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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9881052" data-attributes="member: 4937">Having played in that era and having read the endless Dragon magazine arguments about how character generation should function, and all the endless arguments between players (in the broad sense of those that played the game) about what the best chargen system to use would be, I can assure you that the vast majority of people who defended the system also at the same time hated the system and that the system was most honored in its breach by various kludges and cheats to work around it.Fundamentally, several of the major goals of a character generation system are violated by the way the game handles ability scores.  In general, you want a system that more often than not produces a character that every participant wants to play.  AD&D absolutely violates this, creating a system were more often than not most participants have a character they are disappointed or dissatisfied in. Really enforce that randomness and watch what happens over time.  At the time I was intensely uncomfortable with Method V, though a lot of the tables around me adopted it. The problem with Method V is it totally turns the system on its head.  For the most part, the system was designed around subclasses being rare rewards for being lucky.  Method V totally turns that around and lets you make any character the system can generate (just about) by fiat alone.  But the problem with that is that just as the classes aren't remotely balanced, neither then is the character generation system.  You will pretty much always end up with higher ability scores just by choosing to play a class that requires higher ability scores.  And because ability scores matter strongly (in the sense they either give nothing or double the power of your character) this tends to create nonsense.Think of the system as a challenge.  Come up with a random number generation system for it that produces more often than not interesting characters that are within a fairly small range of ability with respect to each other so that spotlight is reasonably shared, and which are "playable" for some arbitrary definition of playable.  That a look at for example method 0 (3d6 straight up) and methods I through V, and look at them all as attempts to engage with the system, and create like 36 different characters with each methodology.  Ask yourself, which system is working the best and why do we have six different official systems all generating widely different answers?  And then consider that even Gygax is suggesting something like, "Allow the player to reroll if they don't have at least 2 15's.", to which I might amend, "Gygax, your own system generally gives no real advantages to a 15, a character with two 16's is generally like 20% more capable than one with two 15's."  Functionally the system comes down to one of two procedures of play - either cheating or else high player death to winnow out the sort of characters the system creates that couldn't cut it.  In the long run you create a system that is about chasing fun, more akin to breaking open packs of collectible playing cards hoping to find a chase mythic rare than pretty much any chargen system written since 1990.  And that should tell you something.</blockquote>

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