D&D General How Do You Feel About Randomness?

[Kurotowa]

Randomness is useful as a creative prompt. Something to spur ideas and break people out of creative ruts. It can be useful for a DM to use randomness for things like less important monster encounters or padding out treasure lists. I can be useful for a player who wants to pick up some character quirks or minor trinkets, or needs a seed to build a character concept around. But you usually want to use the random element as a starting point and then build on top of it.

Where randomness is not useful is determining inherent PC power. That's just gambling, and there will always be winners and losers. I don't find that particularly fun or beneficial to the game.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I've never really liked randomness for character gen. Even back before there was anything like point buy, we just rolled up multiple PCs until we got something we liked.

Far too often there are significant power differences between PCs if you do 4d6kl rolls. I'd rather have the character I want, not a character I'm forced to play. A one time roll for a PC I hope to play for hundreds of hours just doesn't make sense to me.

If I wanted random (I don't) there's a lot of ways to do it. I also don't see how help with the cookie cutter issue some people complain about, people will still arrange ability scores as optimal or pick the best class that fits. I just don't see how it matters.

There's plenty of opportunities for randomness during play, from D20 attacks and saves to damage rolls. I do use average HP and damage for monster but that's just for speeding up combat.

Yeah, fully agreed. I usually have some sort of character concept I want to play, and even if I wouldn't the randomisation the rules offer wouldn't help. And I can get the appeal of random character creation, if we were actually randomising the concept. Like if you randomised class, species and background, and then built the character with point buy that might be fun for a short campaign, but how randomisation under the current rules works, you're not really randomising the concept, just the power of that concept. Same with the HP. That is purely negative for me, you might as well randomise the starting levels of the characters.

 

[Lanefan]

... partially randomizing buy and sell prices can create the feeling of complex market forces affecting trade value where none really exist.

While I completely agree with this in principle, in practice I don't dare implement such because the moment I did my game would become an endless exercise in buy low, sell high. I just ain't got the patience for that.

 

[Lanefan]

Where randomness is not useful is determining inherent PC power. That's just gambling, and there will always be winners and losers.

Where to me, that's the point. Some characters are just inherently better than others; reflective of real life where one person might be good at everything while another is only good at a few things and some are average at best no matter what they try.

Never mind that my long-term records indicate that the stats a character starts with are a very poor (as in, likely statistically irrelevant*) indicator of its expected overall career length. Far far more relevant is the level it starts at, mostly because low-level characters aren't often revived on death while higher-level ones often are.

* - or close; I'm not statistician enough to know where the border of statistical irrelevance lies.

I don't find that particularly fun or beneficial to the game.

Different strokes, then.

 

[Oofta]

Yeah, fully agreed. I usually have some sort of character concept I want to play, and even if I wouldn't the randomisation the rules offer wouldn't help. And I can get the appeal of random character creation, if we were actually randomising the concept. Like if you randomised class, species and background, and then built the character with point buy that might be fun for a short campaign, but how randomisation under the current rules works, you're not really randomising the concept, just the power of that concept. Same with the HP. That is purely negative for me, you might as well randomise the starting levels of the characters.

It could be kind of interesting for a short term campaign to randomize class, subclass, race, background. Heck, you could easily come up with 20 arrays based on point buy and roll for which array to use. But personally? I'll never play in another game that randomizes ability scores. I just don't see the point and I've seen massive differences with 1 PC with multiple 18s, nothing lower than a 14 while another has a single 14, a 12 and everything else below a 10. Yeah, that second character may survive longer in a killer campaign, but they will never have a chance to contribute as much to the team as a PC (player contribution being unaffected). If they do survive longer it's almost always because they never took any risks ... not my idea of fun. I just don't see the reason to have winners and losers for something that can have such a long term impact.

Rolling for everything for a short term mini campaign? I don't care. Long term? Nah.

 

[Reynard]

I have seen Shadowdark characters with very poor stats and low hit points outlive other characters -- probably, in part at least, BECAUSE of those bad rolls. that is, the players chose to play the character like the frail thing they were and so they lived longer.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Where to me, that's the point. Some characters are just inherently better than others; reflective of real life where one person might be good at everything while another is only good at a few things and some are average at best no matter what they try.

That sort of unfairness doesn't sound fun to me.

 

[Charlaquin]

While I completely agree with this in principle, in practice I don't dare implement such because the moment I did my game would become an endless exercise in buy low, sell high. I just ain't got the patience for that.

Fair point! I only actually randomize sell prices, not buy prices, and only of “treasure items” like trade goods, gems, and art objects, so this has never come up for me.

 

[overgeeked]

Fair point! I only actually randomize sell prices, not buy prices, and only of “treasure items” like trade goods, gems, and art objects, so this has never come up for me.

I tried doing something more “realistic” and flexible with pricing but it got out of hand real quick. I ended up just ignoring all the random tchotchkes and giving straight gold. Sometimes I enjoy the “how are we going to get this giant gold statue out of the dungeon” but most times I’d rather just get on with it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Fair point! I only actually randomize sell prices, not buy prices, and only of “treasure items” like trade goods, gems, and art objects, so this has never come up for me.

In my game randomisation of prices works by me forgetting what things cost!