Random stats would seem to be one of the things in D&D (etc.) that didn’t come directly from wargaming, which in my experience is about reducing the diversity of units to known parameters (“this is an élite cavalry regiment with good morale”). Is it known where it got started?
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We’re chasing Chestertonian fences now?
It would be interesting to know why Gary (or whoever) felt that it was important. What purpose does it serve in the game?
I think this may be one of the places where the idea of niche protection comes from: even in a genre without formal roles for people to slot into, it’s annoying if some other PC can do everything mine can do only better, perhaps even more annoying than their being exactly as capable as my guy.
And as for stat minima to enter a class, we worked out fairly early on that it didn’t make the class less powerful, just rarer.
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That may be the case. I’ve never looked at any version of D&D subsequent to original D&D (the three little tan books). I came up with 4d6 choose three back in the twentieth century sometime. The other options I proposed originally were partly inspired by reading the list in RuneQuest 2.
Character stats in AD&D seemed to be mostly useless. Any effects they did have simply made the game worse.
Best solution: roll 36d6, ignore all the results and pick whatever stat numbers make for the most interesting story.
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It would be safer to do it in the reverse order, I think.
The fairness issue has different interpretations. If we are playing chess, then everyone starts out with exactly the same forces in exactly the same configuration (modulo left-right reversal), and that’s fair. But if we are playing bridge, then everyone gets a randomly chosen 13 cards, and before the cards are dealt, everyone’s chances of getting any one card are identical—and that’s fair too. It doesn’t change from fair to unfair just because you got a bad hand or a bad set of rolls.
On the other hand, my inclination is to give players a choice: either roll randomly and take what they get, or accept a fixed result that’s comparable to an average set of rolls and see what they can do with it. If they want to risk an inferior character for the sake of having a chance at a superior character, they have that option, but it’s not forced on them. My feeling is that there ought to be a little mean-variance trade-off in this: the fixed result ought to be just slightly less good than the average random result. This may be because I’m risk-averse and don’t understand the mindset of people who gamble for pleasure; I want an extra payoff before I’ll take the more random option.
The nonrandom approach is certainly better if you want to play a character who fits a concept. The random approach is more of a challenge: “Here’s a role, let’s see what you can make of it!” And you might not want that challenge.
It can certainly be really sucky if you create a random character and are faced with spending an entire campaign playing a character who has inferior traits, or just doesn’t fit the campaign theme. C has told me about playing in a Traveller campaign where the other characters were all merchants out to get rich, and she was playing an ex-soldier whose only skills were things like demolitions; her character spent entire sessions getting stoned in her cabin. The random rolls approach works better if you will make multiple random rolls and they have a chance to average out, which isn’t usually what we’re doing in an rpg, where you have some measure of long-term commitment to playing your character.
On the other hand, in terms of emulating the genre, superhero comics are famous for not having all characters be equal. The original Justice Society had Johnny Thunder, who was like Bertie Wooster but not as bright (his “superpower” was possession of a magical genie that he didn’t really know how to use); and Wildcat, a heavyweight boxer with no superpowers who was no mental giant; and the Atom, who started out at 5’1" and 98 pounds and then was physically trained to peak fitness, making him a match for much larger men. The Justice League was less frivolous, but still had both the nearly omnipotent Superman and the unpowered Batman, not to mention the classic Aquaman problem (“I’m more powerful than a locomotive!” “I can run faster than light!” “I can talk to fish!”), which has its own page in TV Tropes. So I don’t think getting a mediocre character falls short of emulating the genre as such. If it has problems, they’re more of the nature of “the conventions of the genre in the graphic novel medium aren’t satisfactory in the roleplaying game medium.”
I don’t have any a priori commitment here; I’m exploring conceptually what can be done to balance the objectives of “fair” and “fun to play” and “can emulate the genre.”
That turns out not to be the case in V&V. Strength and Endurance give you carrying capacity and hand to hand damage; Strength, Endurance, and Agility give you movement speed; Strength, Endurance, Agility, and Intelligence give you hit points and power potential (basically fatigue points); Agility and Intelligence make you a more effective combatant generally.
I’ve found myself gravitating towards point buy for generating stats just because it means I’ll know what I’ve done.
Either because it’s a character I’m using in various different one-shots and it’s easy to know what their stats should be for whatever level the game is. Or just to make sure I didn’t miss anything when levelling up.
It only took a few times of looking at a character sheet and being unsure if I’d forgotten to update something or just had crap rolls for me to eliminate the dice entirely.
I found they had a huge effect, especially at the lower levels. In particular, when you needed to roll a 15+ to hit, having a +1 to hit bonus was coveted. And improving the damage form 1d8 to 1d8+2 pays dividends. Plus, many of the “cool” classes had stat minimums.
I know nothing about bridge, so have no idea how long it takes to play a hand. But I’m guessing that you play multiple hands in an evening of play? So the rubbish, bad luck hands will even out with the lovely, good luck hands over the course of the evening…?
For an RPG it is a far more significant investment of my time. From 3 hours for a one-off game to 7 years with the same character in the same campaign. So I want my starting point to be “Hey, this will be fun to play from the get-go” not “Maybe in 20 sessions I will have accumulated enough xp to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
(I’m aware that there are systems where all the characters start out being unable to walk and chew gum, not just the unlucky ones).
