Way to generate charecters

[hammymchamham]

I'm trying to come up with an interesting way to generate stats for my upcomming game. Right now I'm making an NPC who'll be reacurring, and originalyl I was playing around with doing:

9d6 then 8d6 then 7d6 etc down to 4d6... then I thought about doing this into a pool of 39d6, drop the lowest 21. But when I did that my lowest roll was a 4 when I arranged the rolls into 18 numbers. So I came up with this:

Roll 2 pools of 15d6 (which is like 5d6 into a pool), drop the lowest 6 from each pool. From each pool, arrange the 9 numbers into 3 sets of 3, those are the stats.
My first time doing this I came up with 2 polls of:


1 6
2 6
3 6
4 5
5 5
6 4
7 4
8 4
9 3

1 6
2 6
3 6
4 6
5 5
6 5
7 5
8 4
9 3

Now, I can "max" these into : 18, 18, 16, 14, 12, 11 (+14 wow!)... (yeah yeah I know this is powerful). The 12 I dropped were all 1's and 2's.

Now, I don't know if I "beat the odds" with this style. But I really want to do a pool style for charecter generation for the PCs and for major NPC's (I plan on using default array for minor NPC's with some point buy involved).

So, is what I am doing with 2 pools good, or how can I change it so I don't get PC's with +14 total modifiers. I'd personally prefer around +9 for this group...

 

[Severion]

Well Iconic Pig, i've removed the random factor and encouraged munchkinism all around. The players get even numbers 8- 18 to place as they they please, then modify for race.

Severion

 

[hammymchamham]

BUT I WANT RANDOMNESS

/me begins to squeel

 

[Jeph]

IP, it seems as if you want a random way to generate characters that produces steady, evenly-powered results. It seems as if you want a point-buy with a randomly generated number of points. I suggest either doing just that (like roll 3d10+15 to determine how many points you get or sumtin), or just use normal point buy.

 

[Jondor_Battlehammer]

We play a less than serious game, so we have two alternate methods for rolling.

1) The 4D6, or as I like to do, 24D6, drop 6, clump into three's. It's random, but you can choose to have several medium scores, or some high, some low.

2) Roll the D20 for each score. It must be down the line, but you can choose this OR the 4D6 roll, whichever you prefere, (you roll both at the same time). It has made for some very interesting charachters.

 

[CCamfield]

You could, I suppose, give the players a pool of 24 dice each. BEFORE rolling stats they choose to allocate 3 or more dice to each roll. They'll keep the 3 best dice from each roll.

So someone could go 4d6 across the board, or take 3 3d6 rolls and also have 3 5d6 (keep best 3) rolls.

 

[Umbran]

Or, you could just choose the stats you want the NPCs to have, based upon what you want their capabilities to be. If you want variation, you can simple choose the stats appropriately.

Dice pools don't increase randomness, they decrease it. The more dice you roll, the closer the overall behavior will be to "average". If you throw out low dice before you even group into stats, you push the average up.

Note then that the max stat is still 18. If you keep the highest stat fixed, but push up the average, what's happening? The top stays fixed, so the bottom must be moving up. All the stats are falling into a narrower, higher band. This is not a way to get randomness. It's a way to get uniform, high stats.

 

[ced1106]

BUT I WANT RANDOMNESS

Heh. Reminds me of a player who randomly rolled 3d6 until he got 18's.

**Anyway** this is an NPC we're talking about. I'd say go in reverse order of character generation: background, skills, level, and **lastly** attributes. Oh, sure, have a vague idea if he has a high or low Str, Dex, etc., but you're God -- er, the DM -- and you get to call the shots. You could even roll a d20 behind the DM's screen, see if you roll a high or low number, and say "He hits!" and "He missed" based on how the scene is going. As you play, you'll get a better feeling for your NPC and can come up with his stats.

And if your players complain, roll another d20 and add that many levels to your NPC.


Cedric.
aka. Washu! ^O^

 

[Slacker]

One of the DMs in our group came up with something novel. He let us decide what our ability scores were according to our vision of the character. No dice rolling, no second guessing, just a player's opinion of what the character should be. To make it balanced, the DM came up with a point buy value that was the standard for the game. Turns out it was 32. For each point above, the character suffered a -1% xp penalty at the end of each adventure. For each point below, the character gained +1% xp.

 

[hammymchamham]

well, I need stats for him "now" (the campaign starts in 2 weeks from tonight), and I hope that he'll hand the PCs their subdued behinds. Its a wizards starting at lvl 13 (they'll be 5), and I'm treating him like a PC. He's not the big bad guy, he's actually hopefully be someone to help the PCs (his AL in CG). Everything is starting out as a test for the PCs. He basically subdues them, and they wake up ? hours later in the middle of a maze.

I'm actually gonna change how I do the dice rolling, and will test it on this NPC.

Sorta like Jondor_Battlehammer's idea, roll 4d6 (drop lowest) and a d20(1,2,3 is a 3, 18,19,20 is an 18), keep the higher result. If the d20 comes up 20, roll again. Yatzee kinda deal. One time, and one time only durring charecter generatino, if 6,6,6 or a 20 comes up, reroll (at players choice). If 6,6,6 or a 20 comes up again, it becomes a 20.