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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 3517508" data-attributes="member: 11999">I really don't see that as being balanced or fair towards the players who didn't roll well.Even with a very slim chance of rolling either result, it's still possible to have a party of either.  Regardless of what the vast majority of Melniboneans or Pan Tangians do, I don't see it being counter to the setting if there is one, single, solitary group of four Melniboneans that travel together to accomplish some purpose.  It doesn't mean that they're all doing it; just the four that happen to be PCs.Yeah... it might be like not allowing players of Dungeons & Dragons to play dragons as their characters!You don't need to disallow it.  Any imaginative GM can come up with a reason why four characters of a race that almost never "go adventuring" or "travel in groups smaller than armies" are working together, and it doesn't have to be counter to any part of the setting.I simply don't consider it as fair if every player has an equal chance of rolling a really good result or a really poor result in character generation.  It has such far-reaching effects on the entire game that players should start out on an equal playing field with equal opportunities.    If you have a limited amount of free time to spend gaming -- as most working adults with families do -- why on earth would you spend all that time not playing a character you want to play?There are ways to play a paladin if the rest of the party are members of the assassin's guild; it just takes a bit of creativity and a DM who can grasp concepts outside of "the PHB says that Paladins cannot adventure with characters of Evil alignment."  There's a lot of potential interpretations of how a Paladin might act, and it is quite conceivable that a Paladin may have to suck it up and wrestle with his own personal "demons" and work with a group of evil-aligned assassins in order to serve the greater good.  That's a situation rife with role-playing opportunities.If I may be so blunt... what is the freaking point of that?  If you are rolling on a bunch of tables to generate your character and halfway through you roll a result that says you died...  Wow, that was a spectacular waste of time and half an hour of your life you'll never get back.  That's poor game design.  Same thing with psionics in the original AD&D PHB.  If you wanted to test for psionic abilities when creating your character, you'd roll percentile dice.  If you got a 96 or above (something like that, modified by Int, Wis, Cha bonsues?), yay, you get extra powers that nobody else in the group does!  If you roll really low, like an 04 or less, your character is basically a vegetable.  Roll a new character!  Again, what an absolute waste of time.  What is the point of having a possibility of your character dying during character generation, other than to waste the player's time and cause unnecessary aggrivation?A DM is well within his rights to restrict particular choices during character generation.  I'm not quite sure how this point is relevant to the rest of our discussion...?  Now, if all of those character races had all of their fancy powers that cause them to have a +LA and you put them on a table where players rolled and 90% of the time they were a human or other PHB race, but also had a 1% chance of being a minotaur or drow, and a 1% chance of being something crappy like a kobold or a giant rat.... that would be a poor design choice, in my opinion.  It's not balanced nor is it fair.  My point isn't that the game itself has to always be balanced and fair.  Well, it should be fair in that the DM isn't carrying out a personal vendetta against a specific player for not giving him a ride home or whatever, but bad things happen to PCs, often as the result of chance, and I have absolutely no problem with that.  Adventuring is a risky profession.  But I think it's poor game design to include this sort of wildly varying randomness in character generation itself.  Someone is going to roll up a Buffy, and someone else is going to get stuck being a Xander.  It's hard to feel like you're contributing anything meaningful to the game when all of the other characters have you outclassed.I don't remember the mechanics of how the magic worked but... why not just limit starting characters to less powerful forms of that magic, and gradually open up the more powerful magic as he or she advances?  Just because all of the characters in the books of those races had powerful magic doesn't mean they all started out being that powerful.  It reeks of Palladium-esque game design (I know it was Chaosium).</blockquote>

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