I kind of want my characters to be quality controlled. For instance in a convention game with strangers I have no control over how good/average/bad the GM is. I have no control over how good/average/bad the scenario is. I don’t want to also have to create some randomly rolled piece of tat, so that my fun is in spite of, instead of because of, what is written on the sheet.
Tell C I sympathise. I remember a couple of Traveller con games where my randomly rolled Forward Observer skill was of no earthly use, and it was flail and fail at everything else because I did not have the stats or skills to succeed…
On the other hand, in terms of emulating the genre, superhero comics are famous for not having all characters be equal.
Yes but a metric tonne of them were created in isolation and only forced into superhero team-ups retrospectively. For instance, a WW2 RPG game could be fun if composed entirely of no-hopers who make Dad’s Army look competent. But it is not fun if you are Private Pike and everyone else is an action hero.
I think that’s approximately what I was pointing to by saying The random rolls approach works better if you will make multiple random rolls and they have a chance to average out, which isn’t usually what we’re doing in an rpg, where you have some measure of long-term commitment to playing your character.
I think there are at least three different problems that can arise from original D&D style “roll all your stats on 3d6”:
- The average set of rolls produces characters with a mean of 63 total points, which may not be heroic enough for a particular genre.
- Even if the average roll is good enough for the genre, you may have gotten bad rolls and have only 49 total points, and your character won’t be any use.
- Even if your character has a suitable total point value, the distribution may not support the character concept you want (a gadgeteer with Intelligence 5, or a brawler with Strength 7 and Dexterity 8).
Or, from the GM’s viewpoint,
- Maybe you are trying to build to a character concept (whether original or taken from source material), and the rolls you get don’t support that concept.
- Maybe you have no specific concept, and are doing “let’s see what happens,” but the rolls you get define a character who couldn’t be viable as any sort of adventurer or of superhero, so you can’t provide a plausible narrative or simulated world that includes them.
Add to the second point, your character may be some use, but some other character may be much more use.
I’ve found this is a problem with the Central Casting books, which can be otherwise quite an enjoyable activity: you may well end up with someone who’s blatantly not the PC/NPC you need.
It’s basically a completely different game with a few derived concepts. Stats are rated in die types rather than on a 3-18.scale.
That’s not what the preview PDF shows… 
I think that’s probably not something I need to pick up. I have several choices of rules set already if I want to do supers in contemporary style; and if I want old school, I own both Superhero 2044 and Villains and Vigilantes 2/e. Thanks for the information!
Random generation is fairly likely to be a fail at producing something that fits your needs. I’ve found this to be the case, for example, with both alien race creation and solar system creation in GURPS Space. And likewise with sector creation in Traveller.
You’re right, I was misremembering. Not die types, and in fact based around the same 9-11 average and 3 minimum. But very different from previous editions.
I think I’m going to disagree with Roger’s suggestion that assigning a specified series of numbers, such as 13, 12, 10, 9, and 8, to a set of characteristics is one step away from straight point build on a scale of randomness versus design. It seems to me that both methods are completely free of randomness. The former method is more constrained, but it’s not constrained by randomness, but by a restrictive rule.
That said, of my three considerations,
- The average set of rolls produces characters with a mean of 63 total points, which may not be heroic enough for a particular genre.
- Even if the average roll is good enough for the genre, you may have gotten bad rolls and have only 49 total points, and your character won’t be any use.
- Even if your character has a suitable total point value, the distribution may not support the character concept you want (a gadgeteer with Intelligence 5, or a brawler with Strength 7 and Dexterity 8).
I’m going to say that I’m satisfied to address the second by giving players freedom to choose between random rolls and some form of pure design. For the first, I think that “roll six times and discard one roll” gives enough of a boost in the random approach, and that raising the point total for point build correspondingly keeps things balanced. I think that I don’t want to do a specified series of numbers, both because it may block a character concept and because it gives too little variety of characters; instead I want to provide a point total that can be spent fairly freely.
So I’m going with either
(i) roll 3d6 six times, and then assign five of the rolls to the characteristics;
or
(ii) set each characteristic to 8, and then allocate 15 points to raising desired characteristics.
That seems to me, on one hand, to make superheroes who gained their powers randomly reasonably close to ordinary human beings, but on the other to make them a bit better than average, which both makes them viable as adventuers and fits the romantic convention of the genre. And it leaves room for an exceptionally talented and/or trained normal human being to buy up characteristics with “Heightened (Characteristic) A,” or for a scientific genius to take “Heightened Intelligence A” specifically. So I think it will work for the concept I’m playing with.
All the discussion here is greatly appreciated; it really helped me think through what I was trying to accomplish and what methods were available.
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I suppose you’re right, but even so, rolling a number of character stats independently does not efficiently or reliably assign or even allow you a role. If you wanted to do that it would be much better to roll your character class or professional template, or deal each player a class or role from a special deck of cards.
The wise and handsome Professor @RogerBW has told us many times that RPGs need plots and characters that are suitable to their peculiar form, and cannot be relied upon to do well with plots and protagonists copied from even the great successes and stalwart principles of other media. The same thing is true of game mechanics. Fundamental properties that make chess and Go, whist and poker, gin and dominos, hazard and knucklebones, darts and shuffleboard, charades and spin-the-bottle immortally successful game designs and the forebears of numerous descendants are not necessarily translatable to RPGs.
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