Creating your Character vs. Meeting your Character

[Chronikoce]

I was just curious what other people thought of these two different methods of character creation. The group I play with has always used stat generation where you choose what rolls go where (or point buy).

I would like to give natural stats a try where you roll each stat in turn and then pick your race and class based on what stats you ended up getting.

Has anyone used the second method and found it to be fun? My hope is that it will encourage my group to break from their regular routine and create new class/race combos rather than playing the same character type every time because it is what they are comfortable with.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I was just curious what other people thought of these two different methods of character creation. The group I play with has always used stat generation where you choose what rolls go where (or point buy).

I would like to give natural stats a try where you roll each stat in turn and then pick your race and class based on what stats you ended up getting.

Has anyone used the second method and found it to be fun? My hope is that it will encourage my group to break from their regular routine and create new class/race combos rather than playing the same character type every time because it is what they are comfortable with.

Well, in my experience most players have a preferred kind of character, and for some people, it is really really narrow.

That said, I think it is a good idea (Maybe for a short game) to have people play a more or less random character as a way to try to get people out of their comfort zone and into something new.

I think that could work well.

 

[Janx]

1E D&D used to have char gen like that. 3d6 in order, pl;ay what you rolled.

I wasn't a big fan of that model.

I like freedom to pick what kind of character I'll make. If you get a guy with 17 STR and low everything else, you have pretty much been boxed into a Fighter.

What if I didn't want to play a fighter this time?

But I also try to mix up what I play. At this point, I've probably played every race and class in the PH (not every combo).

Some other players get stuck in a rut.

In some campaigns, we specifically assign classes or races, just to force some mixing it up. But those are "special" campaigns where everybody accepts that loss of chargen control.

 

[Chronikoce]

I was thinking of using this for a 1-3 session campaign. More of a break the mold type of thing (we have 1 player that will play a bard unless we berate them endlessly to pick something else).

I don't think I would want to use the natural rolling as our go to method because as you guys mentioned part of the fun of the game is getting to play new and fantastic things and having your stats chosen for you could result as you mentioned in 'oh yay I get to be a figher'.

 

[chriton227]

My group has used rolled stats in 3.x and earlier, but after the roll we normally allow either swapping two of the stats, or if we are going for higher power swapping two and rerolling one. That way if you are going for a particular character type, you have a decent chance of being able to swap a good score into the necessary attribute, but you still have a fair amount of randomness overall.

 

[fba827]

while i enjoy the idea of doing that, my experience with actually doing it hasn't been that great.... no so much because of me specifically, but because of the atmosphere it created for the group.

There was typically that one person who got a character type that he/she didn't want to play. This led to constant griping about it ("I could do it if i was a spellcaster and not this burly fighter type..." as a response to everything), or not taking it seriously ("sure, i'll charge straight into the dragon's lair farting the whole way"), or basic dissociation ("i know the group just met in the tavern but i can't figure out any motivation for this type of PC to want to go with them, i know, why i don't i try and make up a new character now...")

Or there is someone who rolls below the average of the rest of the group and feels gimped (whether or not the PC is actually gimped isn't the issue, it's that the player feels gimped and that spills out in to attitude)...

or converse to the above,you'll have the one player who rolls so high above everyone else's average that things seem absurd for anyone else to try and both with skills when that other player is good at everything.

those sorts of things just led to bad atmosphere/ tone/mood when trying this (even if just for a short pickup game). So it really depends a lot on your players and group.

As a slight tangent, I once played in a group where for a short game we basically took a bunch of minis (we lined up 30 since we had a 30 sided die) and then each person rolled the d30 to figure out which mini he/she would base his/her PC off of. We also did it a second time with the variation of rolling twice and then the player would pick which of the two results he liked. Mind you it has similar shortcomings to rolling for stats, but we did it and it was fun for a session none the less (I did this with a group different than the one i tried rolling for stats with) -- the second time didn't work so well mainly because of one new player that was with us who didn't want to play the archetype represented by the mini....

 

[Bleys Icefalcon]

My gaming group got so wound up with twinking and builds (one guy told us that by 10th level, within the rules, his AC would be 100) - then made me really dizzy when he proceeded to show me how...

So after this ... using an old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook - (1st Edition) - I had them all roll stats in one single coulm using 3 six sided dice for each of the primary stats, then I made them keep the stats where they fell - and we made characters of first level straight out of that book.

Was the most fun we'd had in years.

 

[Chronikoce]

Min/maxing was another one of my concerns as well. This current group is not a culprit of it but I play with some friends every so often that are. I might use this next time I play with them since it does seem to be an effective way of (hopefully) stymieing the min/maxers

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

Everyone makes the character they want... then they pass it to the player on their left

AR

 

[Chronikoce]

I was talking to a friend and he had a really mean idea for dealing with people that twink the hell out of characters. Tell every one of your players to make the strongest character they can possibly manage all sources of rules allowed. Once they have done this you take the sheets put them to the side and tell them to roll up a batch of level 1's with standard array and inform them that a group of high level adventurers have gone rogue and it will be their job to stop them. Forcing them to fight their own twinked creations is pure delicious evil haha.