Choosing Stats

From my first experience playing, with every game I participated in, play stopped any time that someone rolled up a new character.  That is, everyone at the table waited to see what the results would be.  The idea that a player would go off alone, while the game continued, to roll dice in order to make a new character without witnesses, was something I didn't encounter until many years later.  Perhaps it's because I play with Canadians, and we're all so polite.  Still, there's never been any question among players here, to this day, of having a vested interest in a player's new character.

There is, in fact, a palpable excitement among the players.  They remark on the 4d6 as they fall, expressing their enthusiasm when an 17 or 18 is rolled.  They want to know what the new character's going to be.  After all, this is a new member of their team; someone they'll soon have to rely on in a pinch.  Each game participant relives when they rolled up their character; how it felt; how the other players reacted.  The process isn't boring or dull.  It's an opportunity for bonding.

Let's start with my rolling a set of six results.  Sorry, not going to make a video of this, so I'll be rolling them without witnesses too ... but as this character is for demonstration only, this should be fine.

My first attempt yields, in order, 12, 15, 12, 13, 8, 15.  When rolling a player's "main" character, the first character the player gains, I don't consider these scores to be high enough.  As I explained in the 4d6 post linked above, my game relies on a bare minimum of stats.  As it happens, the above falls short by 1 point — I require a minimum of at least one 15, or higher, and one 16, or higher.  Thus, with a main character, these rolls are scrapped and the player rolls six new ones.  Once upon a time, I would just adjust the rolls, to create the minimum; but it's more exciting to have the player roll again.

Now, if the above set were rolled for a character's henchfolk, the additional supportive character a player gets when their main character reaches 5th level, before these numbers are scrapped I ask, "Do you want to keep these numbers, or keep the six you haven't rolled yet?"  Only two attempts can be made for a henchfolk, because they're deliberately meant to be supportive.  The player already has one tough-enough main character; henchfolk can have flaws.

In this case, I think probably the player would keep the rolls above for a henchfolk.  After all, the total is 75, about 2-3 points above average (I believe the average of 4d6, drop the lowest, is somewhere around 12.17, but if someone wants to correct me ...).  A new set of numbers could be much lower.

Let me roll a second attempt.  In order, 7, 10, 12, 8, 5, 11.  Ouch.  Wow, that is really bad.  One of my party's henchfolk is about this level.  The player named her, "Hope."  Mostly, as a hench, Hope looks after things.

I'll try again.  In order, 15, 17, 13, 9, 12, 16.  That's not bad.  As these are good enough, I'll make this a fighter, human I think for simplicity, and male because I'm a male.  The next step is to place these rolls under the headings of strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity and charisma.

Where to put them is always a point of contention.  As a player, my chief concern is survival.  At some later point, when I obtain a henchfolk, I'll have other concerns that addition can address.  As I know my game, and am observational about how often certain die rolls come up, I know where those stats ought to go to produce the best possible results.  I don't withhold that information; I'll tell a player my opinion, if I'm asked.  But I'm rarely asked.

Here's my contention with players who want to figure out everything for themselves.  They don't figure things out. They don't read the rules that I've posted that apply to making these choices.  They don't ask questions.  Instead, they throw numbers at stats with abandon, often assigning far more importance to charisma, in particular, than it deserves.

According to my aging table, as a human fighter I'm going to start the game between 15 and 18 years old (unless the character background generator adjusts this, but that's a low chance).  This means I'm almost certain to be a young adult.  Looking at the age adjustments to ability stats, my "new" character's wisdom is going to be adjusted by -1, and my constitution by +1.

If I put the two highest stats under strength and constitution, I end up with either a 16 strength and an 18 constitution, or a 17 in both.  A 16 strength adds 1 point of damage when I hit, but it gives no bonus at all when I try to hit.  The difference between a 17 and an 18 constitution is 1 point per level.  By the time I reach 9th level, if I do, this provides a difference of 9 additional hit points ... at a time when many of the monsters I'll be fighting cause that much damage a round.

Whereas in getting to be 9th level, I'm going to make hundreds of attempts to hit.  That +1 bonus to hit will matter a dozen times in every fight I enter, whether I'm hit or not.  Yet where does the player choose to put that 17?  For a fighter?  Under charisma.  At least half the time.

This is because, usually, a player sees that 17 and thinks, "OMG, I can be a paladin!"  So they waste the 17 under charisma.  Then the put the 16 under constitution, where it rises to another 17 ... and they put the 15 under their strength.  Where it is totally fucking useless to them.  Seriously.  They might as well put the 9 under their strength, since that's the bare minimum ... and every result from a 9 to a 15 gives the precise same bonus in fighting.  None.

Now, some would say this proves AD&D is a broken system.  See, the system doesn't let players be stupid gits when being a paladin matters more to them than anything else in the game, therefore it "doesn't work."  Especially as they find their treasured paladin can't hit anything in a fight.  It doesn't seem to sink in that maybe the paladin option should be reserved when at least two 17s are rolled, or that the 16 should be put under strength and the 15 under constitution, so they both become a 16.

I watch this happen all the time.  And when it does, I know the player's going to be disappointed.  I know they've built some fantasy model for the paladin in their head, but I'm not supposed to say anything, because "agency."  So I shrug, wait for the player to slowly grow aware of their start-of-the-game fuck up, and eventually out of pity throw them a +1 sword.

