Dannyalcatraz said:
I disagree.
In the Stormbringer RPG, the Chaosium RuneQuest interpretation of Michael Moorcock's Elric books, whether you are capable of spellcasting largely depends upon what race you are.
Race is determined randomly because the player races vary widely in innate power. You only have a 1% chance of being Melnibonean (the most powerful race), or a 2% chance of being Pan Tangian (#2 on the power chart). Similarly, you only have about a 1% chance of being that world's equivalent of a Neandertal.
Bad design? No- it accurately depicts the source material and helps preserve game balance.
I have to disagree -- that is terrible game design and doesn't preserve game balance in a meaningful and fair way. Accuracy to the source material is secondary to the fact that it is a game. If one wants absolute accuracy to the source material, one should just read the books.
It doesn't preserve game balance because one player is often going to end up rolling well, most players will get an average result, and one player will often get a sub-par result due to the random die roll and get a character that isn't very fun to play because it gets outclassed by everyone else. The argument that "true role-players don't care and can still have fun with it" doesn't hold any water to me. Most players aren't likely to have fun with it -- especially not for any great length of time -- and once out of high school and college, available gaming time tends to drop dramatically and it's a really crappy use of limited leisure time to play a character that isn't fun.
I don't even like the standard 3e method of rolling characters (4d6, drop the lowest, arrange as desired) because inevitably once player will roll something like 17, 17, 16, 14, 12, 12 while another rolls a 14, 12, 12, 10, 10, 8. Player B decides to make a Fighter, but depending on arrangement of score, Player A can make a character of virtually any other class and be a better fighter than the Fighter for the first few levels, plus have all these other nifty abilities. If Player A is a Cleric, Druid, Rogue, or Bard he may be a better fighter than the Fighter for even longer. So the rules state that you have to have at least one score of 13 or higher with a net +1 or higher modifier, and many DMs will say that you need at least one score of 16 or higher with a +4 overall modifier or what have you. Or let players roll X number of sets of scores and pick one of them. It's not really "random" anymore, and what it really comes down to is that players like "random" character generation only when it gives them something cool or powerful.
When players get stuck playing characters they don't really want to play because they rolled poorly, the most common results are either disinterest in the game or active attempts to get the character killed off so they can try again -- although I really don't understand the DM logic that requires a player to play a character that he or she doesn't want to play and won't allow him or her to create a new character unless the current one gets killed.
Game balance is not preserved by making the most powerful (and weakest) character options obtainable only by an extremely unlikely result of a random roll. It rewards and penalizes players for an action that they have absolutely no control over, which can only be described as unfair. Random die rolls to determine the outcome of actions are part of the game and I certainly don't think it's unfair if characters are penalized as a result -- in part because the player's decisions usually have some effect on the outcome or in determining whether they need to make a roll in the first place. But to subject something with as long-lasting an effect as basic character generation to the result of random die rolls with wildly varying results? It's a terrible idea, it's terrible game design, and it's not balanced in any way.
