4d6

Last month, JB at B/X Blackrazor wrote a good take on the benefits of AD&D, from the perspective of someone who's chosen to embrace that system in the last few years.  Read it, if you haven't.  I embraced AD&D more than 44 years ago, and still use many of it's precepts, though nearly everyone has been marginally altered in some way.  For example, while I use the "to hit" table template from the original Dungeon Masters Guide, I've translated it to THAC0 and individualised it for each class.  Yet just as in the DMG, a fighter still needs a 10 to hit armour class 10.

While my Authentic Wiki details for my house rules, it rarely provides insight regarding my reasons or my thinking process for these changes.  I thought it might be pleasant, for those interested in rules, to get into the nitty gritty of these things for awhile, as a change of pace.

[Aside:  I'd much rather discuss maps at the present, but back in November my computer with a Windows 7 operating system died, literally, motherboard unrecoverable.  It was acting up well before, so everything on it had been duplicated ... but I was still using it to make maps, which I did with the Publisher 2007 program.  On Windows 7, Publisher 2007 could easily handle graphic files up to 20 mb, despite the computer having just 500g of ram and just over a terabyte of memory.  The computer I have now has four times that capacity, both in ram and memory; but Publisher on Office 365, with Windows 10, can't manage a file larger than about 1 mb without having conniption fits, making it completely useless for the maps I've made and can't now expand.  As such, I have a friend good at this sort of thing hunting up a cheap tower that'll run Publisher 2007.  Fuck'n microsoft]

The best place to start would be the player's character, specifically rolling it up.  The wiki includes a page for character creation, if the reader wants to view the whole process I use.  I've explained my reasons why characters must start at 1st level in the past, so we can address the following, which remains a point of contention for many campaigns:

"When creating a player character, players choose 4d6, or four 6-sided-dice. These are rolled in succession six times. In each case, the lowest die, or one of the lowest dice, is discarded, so that the remaining three are added together. These six totals represent the new character's ability stats.

This is exactly the process I did myself back in 1979 with my first game; it's how everyone did it in my part of the world up until I left the gaming community around 1986.  I wouldn't hear of anyone using an alternative until I stumbled into D&D on the internet in 2003.  This is largely because by the time "basic" versions of the game came out, my associates were out of school, working to pay our rent, starting university and such, and thought that "basic" was a joke.  None of us had needed a "basic" version to learn the game.  I remember my friends and I in this shop downtown called Catch the Wind, that sold kites and games, looking at these flimsy children's books and laughing.  Little did I know how these children's books would stultify so many gamers who saw no reason to graduate to "advanced" versions of the game.

As a DM, I see AD&D's combat/survival structure relying on characters possessing at least two stats above 14.  There are no benefits for any stat less than 15 with regards to strength, constitution and dexterity, upon which the combat system depends.  And though spell-use can mitigate the need for these somewhat, a good mage or illusionist really needs a +1 dex bonus at minimum (in my experience), while a cleric whose going to wade in and fight needs at least some bonuses in strength or constitution.  A cleric who won't wade in hasn't a good enough spell arsenal, and is therefore useless; which is part of the reason why clerics who tried to style themselves as "healers" and not "holy fighters" ended up crying for more healing potential, as the original list doesn't allow this specialisation effectively.

Thus, adding that extra die to 3d6 increases the chance of rolling above 14 sufficiently to hit that window of "practical" character.  I know that many, many voices refuse to believe there is such a thing; that the game needs to adjust for the character, and not the reverse.  Of course I could run a softer, more gutted game for those players with mediocre stats, but having experienced the lessened potential and drooling dullness of such a game, I'm not sold on the concept.  If the reader wants me to go into that, I will, drop me an email, but for the present I'll assume most people here are aware that having bonuses makes players happy, and I like happy players.

Too, the 3d6 alternative produces too many "culls," my term for the selective slaughter of players whose stats are too obviously likely to get them killed.  The penalties for stats of 7 and less can be tolerated if they appear with rarity ... but when they're scattered among multiple players in a party, sooner or later the randomness of unfudged die rolls takes its toll.  I see no reason to roll up characters en masse for the purpose of creating an inferior stock.  No, I prefer the alternative.  A nice collection of characters whose stats average around 73 or better makes a party more likely to survive, thus producing a sustainable game.

One reason for fudging is that many DMs, and players too, don't actually approve of the game's randomness.  Thus many arguments for or against standardised rules either promote a campaign where role-playing is imposed over die rolling, or one in which the die roll is seen as a "suggestion" and not as a fixed metric.  Or both.  Because I like rolling dice in the open, and accepting their results though the heavens fall, however much it disappoints or just plain hurts, I've had to adapt my game to the 4d6-based stat generation with which I've run these many decades.  Had I started with 3d6 for each stat, I might have early on built my house rules in a different direction.  I might have adjusted results to reflect the greater chance of a rolled failure.  My actual game, and what happens, would be quite different, I'm sure.

Moreover, there's a very good chance that if it hadn't been proposed for me, I might never have stumbled upon the 4d6 system on my own, ever.  I might now be arguing a 3d6 system, one in which rolling a die had less impact on my campaign, merely because it would cause death that much more often due to the lower stats generated.  Yet there's also a part of me that believes its very possible I would have gotten bored with D&D in my 20s for that reason alone.  That the game, as an exercise in talking rather than fighting, would have lost my interest entirely.  Without question, combat is the best part of my campaign.  Every set of players I've ever run were excited for it more than any other aspect, which is why I've spent so much time adjusting and tweaking it, to rid combat of any feature that weakens it's capacity to thrill.  I watch other combats run in other systems, or by other DMs, and I'm stunned at how deathly boring these are.  I'm not surprised that most D&D players don't like combat.  D&D combat sucks the big one.

I think I'll forego any discussion of the steps that later editions went to solve player appetites and game metric flaws.  On the whole, I disapprove of everything.  There are a few aspects of my house rules that I've lifted from 3rd, but I've seen not one thing from 4th or 5th that I wish to incorporate.  And I've read the books.  It's all the wrong direction and it's all shit.

It's probably worth using some time to address issues of players who roll terrifically well on their stats vs. those who don't.  Those disgruntled participants who chafe at having characters of greater power and ability are often blind to much of the game's structure.  First, good stats won't keep a bad player alive.  I've had many bad players who got excited at rolling two 18s for their stats, only to assume the stats would solve all their problems.  An 18 dexterity won't provide invulnerability, hit points run out, characters with an 18 strength still miss, an 18 charisma doesn't automatically make everyone a friend.  Most of the time, it ends it greater sadness for the player when their character of two 18s dies, since that's what matters most in their minds.  Often, it takes a good player to know how best to use those excellent stats; the same that would know how to use stats of less effect.

Secondly, all the players in a party are meant to work as a team.  Not every player with the 1941 New York Yankees could hit like DiMaggio.  In fact, no one can.  But every player on that team benefitted every time DiMaggio got a hit.  Good players understand that if anyone on their "team" rolls a high stat, or a bunch of them, that it benefits everyone.  But then, that also requires a DM who won't let one player lord it over another, or allow a player to gripe and moan about their bad luck.  That sort of attitude can wreck any team, no matter who they are; and while 180 years of organised baseball has accepted that if you want them to behave as a team, you've got to make they understand that they ARE a team, the company decided the answer was to jiggle numbers to make it look like every player is the same.  The same company that argues that "game play" is what matters.

Uh huh.

We can stop for now.  I can talk about character generation for quite a while.