Quote from: CRKrueger;954740Dunno man, I've had Lifepath random gen give me a zero-level character.  Ended up being one of the coolest characters I had.

Tekumel's is to date the strangest one Ive seen. Universe's was the first ever saw.

Quote from: CRKrueger;954765It's the convention Omega was talking about, where the GM is encouraged to let the player reroll a truly hapless character.  I call it the Shopkeeper Rule just because it was actually defined in Hackmaster:

Thats alot older than Hackmaster. Ive seen at least two RPGs and Dragon suggest keeping the un-used PCs for everything from backup, henchmen, NPCs and whatever.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;954764In 'real life' if Fritz REALLY wanted to adventure, he'd train his body to be able to do it.

That makes Fritz even more awesome!!

Instead of a lazy mook with straight 8s, maybe Fritz was a straight 5s peasant has been busting his ass for years to improve himself to his mighty 8s ever since his god started visiting him  (through his favorite sheep) and made him a paladin!!

Quote from: CRKrueger;954766Why would you want that?

Dudebro, didn't you hear? In 2017 pretending to be an elf without crying is FUCKING HARDCORE!!!.

I've DM'd and GM'd for decades. I've seen hundreds of different PCs in three dozen different RPGs that players created with random vs. point-buy. The point buy PCs are usually more competent and well balanced and the random PCs are usually more interesting as dramatic personas to be inhabited.

Not always, but usually. Call it 70/30.

Quote from: CRKrueger;954766It has nothing to do with math or statistics.  It has to do with people crying because their character isn't the star of the show based on nothing but certain measurements.

I absolutely get wanting to play a superhero. But zero-to-hero games all have TPKs happen at low levels.

Plenty of 4e PCs started with +5 to hit, 20 AC and 20 HP.  Plenty of them died because some days that damn D20 won't show double digits.

Same with Rifts. I've seen plenty of overpowered PCs get toasted because the Dice Gods can be fickle.

Yeah, dice are fickle, but in real life, we try to stack the deck in our favour as best we can, some succeed better than others.  But I don't see why RPG's have to make it so hard for players to be what they'd like to be.  Apparently, it's wrong to want to be a smidge competent, I guess.

A roleplaying gamer complaining about bad dice rolls is like a soccer player complaining about not being given good passes to give them a shot on goal.

Quote from: CRKrueger;954766Some can, others carry scars for life.

Are you even serious?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;954764. . . [P]olice officers are trained to carry 9lbs. of gear on their waist, that will increase your strength and constitution.

"Increase your strength and constitution?" No, it gives you miserable lower back problems, you ignorant wretch.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;954803"Increase your strength and constitution?" No, it gives you miserable lower back problems, you ignorant wretch.

Right.  Sorry, man, but you never took the RCMP training course, I know someone who has, before he went to NWT and yeah, the belt is 9lbs.  Also, as you usual you're skipping the part where most adventurers would take similar training because wielding a blade or an axe, wearing armour (even just leather) requires quite a bit of athletic skill.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;9541661e AD&D did not recommend 3d6 in order, but thank you for the knee-jerk edition bash, fuckwit.

Grow up. I simply pointed out if you did use the vaunted 3d6 in order chargen you'd never be able to play a paladin or bard in 1e (or 2e for that matter) because of their stat requirements. I didn't say that system came from 1e as Gygax in fact gives a variety of options from what I recall. You are a sensitive bunch around here. Ready to go off on an edition rant at a moment's notice. I guess I hurt your feelings along with Gronan's somewhere along the line and now have two manchildren biting at my heels.

Quote from: Tetsubo;954691If someone wants to play Fritz, cool, game on. But no one should be *forced* to play Fritz. Which is what a random system does. A player doesn't get to play the character they *want* to play. They get to play the character fate hands them. That is real life. I don't want to play real life. I want to play high fantasy.

I've largely stayed out of this since its mostly involved D and D, something I don't play (in part due to the emphasis on random character generation). But I'll agree with the above. I'm not playing to emulate "real life" and more to capture some of the feel of fiction that I enjoy. So when I play I usually have at least a basic character in mind or develop one pretty soon after starting the process of char gen. Plus it is a game, something I'm doing for fun and playing the character I wanted to play is part of my fun. It doesn't have to be exceptionally powerful (but I have been in the sucks to be you side of bad char gen rolls).

