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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6405722" data-attributes="member: 4937">Crap.  Yeah.  I keep forgetting how much divergence there is from my game and RAW.  I used my formula, but I'm not really sure what it corresponds to without doing some investigation.  Exactly.  Once you throw in, "4d6 drop the lowest and reroll hopeless characters", you have so much randomness mitigation and so much potential for high stats that is really hard to separate out "I enjoy randomness" from the mathematical fact that the sort of 'randomness' they enjoy tends to produce results so out of scale that no point buy chargen methodology would endorse them.   And it turns out in practice that, "Make them play what they roll.", is impossible anyway.   So as a methodology to get everyone to 34-40 point buy while still feeling like you are hardcore, it's great.  But as an actual endorsement of random chargen, it's highly suspect.  One way to demonstrate this is to show just how uncomfortable those same people would be with a different methodology that produced the same results in play.   Suppose we did chargen this way:The DM secretly rolls stats for each player using 4d6 drop the lowest, and then figures out the point buy of that stat array.  The DM then reports to the player total as how many points they have to spend during character creation.   So, Dave gets 34 points, Anne gets 27 points, Jim gets 32 points, and Carl gets 8 points.   Fair?  By the definition that everyone had equal opportunity to get a large or small amount of points.  Sure.   Actually fair though?  Ask Carl what he thinks.Pretty much.  There is more too it than that, but as I said.  I know lots of people who claim to love random chargen.   And I'm sure that these people honestly do enjoy random chargen.  But its become clear to me over the years that it isn't mainly because of the randomness that they enjoy it, and even if it were true that they did, it still wouldn't be good for the game as a whole.   For those tables where it is functional, there are often elaborate social contracts around chargen that allow for the illusion of randomness, but in practice the rituals around chargen amount to means for eliminating the randomness from the chargen and keeping what they like of the process.  In some cases everyone at the table actually has the same agenda, and in some cases its that a few players have that agenda and everyone else doesn't really care so its just more functional to let that player do his thing than fight it.I used random chargen for ages.  I started out with 3d6 in order, but in practice that tended to be method IV - people would roll up a bunch of characters and only play the 'keeper'.   So then I went to 4d6 take the best three straight up in order, play what you get, because rearranging the scores seemed to me to defeat the good part of encouraging diversity.   Then I really started to realize just how important it was to have one 16+ in order to have a playable 1e character, so I started allowing players to designate one score as their primary ability and they could roll 5d6 take the best three for it so as to allow a greater percentage of characters to be really playable.   About that time I gave up on AD&D and went to GURPS.   I never liked point buy per se, and when I went back to 3e my first instinct was to allow both point buy or rolling as an option.   It was then that I realized as bad as point buy was, it was vastly superior to random both from a standpoint of fairness and from a stand point of simplifying the social contract of the table and eliminating all the drama and hassle I as the DM formerly had to put up with during chargen.   And in particular, since 3e made stats between 8-15 vastly more differentiated than 1e, point buy turned out to be the only way to be fair.   1e characters could differ vastly in post 3e era point buy terms, without having great difference in functionality.   If I came up with a 1e point buy it would look something like:3: -64: -55: -46: -27: -18: 09: 010: 011: 012: 113: 114: 215: 416: 717: 1018: 14Really any character with 1 16+ and not having a noncomplimentary score below 5 was pretty much playable in 1e.   A 1e character with the stat array 18, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 (14 points with the above table) is vastly more playable than one with 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13 (6 points in the same table).   Vagaries in the randomness tended to be somewhat smoothed out - though again, not necessarily by a lot.   Also, certain 'prestige classes' - like the ranger - tended to reward good all around stats but no normally critical 16+.   But even with this organic design around random chargen and dealing with it, in retrospect it didn't work and to the extent that it did work it wasn't actually working like I thought it was.   The real point is that the dice justified a certain short term memory about what was actually going on around chargen.</blockquote>

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