind of legendary epic event for the Hobgoblin race because they normally just aren't any good at magic at all. And yet he still gets trotted out for play occasionally. So my experience is quite different from yours--low stats characters do get put in play at my table.

to be honest, if I were playing in the game with the idea as you put forward I would make a dozen or so NPCs and even if they had good stats put weird little things in there that would be fun then donate them to you... just so I could see what the DM came up with... after an hour or two I might even forget I'm supposed to be making my PC...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Over the long haul, it was not necessarily so greatly different at Gary's table or in other early groups. Reading between the lines and a bit of speculation...

The PC attrition rate was extremely high in early D&D, and players were constantly rolling up 2-3 PCs to be butchered in the coming session, to come back and do the same tomorrow night. Surviving to level 2 was hard, and level 3 made that character something special, regardless of stats. So if your crappy PC from last week got "forgotten" and you rolled up two more PCs for the night, nobody cared. That PC with the bad stats who survived last night's blood bath and was now close to 2nd level, whether he made another appearance was your call.

So in multi-DM megadungeon bloodbaths being run at HS and college gaming groups, it would be perfectly normal to roll up a new PC every week until you got the cool stats and hoped that PC lived. He probably did not.

Eventually the game transitioned towards higher PC survival rates and even protagonist-like conventions. But the idea of roll until you get a PC you like persisted in various fashions.

Yes, this is my style. Except I don't have protagonist-like conventions in-game; the closest I have is a karma convention wherein the players (not PCs) can effectively exert divine power over the events of the gameworld to cheat fate, and I then get equivalent karma points to make their lives harder down the road. It enables protagonist-like conventions at the metagame level (if the players choose to undo a TPK or something) but it's really a form of save scumming on the tabletop, and as such, each time you "reload" is kind of a moral defeat IMO, although I don't make a point of rubbing it in.

(Oh, and I also don't run megadungeons. I focus more on overland than dungeoneering; rarely do I even map out the interior of buildings. But that's not germane to this thread.)

Anyway, the point is that high-turnover and roll-for-stats are very compatible playstyles.

BTW, I love your "hungry pets" sig.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

In practice it was okay; the campaign was pretty awesome though. One guy just wasn't great at describing his character like that so felt hampered by the process. Another player admitted afterwards he didn't really read the descriptions. I figured something was up with him when he assigned the described clumsy character a 17 dexterity. One of the women we game with didn't give anyone a charisma lower then 17 because she didn't want to adventure with any uglies. One player assigned some stats in the 20's because in the guidelines I wrote up I didn't limit what the attributes could be.

I was kicking around an idea for a campaign, and my original thought was to include in the campaign notes "PC stat generation method: Any (players decide)".

I giggle just thinking what the players will make of that.

At a practical level, I think you method makes more sense.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Isn't that technically just another form of re-rolling until you are happy with the result?

I think I covered this in my response to GMForPowerGamers above, but I don't see them as the same, both because creating multiple PCs leaves artifacts in the game world (the created PCs) whereas rerolling does not, and because human factors (lost cost of rerolling dice vs. creating full PC) means that rerolling is more gameable. When I play Secret of the Silver Blades on the computer I can sit there for an hour hitting "Reroll" over and over hoping to get those perfect 18s with 18/00 Strength, but if each reroll required even five minutes of my time to choose a name/choose icons/allocate feats/save the file/etc. I'd likely to get sick of it after five characters and just bust out the hex editor, at which point I'd probably have pure 25s in all stats instead of just 18s.

(Yes, I'm a cheating cheater when it comes to Gold Box games. I'm not proud of it.)

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

I think I covered this in my response to GMForPowerGamers above, but I don't see them as the same, both because creating multiple PCs leaves artifacts in the game world (the created PCs) whereas rerolling does not, and because human factors (lost cost of rerolling dice vs. creating full PC) means that rerolling is more gameable. When I play Secret of the Silver Blades on the computer I can sit there for an hour hitting "Reroll" over and over hoping to get those perfect 18s with 18/00 Strength, but if each reroll required even five minutes of my time to choose a name/choose icons/allocate feats/save the file/etc. I'd likely to get sick of it after five characters and just bust out the hex editor, at which point I'd probably have pure 25s in all stats instead of just 18s.

(Yes, I'm a cheating cheater when it comes to Gold Box games. I'm not proud of it.)

Yeah, I read your response to GMForPowerGamers and it covered it nicely. Originally I thought you just meant redoing the stat array and not an entire character. Your method have some great benefits, including the players helping flesh out the campaign world. If I ever run a game where the players have multiple PCs, I might very well steal your way of dealing with leftovers.

 

[Manbearcat]

Is rolling for stats punishment? Well, I wouldn't call it punishment per se. I would just say that it is evil and only tables that are hives of scum and villainy allow for it.

But that is ok. It is important to have black-hat wearing villains amongst us, brazenly flaunting their wicked attribute-rolling ways. It is important because it reminds white-hat wearing standard array GMs like me that I'm good, and decent, and kind, and fine, and nice. And better. And they're just not.

I hope that all makes sense. I can clarify it if anyone is unsure of this crucial point I"m making. This is important.