I don't think there's anything Badwrongfun about random rolls. I've played in some random games as a change of pace and used things like random background tables to flesh a character's history. (loved the Central Casting stuff) but overall I like Point Buy as it provides the play experience I find the most enjoyable. As a GM, I want to give that some enjoyment to my players. And I have had folks in Point Buy games play a "Fritz" and it seemed like the enjoyed it more if they wanted it than when  it was handed to him but they've been of similar preferences to mine.

Along with giving the players the options of point buy or rolling, I am sometimes just as big a fan of pre-made characters. Provided the game gives you some good options of course (like The One Ring)

What I remember from failing and giving up trying to figure out White Box D&D in 5th grade (over 30 years ago) was that attribute values actually had pretty much zero effect on anything except for rules of the form:

The Prime Attribute for a Fighter is Strength.
The Prime Attribute for Cleric is Wisdom.
...
If your Prime Attribute is X, your character gains needs Y% less experience to gain an experience level.

Were there other effects of attributes that had non-house rules in White Box D&D?

Quote from: Nexus;954737There's certain ways to trigger that here. Most of them involve Storygaming vs Roleplaying discussions. There was a good one over descriptions fairly recently.

Oh yeah and "Total Sandbox" vs...well anything else often explodes.

Quote from: Spinachcat;954761To the rest of the party, Fritz is a righteous Paladin fervent and beloved by his god in a fantasy world where the gods meddle in the affairs of man. By the time the other PCs realize Fritz is a kook, who knows what experiences the party will have encountered with him? THAT is interesting roleplay.

Also, -1 on D20 is -5% on D100. It's not some earth shattering penalty.

In the reverse, the PC with all 13s and +1 to everything is only 10% better than Fritz.

The raw math doesn't support the panic over the numbers.

Actually the raw math does support the panic over the numbers.

Quote from: Spinachcat;954761In 3D6 systems, the human average is 10.5. Fritz is slightly below average with his straight 8s.

Also, his INT 8 is based on what? Lack of brains? Lack of education? Lots of bad ideas? That's a conversation for players and GM.

And Fritz thinks he's chosen by his god, he can't stay home when there is a world to save.

2 sessions in and everyone else around Fritz realizes he has massive delusions of grandeur and leaves him home.

Quote from: CRKrueger;954766Why would you want that?

Has zero zilch nada to do with roleplay.

Quote from: CRKrueger;954766It has nothing to do with math or statistics.  It has to do with people crying because their character isn't the star of the show based on nothing but certain measurements.

I am not going to constantly keep rolling characters to appease some dumbfuck Dm's love of Krueger's shitfuck of a character.

I play as if I am actually there, you may have heard of this concept,  why in the hell would I want to put my life on the line for someone I know is not cut out for this line of work?

What was that?  Because that's what Krueger rolled?  I give a fuck what Krueger rolled,  we don't have to suffer his special snowflake character, play something remotely in the realm of realism or GTFO.

Quote from: noman;954418Pretty much this.

Not a fan of random rolls.  If I have the opportunity to play in a OSR game, and the GM wants his old-school rolls, then so be it.  His table, his rules.  If I end up with eights in every attribute, I'll be playing Fritz, the delusional hobo, who believes he's a Palladin of the Sacred Temple of Genre.  If he gets geeked, no biggie.  Just a game.

But if it's my table, it's gonna be point-buy up in that motherfucker.  Even if I run an OSR style game, which I do rarely, I'll use a homebrew point-buy system because (A) I prefer such systems and (B) just to annoy the purists.  

More or less the same here. I started D&Ding using random stats, and I've enjoyed being a player despite rolling for stats, but I can't even remember the last time a player rolled for stats at my table.

My wife likes to roll, so I'm really excited to playtest a new D&D-ish indie game that has options for both rolling (a randomly arranged array) and point buy. Players who like to roll to discover their character can do that, and those who show up with a character in mind can make it happen. Imagine that!