These early decisions in a strategy game can easily be the reason why a player quits our game.  And often, by threatening their agency a little bit by speaking some common sense out loud, and saying, "You're really going to miss being able to hit monsters," we at least gain the benefit of saying "I told you so," when they stew and pout away game time.  Assigning ability stats matters.  Its absolutely as important as choosing players for your office football pool — and there again, there's always one joiner who puts it all on one super-amazing player, who gets a knee injury in the season's second game.  Whereupon, they grouse and moan that it "wasn't fair" and "they didn't know."

That's all right for a football pool, but it's an attitude that positively sucks for D&D, when we all play together for many hours at a time.  I don't want investigative players, or experimental players, I want HAPPY players, who hit more often when they swing.

Missing stuff is for mages.

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.

I Don't Toboggan Any More

I don't toboggan any more.  Once upon a time, I did so at every opportunity in the winter, because it used to be a thing and because I was young and fit and could climb up a 100-ft. hill dozens of times.

I took this shot last night from atop St. Andrew's Heights in Calgary, usually considered the best sledding hill in the city.  The sign indicates clearly that it's still possible to freely participate in this somewhat dangerous activity.  The hill is 100 feet, according to Google Earth, though it looks somewhat higher.  A photograph, and even a video, doesn't do it justice.  I've added a photograph below, but in two-dimension it just can't capture the sense of vertigo I felt standing atop the hill last night.  It's strange to think how I went down this hill, alone, when I was the same age as the boy in the video.  Once, I was that happy.

A quarter-mile from the Foothills Hospital, which has a helicopter available if they can't get your body up the slope by carrying.  It was occasionally needed.  I've been down this hill on a wooden tobaggan, a sled with metal rails, a truck's inflated inner tube, one of those discs with handles and on a crazy carpet.  My father and I broke a toboggan in half jumping off a glassy-iced snow jump once, scattering us and pieces of the toboggan down the slope.  Note that the sign above says "no jumping."  In the 1970s, there was no sign.  But there were super-bright sports lights atop poles so people could sled at night.  Those poles are gone.

Why did I stop?  Hm.  My hard-core tobogganing days took place between the age of 9 and 13 ... with a few occasional times taking place in my teens and then a few more times with my daughter, who wasn't that into it.  When getting down to it, tobogganing is fun, but it's ... well ... repetitive.  Each time down the slope adds to a store of memories that steadily reduces the excitement and newness of future runs.

To compensate for this, we build new ways to make the tobogganing fresh again.  Once, we piled nine people on a four-foot wide inner tube and, clinging as tight as we could to one another, we went down the slope.  And then we did it again, only this time we went over the jump.  When we hit the ground, it was like a bomb made of people and kids.  No one was hurt.  We chose not to do it again.

New toys, new combinations, deliberately choosing places where the snow was ice, deliberately making ice ... we kept our interest going for a while.  But there's always the hill to climb up again.  And the next run is always a little bit more disappointing.  And the winter weather is never a plus. Until finally one day you're with a bunch of your fifteen year old friends and someone suggest sledding and everyone says, "nah ..."

I've been thinking about Lance's comment yesterday, where he wrote, 

"At this point I've played so many characters I just don't care that much about the how good or bad my pc is and would prefer to fit into a role than come to the table with my own prefabricated concepts.  There have been times where I've randomized my class choice and equipment selection. For me the choices are presented while playing the game, not before especially because I've made every one of those pregame choices hundreds of times and would rather be surprised by a result I would never choose(I'm naturally a bit of a min-maxer) than feel like I'm just playing the same character with a different name again. ..."

It's a bit sad, I think, when the notion of drawing up a character achieves the status of dragging a toboggan one more time up a hill for one more 27-second run.  Where it's so repetitive we have to design mini-games inside the character creation process to give ourselves a reason to care.  Right there's the slow death of a grognard losing his taste for the game.

I have not, as a point in fact, rolled up "hundreds" of characters, in large part because I stopped rolling my own characters at all in the 1980s, when I gave up playing for DMing.  But I also feel that I probably have barely topped a total of 100 characters for all the players who ever played in my campaigns.

During the one long campaign I ran between 1984 and 1994, I think I helped players roll a total of about 17 characters.  Prior to that, in the two brief campaigns I ran between 1979 and 1984, I could probably count maybe 25?  Six, eight players, occasional deaths, two campaigns ... hm.  Maybe 30.  Then, between '94 and 2003, I didn't run any games; I played in a couple and I worked on my game world, but no actual running.  Then, starting in 2003, out of about 14 players off-line, who have run the same main character since entering the campaign, it works out to about 40 characters and henchfolk.

That leaves the online people.  Maybe 10 characters with the first group, 8 more with campaigns that went nowhere, somewhere around 7 or 8 with the Juvenis campaign?  Call it 8.  All told, in the ball park of 125 characters that I've introduced into my D&D campaigns since I started in 1979.

Maybe that's why I simultaneously don't see D&D being about character creation all the time, and why I'm not bored with character creation.  I haven't remotely been down the tobogganning slope often enough to see the game through either lens.  I still think of character creation as "cool," so that I'm interested every time, while constantly building new angles on it to support the larger campaign game.  And while I do kill player characters, I don't do it that often.  People have seen me do it online, but in fact most of the time, the players live through each struggle and go on.  PLUS, when they die, they usually don't do it by slipping off a boat into the sea, where they'll be lost forever.  Usually they die of wounds.

So, I feel for Lance.  It hurts to see someone talking about character creation in those jaded frames.  It speaks of too, too many one-off games ... of too many 20-foot high toboggan hills.  Just ... just wrong.