You roll a 3...

[TarionzCousin]

I'm typing this before I "roll." This could be an amazing coincidence.


Edit: Wow! What are the odds?!?

 

[Water Bob]

Not me. I put the 3 in Con.

And have a backup character already to go when my first PC dies within ten seconds of combat starting.

"Oh, drat. Sir Wimpsalot died already? It's a good thing I have his squire, Micky the Clever ready to jump in."

Man, nothing burns me up more as a DM than a player who won't accept his rolls and does everything in his meta-game power to kill his current character in order to roll a new one.

What I normally do as a safeguard against this is have some "special" rules for the player's first characters. One thing I do a lot is allow the 4d6, drop lowest, arrange to taste method for the 1st character and then, if any second characters are needed, those guys are rolled up using 3d6 arrange to taste.

In a higher level campaign once, I told everyone at the beginning that if they lost their character, their second one would have to start at level 1.

Sometimes, I say that if you lose your character, you get an NPC that I've rolled up.

Or something along those lines. I do something to encourage keeping the first character, no matter how his rolls turn out.

 

[Water Bob]

That's great. It can still happen, though.

Sure. That's why people play the lottery.

And, that's why you probably don't know anyone who has been struck by lightning. But, both of those things happen.

Of course, rolling 4 ones on 4d6 is much more likely than either of those events.

 

[Holy Bovine]

Do you have any idea of the chance of rolling 4 ones on 4d6?

It's somewhere around 0%. More accurately, it's close to 0.077%. Odds are, you'll roll that sum once in 200 throws (or there abouts).

Gee what are the odds of more than 200 people making characters? Probably less than 1% I'll bet...

 

[Holy Bovine]

Man, nothing burns me up more as a DM than a player who won't accept his rolls and does everything in his meta-game power to kill his current character in order to roll a new one.

What I normally do as a safeguard against this is have some "special" rules for the player's first characters. One thing I do a lot is allow the 4d6, drop lowest, arrange to taste method for the 1st character and then, if any second characters are needed, those guys are rolled up using 3d6 arrange to taste.

In a higher level campaign once, I told everyone at the beginning that if they lost their character, their second one would have to start at level 1.

Sometimes, I say that if you lose your character, you get an NPC that I've rolled up.

Or something along those lines. I do something to encourage keeping the first character, no matter how his rolls turn out.

Boy - you're a barrel of laughs!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sure. That's why people play the lottery.

And, that's why you probably don't know anyone who has been struck by lightning. But, both of those things happen.

Of course, rolling 4 ones on 4d6 is much more likely than either of those events.

Well, I don't know anyone who has been struck by lightning. However, I DO know someone who won $5M in a lottery.

And personally, I rolled a sequence of 1s on D20s and % dice (saves vs magic, poison, polymorph, system shock, etc.) that got a 2Ed DarkSun Dwarf with a 19 Con turned to ashes (the sequence in question was longer odds than winning the lottery, according to the math-whiz in the group). I also rolled a sequence of nat 20s and 100s on % that was similarly long odds.

Maybe I should play the lottery.

 

[Water Bob]

Maybe I should play the lottery.

Heck, I'm going to try one more time, just because it gives me an excuse to use the nifty dice roller!

 

[howandwhy99]

The player could always say "I quit this character".

So the PC effectively dies.

As a referee/DM I don't have a problem with it, but it is saying something to the like of "I won't play this game with statistics like these." Okay, but why? Any core class is playable with any rolls. It's up to the player to see it through.

Basically, what it comes down to is adjusting the difficulty level of the game. Only playing with high scores actually makes the game much easier for the player and less of a challenge. Playing with lower scores makes it that much more of an accomplishment to reach higher levels.

I guess I could see ditching scores to play a PC with lower ones, but it's not exactly something you hear every day.

Think of the game Solitaire. The order of the cards changes the difficulty of each game. As a challenge in powers of observation, the difficulty is nearly absent if every card flipped stacks with eventual closing out of every suit.

 

[howandwhy99]

double post

 

[TarionzCousin]

Boy - you're a barrel of laughs!

Yeah. I was being hilariously funny, too!

One of the most enjoyable characters I ever DM'ed was an Urban Druid who spent most of her time in the town's sewers. She never bathed and smelled horrible.

The player decided all that after rolling a 7 for Charisma.