harliequin
Villager
You have your characters work together...sort of how DMs control mob/swarm type monsters. Instead of thinking as your 4 characters as separate individuals, you control them as a team.We didn't use a grid. You still have to know what characters are where and what they're doing in theatre of the mind. If anything, it's probably even more to keep up with when you don't have a visual representation.
Random ability scores is one thing. But then to add to that a random background to imply you're a warrior with a terrible Str and Con score. Or a wizard-type with no Int. I've never seen a system that makes race/class AND ability scores random. It makes no sense.
There's chaos, and then there's just random "roll on a chart and your character is dead." And then it doesn't come down to skill, good play, or anything besides dumb luck. At that point you're just playing Yahtzee with your die rolls.
Maybe it was a bad GM, a bad group, a bad adventure, etc., but I can't understand how in Hades you handle 24 characters in an adventure without it becoming a bogged down, bad experience.
Bob the dung farmer has a rope and tosses it to Shelly the halfling who weaves around the monsters legs with it, meanwhile the other two taunt the monster, distracting it so it doesn't squish Shelly. Boom boom boom boom. Have 4 d20s and indicate which character is which color before rolling them all at once to determine who is successful and who isn't and then role-playing the result with the assistance of the judge.
Then when some of your characters inevitably die as they are meant to in a funnel, your turn becomes a bit less chaotic, but you also lose some advantage to being able to control the entire team and have to actually interact and work together with the other player characters too.