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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8845970" data-attributes="member: 6877472">During the 2e era, where everyone was poring over books to try and equip their Fighters with the "best" weapon, my friends and I made a dizzying array of characters, some rather dubious (mostly because we had this insane belief that a game that let you make any character you desired would somehow make those characters good, lol- like the time I was inspired to make a Whip user after playing too much Castlevania).What we quickly ran into, however, was that the value of these characters really depended on who was running.  Some DM's had no problem with a player "finding" a powerful version of their weapon of choice.  I had a tendency to flood my games with magic items because I thought they were so cool (I'd run modules, and replace "boring" items with cooler ones- like magic items from The Magister, or ones of my own design, thinking that was about the right distribution model, only to find out later that modules totally ignore the treasure type rules, lol).  Another DM was super stingy and would toss you into Ravenloft and tell you how lucky you were to find a +1 knife.  But our forever DM had a compulsive gambling streak, and almost always used random treasure tables, including comprehensive ones of his own design!  So we found that, in most cases, if we wanted to find a magical version of our weapon of choice, we had to go seek it out, it was probably not going to fall into our laps.  Whip guy found an extremely powerful +3 mace, which I couldn't help but be grumpy about, lol.A plethora of Katana users would sigh in dismay, while the jacked-up Sylvan Elf with Two-Weapon Style Specialization happily dual-wielded longswords.  To say nothing of my Gladiator (the DM allowed me to use the Dark Sun class), who found out that, not only was he not going to find magic wrist razors, they actually suck.  Fortunately, Gladiators are built to deal with that sort of thing, and he quickly moved on to other weapons (the class is proficient with all weapons, and can specialize multiple times in different weapons).Though I would be remiss if I didn't mention my Savage Fighter.  I had two 18's and I put them in Dex and Con, like a ninny.  I had a Strength of 12!  I couldn't wear armor, and I was specialized in the Greatspear (an absurdly powerful weapon, stat-wise, but fairly rare since it's not in the PHB).To say I struggled mightily was an understatement, but it turns out having gobs of hit points is fairly nice in it's own right.  Through sheer luck, I kept rolling stupidly high on hit point rolls, so I didn't die.  Then we found a Deck of Many Things, and I ended up with Bracers of Armor, a Belt of Stone Giant Strength, and a Wish, which I immediately used to give my spear the power to "pierce even the toughest hide" (I always try to make my wishes plausible in character, even if this means I'm thrown to the mercy of the DM, lol), since we'd just had a disastrous encounter with gargoyles when playing The Sentinel.  I never got the full stats of the weapon, but I quickly graduated to one of the most powerful characters in the campaign.  Now, while I had a blast, I started to go on solo adventures more and more over time, because I realized that I was outshining the other characters- suddenly, they were the ones struggling to keep up, instead of me.And I knew what that felt like.  Which is really my main issue with high randomness in D&D.  It can be fun or miserable for an individual player, but rarely the whole group.  Someone always ends up with a better deal, and you're not guaranteed to have a long enough timeline for the pendulum to swing the other way.One guy gets a 17, and you get a 8.  One guy gets a Broom of Flying, and another finds himself with a Ring of Swimming he doesn't have attunement slots for.  And there's no guarantee of it ever balancing out.</blockquote>

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