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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Christian" data-source="post: 890582" data-attributes="member: 381">Re: FAIRNESS?My disclaimer: I prefer rolling stats to point-buy.My answer: As I understand it, the concern is with the difference between campaign-long rolls and individual-incident rolls. Here's a reverse analogy: Suppose that, instead of rolling a d20 every time you swung/fired a weapon, you rolled one d20 at the beginning of the campaign, and that was your attack roll for that character for the rest of his life. Obviously, the character who got stuck with a permanent '1' is pretty much hosed, while the lucky guy with the '20' is born to be a combat god. It's perfectly 'fair' in the strictest sense-everyone got the same chance to roll that d20. But it sure isn't going to be very fun ...Now, this is obviously stupid. And using an 'average' roll for every 'to-hit' would be obviously pretty stupid too. Aside from the fact that a certain amount of randomness puts the fun in the game, the fact is that so-called hot and cold streaks always even out in the long run. So will hot and cold streaks in chargen, of course-but the 'long run' there is a lot longer, because you don't do it as much, especially if you're trying to maintain a continuous long-term campaign.So, to maintain fun & interest in a long-term campaign, you want to ensure that you don't have the equivalent of characters with the permanent '1' and '20' attack rolls. An easy way to do this is by using point-buy; but IMO this has too strong a tendency to result in 'cookie-cutter' characters, so I prefer to try to achieve the goal in a less heavy-handed manner.</blockquote>

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