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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 8787185" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I'm a fan if D&D traditions, but random stats and hit points are something I'm highly opposed to. The reason is that they are incongruous with other character creation elements. They are one time random rolls that create permanent character traits.Nothing else does that. If it did, we would roll randomly to determine race, class, background, skills, languages, feats or ASI placement, etc.It's a completely different design philosophy--and always was, we just didn't think about it back in the day.Random hit points have no value in modern D&D because they strait up just give some PCs a permanent advantage over others based purely on luck. (Yes, I'm sure all two D&D players who consider that a good thing (out of the millions who would agree with me will pipe up about this statement, but the rest of those who want that experience are probably playing DCC or another OCR game designed around that play style.)Random abilities scores can be useful in certain situations, when done in non-standard ways. They are useful when you don't want a player to come to the table with a character concept. This could be because the desired outcome is to be inspired to play different characters (or just differently expressed characters) than you otherwise would, or because there is a desire for a minigame to see how best to use those stats. Unless that is the case, your group should not use this as it will directly oppose your play goals. Standard D&D play goals involve already having a character in mind, or at the minimum wanting to be able to choose every important aspect of them. Random stats interferes with that.And in the uncommon situation where the goals of character creation actually do align with one of the random stat friendly motives instead of the more common motives, you should use a variant that makes sure everyone's stats end up equal despite being random. That doesn't mean sharing a minimum value but allowing randomness to give you more--that's still the same thing, and this has all the same issues as random hit points. No, the total value of any generated random array needs to be equal.Here is an example of how methods and motive working in harmony can actually play out.I had the goal of potentially having players fully choose their character stats, but inspiring alternate ways to express that character. I created a method of randomly rolling stats that created equal results, and a point buy method that created results equal to the array, but which couldnt produce all the same values. Rolling can get you higher or lower numbers, while point buy keeps you in a certain range and make balanced stats more efficient.Each player rolled a set of stats using the random and equal method. Then each player could choose to use any of those rolled arrays (more than one person could choose the same one) or use point buy. It seemed to work because people chose from the various options rather than all doing the same thing.That's just one example--other methods can be used. I think the principle about motive and method fitting each other have to be taken into accohnt to avoid conflict, and the example considerations given above are some of the few reasons one might validly choose to use random stats or hit points.</blockquote>

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