Rolling Characters

What benefit did I get from rolling up and making literally hundreds of characters in the early 80s, a lot of them for my own use in my own private self-play game, that I ran afternoons when I wasn't planning and running my actual game for real life players?  I can say without question that the process gave me varying skills, and perspective as well.  For one thing, I didn't need the books after a while.  I knew what minimums were needed for every class, then better than I do now, and because of that I could set about making a character more quickly, as fast as I could roll and write.

Now, a lot of people can say that, but I need to stress that this was the case for every character class, not just for those I particularly favoured.  Most of my players tended to stay within a group of two or three classes, so they became astute at rolling up druids or mages or fighters.  And in this, there's a distinction I feel needs making.  Because most players preferred certain classes, that always left other, unfamiliar classes at the fringe of their imaginations.  If they liked mages and druids, they tended to think of thieves or rangers as different, even strange, because to their experience, those classes were.  And this could be said of any player, since rarely does a player have any reason to roll up dozens or scores of what would be, for them, unusable PCs.

Most DMs that I knew were also players a lot of the time, and many of them did roll up a lot of characters.  It was expected, and I still read about or hear from DMs who see preparing for an adventure as a time to roll a mess of NPCs.  Anecdotally, however, I've noticed that DMs, like players, also tend to have preferred NPC classes they like to run.  Since they haven't got a specific adventure planned that requires thirty illusionists, for example, there's no need to roll these up in any great number. Usually, an adventure needs a lot of fighters.  There may be a need for a bunch of thieves, or possibly a small group of assassins, but after that the demand goes down.  Who writes an adventure that requires a score of paladins or druids?  Usually, it's 20 fighters, two rangers, a paladin, maybe two mages, probably no illusionists and maybe four thieves.  Monks aren't included at all, because a lot of people dislike monks, whereas clerics are ... well, even the class was discontinued, right?

My experience at rolling up NPCs didn't come from prepping for an adventure.  I had four miniatures that were monks, nine miniatures that were clerics, five that were illusionists, ten mages, nineteen fighters, six rangers, three paladins ... well, those aren't accurate numbers, but grant me the fact that I'm thinking about the collection of miniatures I had 42 years ago.  I had 80 or 90, not as many as most, but enough to fill a battlefield.  And when one died, I could either resurrect that character with the same stats or decide to roll up a new one, because I had the miniature.  The miniature picked the class, not me.

At first, there were many thoughts in my mind about which classes would normally prevail on a battlefield.  After all, the fighters were all hacky and the mages were all soft, so surely the mages would all go down quickly.  But in fact, no; a spellcaster could unleash a lot of power if getting the chance to do so, whereas the fighters tended to get bogged down fighting each other.  After running a lot of combats, I got less and less interested about relating class to power.  In some way or other, they were all rather well balanced; oh sure, thieves died easily, but they jumped to second level pretty fast and quickly tripled their hit points in less time than a paladin took to be second.  A lucky thief with a good constitution could rack up 20-24 hit points while a paladin, wasting a good stat in charisma, was still trying to get above 10-12.  Maybe not a critical example in actual game play ... but the process of rolling characters and watching them level taught me a great deal about how circumstances and not stats made successes.

This is a lesson that virtually the entire game-building industry of D&D seems oblivious of.  A new class means absolutely nothing in game play.  There are so many existant classes at this point that a person could spend a month making ONE character of every class, essentially learning nothing from the procedure except that there are too many fucking classes.  It's a fairly self-evident reason not to indulge time in 5e.

Apart from the fairly indulgent details that a given class offers, a thoughtful player ought to succeed at the game regardless of which class they choose.  This isn't to say that players shouldn't be choosy ... and hell, who's going to stop them anyway?  No, it's to say that when looking at parts of the game that should be advanced and better designed, adding new classes is a totally irrelevant effort.  Moreso in that with the masses of classes that exist, the distinctions are entirely cosmetic, to what's become a somewhat masturbatory extent.

If we're looking for a concrete way to improve your sense of the game, and the point of view of your players, then sit down and start making as many example characters as you can stand, of each different class that exists in your particular version of the game.  And as you roll your eyes right now, as some of you are, ask yourself, "What is the value of a series of game rules where the application of those rules is so BORING?"

We know how this happened, and how we got to this point.  Players wanted more, this seemed like a solution, it was, except that "more" was always the next word.  Where it comes to choice, "more" is never a solution.  Siddhartha taught us that.  Wanting is not the same as having, as the latter never seems to contain the happiness we so thought it would.

Happiness is in not wanting, but doing.  The pleasure is in being, going, overcoming, even in sometimes losing.  And any class can do any of those things.