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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9252011" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I mean, sure, the DM isn't making money off of the randomness, but the mechanics are still pretty much the exact same whether your are rolling a die, pulling a slot lever, or opening a boost pack. The core idea is still a skinner box, rewards based on randomness. And there are ways that could be leveraged to be even more exploitative, but you don't need that for this to be just not an appealing concept. And I think, yeah, I'm going to use an anecdote to get the point across on why. I play a fair number of play by post games online, I find the timing for them is just far more conducive to my life so that I can still play DnD even though I have a hard time carving out a dedicated four hours of time a week. I have wanted to, for about four or five months now, play in a game as a One DnD rogue. I want to test out the Subtle Strikes ability and see how it changes the Rogue gameplay in an actual campaign instead of a one-shot. I have almost gotten the chance three times. Every time the game fell apart within weeks. I had one that I thought would last longer, and the DM suddenly ghosted me. Now, add to that being forced to roll a d12, and only if I roll a 5 do I get to play a Rogue. Sure, if I was consistently in seven or eight games, which all reached satisfying conclusions within a few months, then I could play 24 or more characters in just a few years.... but that isn't how it works. The last SEVEN characters I have made for various campaigns, all concepts I was excited about, all ended up with two or three sessions worth of content before the game was abandoned. I just checked, I think the last character I made that actually has gotten more than that, was made back in February 2023. So, just about every single character I made in all of 2023 was abandoned within a few sessions. I've only had two that have been long running, and the one right now which would have hit session 4, except that we've had to cancel the session multiple times. Three characters, in a year. Why would I EVER take the risk that one of my only three characters for the entire year would be bound by random chance instead of being what I wanted it to be? I'm already rolling the dice on the fact that I get to play the character at all, why would I want to have a concept, then be denied because I rolled a die and the result wasn't the correct result for what I wanted? And sure, I make different characters most of the time, I don't try recycling concepts too much. But if I wanted random chance to decide for me, I can pick up a die on my own, I don't need or want any type of word from on high, from either the DM or the game rules, telling me "well, if you want to play that Hobgoblin Artificer, I need you to roll some dice and get lucky, because otherwise you aren't allowed to do it." And I especially don't want that to ALSO create disparities where someone is going to be far more powerful than the rest of their team, just because they rolled well enough to unlock the super secret bonus class.</blockquote>

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