I hope stat generation is addressed

[Psion]

Sheesh... and here I thought my philosophy of never requiring a PC to have a stat below 10 was out of the ordinary.

I rather think that D&D is a team game, with no one star. Everyone has different strengths.

At the same time, I think point buy is too fiddly and rolled is too random without non-trivial rules enhancements. I now use a card-based system, though I know that will never show up in the official rules.

 

[Celebrim]

It can work with the right players, which is most of them I think.

I don't know about most of them. Most of them you would be willing to play with regularly, maybe, but I've ran open tables for game shops, book stores, in new towns I've moved to, and other sorts of games where you DM for complete strangers, and I got to tell you, I don't think it would work for most players.

For those players it would work for, they'd pretty naturally gravitate to something like a balanced system where everyone could share in the spot light anyway. So why not formalize that through some method?

 

[Treebore]

You keep concentrating on DM vs player empowerment but you're still missing the "multiple PC's" issue. Point buy allows the players to build characters the way they want them and still be in the same relative power range as the other players - that's one of its big strengths and to me makes it better than rolling.

If the players all know each other and trust each other, and more importantly, know what power level they are all comfortable with, just picking stats will work fine - but in a new group or with new players some better structure is needed.



One of my big problems with RIFTS is that there is no consistancy with the power level of OCC's. I like powerful games, I like playing powerful characters, but when one PC is head and shoulders above another - it's usually no fun. In otherwords it's not a power issue - it's a balance between PC's issue.

How does allowing players to build their attributes however they wish change balance between PC's issue? Even point buy doesn't fully fix this.

Plus, if the players character has exactly the stats they want, they can't complain. They made the choice. If they don't like how it worked this time choose something different next time.

 

[Treebore]

I've played RIFTS. I don't think I've ever encountered a system which is so unfavorable to player control while still having the fluff of being super powered. I remember joking that we could (literally) jump from outer space and survive reentry without a scratch, (literally) turn people into jelly by thumping them with one finger or giving them wedgies, and yet the only thing that kept any of us alive at any point in the game session was pure DM fiat. I've never been more bored as player in an RPG. When it came down to it, it was a tragicly comic game system and I felt more heroic and superpowered playing 1st edition AD&D characters with 3d6 stat generation.

It is all just a matter of scaling. That's exactly one of the problems here. I'm not going to deal with great big huge numbers just because, I've got some player of Yugi-Oh-E-Oh who thinks big numbers are sweet. STR 18,000,000? Why? Why should I bother going to the work? Besides which, numbers don't scale equally. You scale things up, and wierd things will happen to your system's balance. Take a game like MtG (for an example of known balance issues). If I scale the starting life (or starting cards) or anything else down or up, strategies change accordingly. If you have a starting life of 40 and just 7 starting cards, forget playing aggro. Your opponent will always stablize before you get there. If I put it down to 5, whole strategies disappear and lucky wins are more common. Numbers hang in a delicate balance. I'm not going to screw with the game just because.

Who is talking huge numbers? Not me, I have consistantly mentioned 3 to 18. Only those trying to prove player control will break the game are pulling in huge numbers to try and justify their disagreement with player control.

 

[Mort]

That's one of many issues with RIFTS. Another big issue is that RIFTS actually does physics and event arbritration less realistically than just about any other game system I've experienced. The scale is just all whacked up. The whole MDC thing creates really funky problems where ordinary objects are effectively made of tissue paper. You want to see a prime example of how number inflation can ultimately destroy the playability of a system, just look at that Paladium system.

No doubt, there are many reasons I don't play it anymore (though I like the concept). I was just citing one specific problem within the cotext of the thread.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Our group prefers random methods that have very little deviation. Our current favorite is to use a subset of a deck of cards, aces through sixes, with whatever total we want. We either set aside some of the smaller cards, or have one or two left over from the deal. Typically, we deal out 18 cards, divided into six piles. Those are the raw stats. Then the player gets to assign the remaining cards to any of the piles, but the stats can't go over 18 (or 20 or whatever we want). Take those adjusted stats, arrange per preferences, then apply racial mods.

Our current campaign used a deck such that every character was guaranteed to have a total of +5 or +6 total ability mods, which approximates 29 point buy. The +5 only occurred if a person had 5 odd numbers, and therefore by 12th level, it was moot. That gives us very balanced characters, but without the player having complete control over the outcome (which the players prefer, as they like the challenge of fitting their concept around such stats).

