kitsune9
Adventurer
Yes, definitely. I also loved WHFRP chargen system too. That was the one game where I would anything I rolled up no matter what it was. Even if I rolled up a weak camp follower, I'd play it--it was just that much fun.
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Is random good?
- Thread starter Summer-Knight925
- Start date
Yes, definitely. I also loved WHFRP chargen system too. That was the one game where I would anything I rolled up no matter what it was. Even if I rolled up a weak camp follower, I'd play it--it was just that much fun.
Flatus Maximus
First Post
Let's ask this guy:
"Yes."
"Yes."
Last edited:
My players decided to go off-road from their next location, so I took a random adventure name generator and gave them 5 options. The story lines from that act took a life of their own
Even though my players knew I had used some a generator, they thought it was awesome how I made it fit into the world and character backgrounds. And I made my world richer without having to overthink it.
Even though my players knew I had used some a generator, they thought it was awesome how I made it fit into the world and character backgrounds. And I made my world richer without having to overthink it.
Li Shenron
Legend
Oddly enough, I like randomness as a player in character creation... I always prefer to roll for ability scores and then live with the results. I like the fact that random scores force me to think out-of-box and lead me to create a character that I wasn't necessarily planning to play. I am not saying that I want this all the time, there are times where I have a character concept in mind that has grown on me in the past few weeks and I'm excited to try out, and clearly randomness in score generation may cause problems (but in 3ed it very rarely happens... the default score generation method is very generous). You have to understand however that I am that kind of player that pretty much likes all classes more or less, so I am absolutely fine for the dice to tell me what class I have to play in the next campaign! I would even go as far as forsaking the right to put the scores in the order I wanted (I've never actually done this in 3ed, but long ago we played AD&D without being able to rearrange scores and it didn't bother me... I would do it again), eventually however the main force to lead me into a certain character class is usually the fact that everybody else instead absolutely wants to play a pre-decided character, so I'm typically the one who waits and see what role is missing from the party (and yes you're guessing right... I like playing Clerics 
).
Hit Points are different... they converge to average after a few levels, and extreme cases are not really that interesting, except the case of very low HP but let's say that this case it is interesting to play once or twice in you gaming lifetime and that's it.
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As a DM I have much more mixed feelings... and it's very different between the preparation phase and the phase of actually running the game.
In design and preparation of the adventures, I usually don't use randomness. If I need to stat an NPC, I don't roll for abilities and HP, and instead I just pick the values I want. I suppose that I could make more interesting NPC by randomly selecting some of their features (e.g. spells) and see what comes out, but normally I just choose everything.
During the game instead, I often let the dice decide NPC reactions or other events. If the PCs do something unexpected, I am sometimes embarassed to make a decision on what are the consequences, because I feel that my decision will be strongly influenced by my desire to e.g. make them succeed or alternatively to "get them back on track" and similar things... rolling a dice or flipping a coin takes the burden of decision off me (but of course I won't do it if the result may seriously derail the story).
Random encounters are however usually not really random in my games... The random part is the fact that I would roll a % to see if the encounter happens or not. But I would never roll what you encounter randomly, or if I do that then I roll on a small custom table which I've written myself. The reason is that I always have a stronger opinion on what kind of creatures should be in each adventure or locale, and the random encounter tables in published books and adventures always invariably have stuff I don't want to see.
).Hit Points are different... they converge to average after a few levels, and extreme cases are not really that interesting, except the case of very low HP but let's say that this case it is interesting to play once or twice in you gaming lifetime and that's it.
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As a DM I have much more mixed feelings... and it's very different between the preparation phase and the phase of actually running the game.
In design and preparation of the adventures, I usually don't use randomness. If I need to stat an NPC, I don't roll for abilities and HP, and instead I just pick the values I want. I suppose that I could make more interesting NPC by randomly selecting some of their features (e.g. spells) and see what comes out, but normally I just choose everything.
During the game instead, I often let the dice decide NPC reactions or other events. If the PCs do something unexpected, I am sometimes embarassed to make a decision on what are the consequences, because I feel that my decision will be strongly influenced by my desire to e.g. make them succeed or alternatively to "get them back on track" and similar things... rolling a dice or flipping a coin takes the burden of decision off me (but of course I won't do it if the result may seriously derail the story).
Random encounters are however usually not really random in my games... The random part is the fact that I would roll a % to see if the encounter happens or not. But I would never roll what you encounter randomly, or if I do that then I roll on a small custom table which I've written myself. The reason is that I always have a stronger opinion on what kind of creatures should be in each adventure or locale, and the random encounter tables in published books and adventures always invariably have stuff I don't want to see.
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