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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9059503" data-attributes="member: 6790260">There are still ways to introduce randomness, but one of the two desires must be either reduced or tweaked:Every character gets an equivalent starting point.No one can predict what their stats will be in advance.Which makes sense. The first one is, quite literally, saying every character can predict, with reasonable accuracy, exactly what their stats will be. The second is, quite literally, saying that there very likely (but not necessarily always) will be significant differences.The problem is, starting statistics serve two masters, and those masters are often at one another's throats. On the one hand, those starting values are permanent power which can heavily define what a character is capable of for the rest of the game. As [USER=6716779]@Zardnaar[/USER] said, starting with much higher stats is equivalent to getting several feats for free at character creation. On the other hand, for a lot of players, those starting values are also used as sources of inspiration for unexpected characters and as personality/behavior markers. To have the same numbers, even if they are put in different spots, thus necessarily means "these characters have exactly the same personality," which is a huge no-no for most people.I'd say about a third of the time, you cannot please both masters, and no one likes the choice that that induces. Unfortunately, the only actual fixes are unacceptable to at least a very large minority of the audience. Firstly, it is unacceptable to divorce power from these stats, so that they can simply serve as roleplay guides, because many (I would argue most!) folks want statistics that actually signify growth, doubly so in 5e where "growth" has been so thoroughly strangled. Secondly, it is unacceptable to divorce the personality/behavior markers from these stats, because folks who expect that have few to no alternatives and don't get any value out of "just make it up yourself"-type things (because they want to be surprised, and/or challenged, by the character they get, as opposed to what they see as a plastic, manufactured character someone "wants" to have.)Unfortunately, unless and until someone can come up with a method that is (a) truly simple, (b) genuinely random, (c) not particularly predictable, and (d) guaranteed to not produce "unfair" results for one player vs another, this problem will continue to exist. Because the community as a whole wants two characteristics that cannot work together--even in principle. Like how 60% of people can want to reduce taxes, and 60% of people can want to increase services, and yet none of them need to be irrational to do this, because the (minimum) 20% overlap between the two can be made up of people who have nuanced opinions that get glossed into something irrational only when they are forced to join up with rigid political factions (e.g., "I want to increase taxes on the rich, which will pay for decreasing taxes on the poor AND pay for more services." Or, "I want to decrease spending on everything except the army and infrastructure projects, and thus decrease taxes for everyone." Neither of these positions is irrational if understood in isolation, but when part of a political environment, you can have major issues. This is one of the poorly-discussed issues with democracy, that the individual voters can be rational while the electorate can be collectively irrational.)</blockquote>

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