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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6406333" data-attributes="member: 4937">Thanks for the vote, but that doesn't give me a lot of confidence. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />It's sincerely weird to have you agreeing with me.I think that there is a lot more to my argument than that, and it begins with, "Randomness isn't the goal in and of itself, but a means to some end."In the 'old days', I think randomness was used because no one necessarily had better ideals about how to get to those ends.  Randomness was the method we had, it wasn't seriously questioned, we didn't have the technical language to talk about it, it was a sacred cow, and so that's what you went with.  But to make it actually functional, in my experience of play and in discussing it with other people, it was honored in the breach more than the use.  The dice rolling creates the illusion of randomness, but some sort of social contract existed to mitigate that as an actual result while retaining some of the end values that randomness was the methodology used to create.  "Throw out hopeless characters" so that the actual methodology wasn't Method 1, but rather Method 1 plus some number of rerolls until the player or table as a whole is happy with the character is one example of that.  But, "Keep rolling until we get what we want.", as any reflective DM knows that has rerolled random encounter tables is, "Pretend to be random, but actually choose the outcome."If you start looking at the stated primary goals of random character - the actual values we are prizing when we apply the methodology - it turns out that we have the methodology now for creating pretty much any of that while retaining balance.For example, many have suggested that the like randomness for sparking diversity and preventing cookie cutter builds.  Which is fine, but from a purely objective position, if what we valued most was diversity surely choice would produce more diversity than randomness would.  After all, with choice you can always choose to play something different, but with random results you could be given a set of numbers similar enough to the last one to be effectively identical.   If a player says, "I prize diversity over optimization and balance, but if I'm given a choice to create what I want, I always prioritize optimization over diversity.", what are we to make of that but at best and most charitably, "I like diversity, but the temptation to optimize is too great for me to over come so I need methodology that forces me to not do it".   However, I've actually suggested methodology that would spark diversity and yield balance, yet this methodology remains unattractive.   Clearly diversity as the end goal of randomness is at most secondary.Others have said that the thrill of gambling is the reason that they like rolling dice.  This is the theory that rolling dice is fun, so that's why random chargen is preferred.   But the problem with that is that for most people, gambling is fun only when they win and that chargen carries no real cost.  So in actual play, players didn't gamble once and accept losing as a happy result.  They kept up the gambling until they produced some sort of 'winner'.  The discarded the "hopeless" characters through some methodology.   And so while we can honestly accept "the thrill of gambling" as being part of the attractiveness of the mechanic and part of the reason people honestly liked it, when we examine the actual impact on play that this thrill of gambling produced it was to produce a non-random set of playable "winners" who were perforce more balanced than randomness itself would have actually produced.  Again, this isn't actual random, and we can't overlook the end state when discussing why people actually liked the methodology that they actually used.As a DM, absolutely its fun to just randomly determine stuff - even stuff you'll never going to lose.  There is definitely exploratory pleasure in randomly making stuff.  But equally, absolutely there was and is more going on with random chargen than actual randomness.  If there wasn't, there wouldn't be such elaborate table agreements and social constructs around protecting players from it.  Again, one of the most dominate aspects of random chargen is how much of the rerolling gets thrown out with the short term memory.</blockquote>

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