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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9827950" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That's precisely my perspective on it. That is, I have an abstract principle stand, and a personal when-I-have-to-live-with-it stand.On the abstract principle side: If you're going to design a game where folks have to roll, then you should accept certain other things. The randomness should be expected. Character death should be frequent, so nobody really cares what their stats are. Etc. The problem, of course, is that while this produces a game that is self-consistent with its own design goals...it also produces a game I have outright negative interest in playing.Hence, the when-I-have-to-live-with-it side: If you're going to make me do randomness, give me as much of a release valve as I can get against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I don't like being the guy with great stats any more than I like being the guy with crappy stats (and yet most of the time I am one or the other.) Give me multiple slates, let me arrange as I like, reroll 1s, whatever--I want to be as far as possible from totally random stats, because I don't play D&D for KuHrAyZeE RaNdOmNeSs!1!2!@@!21! If I wanted a freakin' roulette wheel, I would go play roulette. I want to roleplay, and I want to game, and I want both of those things to inform one another. Neither of those things has particularly significant use for KuHrAyZeE RaNdOmNeSs. The randomness is simply there to make sure that we don't have a solvable game--that we can make predictions, but have to account for the possibility that those predictions end up inaccurate to varying degrees. That helps to keep the game fresh, and to reward both those who take calculated risks, and those who shore up their weaknesses. It also helps to drive the roleplay forward by allowing for unexpected interactions or permitting external resolution of events--that is, I am not declaring what happens, I am doing what I can with what I have, and working with the consequences as they arise.It's perfectly fine for folks to want the vagaries of the dice to overwhelm everything else, such that your choices barely matter and your numbers definitely don't matter. But forcing that to be the default is hegemonic in a way that the reverse is not. A pile of entirely useless verbiage cannot be easily beaten into shape until they create a humming engine....but an engine can be smashed to pieces to produce a pile of entirely useless verbiage. Trivially easily, in fact. Hence, because it is extremely difficult (indeed, impossible in many cases) to assemble a working (mathematical) engine out of broken, disconnected, and largely-irrelevant pieces, but very easy to smash a working (mathematical) engine into a bunch of broken, disconnected, and largely-irrelevant pieces...well. If it's trivial to go one direction and nigh-impossible to go the other, which spot makes more sense to start in?</blockquote>

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