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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8416834" data-attributes="member: 71699">Coming out of a few threads on generating ability scores, and in particular conversation with [USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER] I came up with an interesting tweak to the deck-based score generation that I'd like to share. [USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER] made an argument for surprise - i.e. for not knowing what your total scores would be, and for each score being unpredictable. Dice achieve that through the independence of each result. I came up with another solution, as follows...Make a 20-card deck from which you will draw 3 cards for each score without replacement, leaving 2 cards in the deck. For example - 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2. This deck has interesting features -<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The range for the sum of scores is 60 to 66</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The range for an individual score is 6 to 15</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A character can have no more than one 15, and no more than one 6</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Scores will average to at least 10, and at most 11, i.e. 10.5</li> </ul>Here is another, a 14-card deck from which you will draw 2 cards for each score without replacement, leaving 2 cards in the deck. In this case - 8, 8, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2. Some features are -<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The range for sum of scores is 54 to 66</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">For an individual score is 4 to 16</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A character can have no more than one 16, and no more than one 4</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Scores will average to at least 9, and at most 11, i.e. 10 (for a 'harder' baseline difficulty)</li> </ul>Features of this deck-based method that I believe are desirable are -<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Mitigates overshadowing - you cannot get a character more than several points better than another (although precisely where points fall can feel more or less exciting)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Unpredictable (suprising) - the distributions are 'hard' to analyse, and the draw is quite random seeing as you don't know which cards will be left in the deck</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">System-friendly, tunable range - the deck can be tuned to place scores inside the range your group find right, for eample 6 to 15 for the 20-card deck above</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Fair - per another thread that makes a point I agree with, characters generated this way will feel fair compared with one another; a character with flaws more likely has strengths in compensation</li> </ol>Finally, a group can choose to allocate cards to scores as they are drawn - for 'organic' arrays - or assign them as desired - for concept-friendly arrays.</blockquote>

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