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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6405244" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that my posts have indicated lots of experience with people declaring that their character is hopeless and can they please have a do over.Because, once again, what that safety valve indicates is that what they really want is not random, but (at least the chance) to be above average.   No one ever suggests they need do overs when they randomly generate 4 16's or higher.   They are like gamblers who get do overs whenever they lose.  They get the thrill of thinking that they legitimately won the lottery, but none of the downside of losing it.   It ends up being a form of self-delusion.I think that Gygax's discussion of this in the 1e DMG is spot on and indicates he understood what people really wanted:  "White it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extend period of attempts at finding one due to quirks of the dice.  Furthermore, these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy - which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race or class which he or she really can't or won't identify with."So Gygax's experience isn't that players are hard core and roll 3d6 straight up and play such characters successfully - as I've often heard bragged on the boards as being 'old school'.  His experience is fairly similar to mine.  Players find a way to keep rolling dice until they get what they want.   Moreover, Gygax doesn't assert that it is true that stats don't matter and anything can be played successfully.   He asserts that players probably neither want to nor should be playing marginal characters.   So he provides not one but 4 methods to players which mitigate randomness in various fashions, and contrary to some assertions he doesn't set out one as default or even that only one method should be used.  In fact, the clearest reading of the sentence, "Four alternatives are offered for player characters.", is go ahead and allow the player to choose what sort of randomness mitigation he's most comfortable with.  But what isn't said about those methods that perhaps should have been said, is that it tends to have the very same problem as 3d6 straight up.   The first time through a method still might generate a "hopeless" character, or a character that the player can't or won't relate to, and then you'll be right back to an "extended period of attempts at finding one due to quirks of the dice".  Eventually I learned that players will just keep rolling till they get what they want, promptly forget that whole extended period, and then declare how much they like randomness with a perfectly straight face.   And because what players really want that declare they like is randomness is to be above average, in the long run 'random' character generation tended to closely match starting out with one point buy and steadily increasing it.  Often in my experience this was accompanied by all the sorts of drama I indicated earlier.   I even played with one group where this had been taken to its logical conclusion.  The DM had simply allowed everyone to basically have 17's and 18's in practically all stats, and then responded to this by having all NPCs have 18's in all stats.  For that DM, that had ended the drama and the hypocrisy - the players had finally gotten what they emotionally if not logically had wanted.  They could feel good about their above average characters, even though had they thought about it logically rather than emotionally, there never was a world where the PCs stats were so average.  You basically admit it yourself.  You say you want random, but you want no possibility of a terrible result.  If you really wanted that, you should have used method 3, rather than method 1.  Method 3 gives very good odds that your scores will be at least average.   However, what it doesn't do that pretending to like 4d6 take 3 does, is make it easy to perform and justify getting a do over, nor does it give you what you want instead of just something you could play.   Again, if your goals were what you say they are, and if you'd reflected on it at all, you'd do something different than what you do.</blockquote>

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