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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6406317" data-attributes="member: 4937">If and only if you don't reroll "hopeless" characters.  If you have a table rule that says, "Reroll "hopeless" characters", then depending on what the bottom percentile of characters that are being excluded, the average is much higher than that.   And if you don't have a table rule that says you reroll hopeless characters, you often have players working around that in some fashion - suiciding characters, cheating, creating multiple characters and then choosing which to play, etc.Again, mostly that matters (particularly for 1e) if in fact no rerolls are allowed.   Once you start throwing out the garbage results, it's just more likely to generate high numbers, plus perhaps also some low numbers at the same time.  Low numbers plus no high numbers typically means the character is discarded through some sort of social agreement or metagame activity.My thesis since challenging this notion that random chargen was balanced is that random chargen is not balanced, creates large imbalances in play, and as a result pretty much everyone that used it (certainly everyone I've encountered and played with) over time developed some sort of metagame methodology to cope with the possible imbalances that actual randomness would necessarily produce.  The result was random chargen with strong conditions that made it effectively unrandom or else while still random was irrelevant to the game the player would play.   I haven't really argued that this secondary development was bad.  It is in fact a functional response to the problems created by random chargen.   Indeed, per Gygax's own discussion, the alternate methods in the DMG were an evolved response to the problems created by earlier more highly random chargen.  They were however but one step in that evolution, because the popular Method I itself (for instance) still didn't control for the randomness enough. The step I would like to take is to recognize that those sometimes unspoken metagame agreements actually existed and were in fact ways of evading the actual results of randomness.   So for example, stating, "I like random chargen, but hopeless characters should be rerolled", suggests at minimum an insertion of choice and fudging into the random dynamic that shows actual randomness was being highly mitigated by a desire for greater balance.  It also suggests, as I asserted earlier, that mathematical analysis of Method I is flawed compared to how it was actually used in play.  In actual play, as I said, it often stood for the excuse to set stats in a more balanced manner, with more playable character, because the actual method wasn't method I, but "Method I until everyone gets (at least approximately) what they want."   And that is not in fact random.</blockquote>

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