You could get a similar effect using dice by introducing a chart that produced a sliding scale. Roll well on the first roll, you get negatives on the remainder, and vice versa. Or take the roll out of a total of points.

I think a lot of people that don't like "random" really don't like a high degree of randomness, especially as it creates imbalances between PCs.

 

[Psion]

Our group prefers random methods that have very little deviation. Our current favorite is to use a subset of a deck of cards, aces through sixes, with whatever total we want. We either set aside some of the smaller cards, or have one or two left over from the deal. Typically, we deal out 18 cards, divided into six piles. Those are the raw stats. Then the player gets to assign the remaining cards to any of the piles, but the stats can't go over 18 (or 20 or whatever we want). Take those adjusted stats, arrange per preferences, then apply racial mods.

Another card-generator. Excellent.

I use a 12 card deck, with 2 each of 4-9. I deal out in pairs, and then add +1 to the 2nd, 4th, and 6th highest scores. This gives stats from 9-18 with an average of 13.5.

One cool thing about generating stats this way is you pull out a poor score, you know there's a great score coming. When diced, if you roll poor, there is not guarantee you are going to make it up.

 

[Januz]

Treebore, I think you are missing the reason why there need to be rules for how stats are generated. It is because the players are supposed to be about equal in power.

You say that a player should be able to create what he wants. Now lets say a player wants to create a charismatic, agile and intelligent rogue but he is frail and of average strength. Now the rules say that average strength is 10-11 and to be frail he would need to have sub10 Con. The other stats would be between 14 and 18. A second player creates a Wise and Healthy Cleric but because of speech problems he has a low charisma(again sub10). The other 2 players say "hmm, I don't need drawbacks since the DM says I can have the stats I want", so they have all stats above 12 and most above 15, creating a Fighter and a Wizard.
Because of the high scores of the last 2 characters you need to increase the difficulty and basically nullifying the benefit of the high scores of the characters and duping them into false pretense of being powerful. This pretense is increased because you have made the other 2viable characters underpowered and they will dislike the other 2characters for being overpowered.

You say they could have created more powerful characters but then you are removing their choice of creating what they want to play and you are just doing exactly what you didn't want by limiting the characters to only powerful characters because negative traits of a character aren't viable anymore.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Another card-generator. Excellent.

I use a 12 card deck, with 2 each of 4-9. I deal out in pairs, and then add +1 to the 2nd, 4th, and 6th highest scores. This gives stats from 9-18 with an average of 13.5.

One cool thing about generating stats this way is you pull out a poor score, you know there's a great score coming. When diced, if you roll poor, there is not guarantee you are going to make it up.

Very cool method. I might have to adapt something similar for future games I run, though I'd prefer the possibility of a PC drawing as low as 6.

 

[Treebore]

Treebore, I think you are missing the reason why there need to be rules for how stats are generated. It is because the players are supposed to be about equal in power.

You say that a player should be able to create what he wants. Now lets say a player wants to create a charismatic, agile and intelligent rogue but he is frail and of average strength. Now the rules say that average strength is 10-11 and to be frail he would need to have sub10 Con. The other stats would be between 14 and 18. A second player creates a Wise and Healthy Cleric but because of speech problems he has a low charisma(again sub10). The other 2 players say "hmm, I don't need drawbacks since the DM says I can have the stats I want", so they have all stats above 12 and most above 15, creating a Fighter and a Wizard.
Because of the high scores of the last 2 characters you need to increase the difficulty and basically nullifying the benefit of the high scores of the characters and duping them into false pretense of being powerful. This pretense is increased because you have made the other 2viable characters underpowered and they will dislike the other 2characters for being overpowered.

You say they could have created more powerful characters but then you are removing their choice of creating what they want to play and you are just doing exactly what you didn't want by limiting the characters to only powerful characters because negative traits of a character aren't viable anymore.

I have never noticed a rule that all characters must be equal. In fact the system is inherently against that. Unless you believe thieves and Wizards are inherently equal? Plus the rules guidelines only worry about players have equal value in treasure, not in the effective power of those items.

So if the players create characters like you suggested, so what? They only have themselves to blame. They wanted those characters, they created them, they can live with it. Guess they will have to learn to create characters they can be happy with.

You have to admit, players don't get much practice building their own characters, since DM's are always telling them how to do it.