Rolling stats

[Victor Maxus]

Hers is a cautionary tale.

For me, the idea of rolling for stats went out the window over 25 years ago. I was very young then, but my older brothers had a friend who was obsessed with having a better character than every one else simply by rolling high stats. The biggest glitch with rolling for stats came with Traveller. He would roll up a character, and if he was not powerful enough for his tastes, would immediately send the man into the belter career, where the survival roll was very high, almost a gaurentee on his death, and then start over.

The same sort of thing can be done with GURPS. If you roll for basic stats, don't get what you want, then get your chararcter Bad temper, impulsive, berserk, and on the edge and get him killed after the first few seconds of the first adventure. Then start over.

I know not everyone is like that, MOST of us took what we rolled and went with it. But to upset the fun for others, all it takes is one person who does this, and this can lead to a problem.

Just a fair warning before taking on the old roll for your stats idea.

[Brandy]

All of this depends upon the point level you intend to play at, too, as well as the emphasis you put on characteristics. For instance, in my campaigns, character attributes run in the 9-14 range, with 15's being very rare. Perfect Organism's method gives too broad a spread for that result, but Brandon's fudge dice idea is quite good -- though I would go with 12+3dFudge myself.

So-called "average dice" work well for this too (dice numbered 2,3,3,4,4,5). Rolling 4 average dice and keeping the best three gives a pretty good range, although 10% of the scores will fall below 10 that way.

[Johnny Angel]

I once played under a D&D DM who used the following method for rolling:

There are 6 stats in D&D (str, con, dex, wis, int, cha.) We had 5 players in the group, so he had each of us roll once, and then he rolled once. The resulting rolls are what everyone had to work with. You could place the numbers into whatever stat you wanted to place them in, but everyone -for better or worse- got the same set of numbers to work with.


However you decide to do it, my advice is to have everyone use the same method. Having some people roll and some people use point buy has the potentially to turn out unfairly.

On the other hand, I suppose you could give everyone a choice to roll or not to roll. Since the player wants to "roll the way you're supposed to in an rpg" I'd say that anyone choosing to roll has to roll 3d6 and take the stats as they are and in the order they are rolled - like old school D&D. Be sure to explain the possible benefits and the possible drawbacks of both methods and come to a group consensus that you're going to try doing it that way for a game and see how it works out.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Maz

To allow Stat-rolling in GURPS I would demand that either all players do it, or the one who rolls have to pay for the stats they roll (but maybe give them a -10%/-20% discount for the random effect).

I totally disagree with giving any kind of discount for rolling randomly; otherwise, the player is never going to learn for himself why random stats rolls are generally considered an "obsolete" gaming technology.

In this situation, I would let the player roll whichever dice scheme I considered appropriate to my campaign, pay the normal costs, and then use the normal point-buy system to "fix" whatever he doesn't like. If he wanted more points, he'd have to use Disadvantages like everyone else.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Harald387

Does anyone ever keep the character who rolled 6, 8, 10, 12, 11, 9 for his stats? No.

(Oh, now look what you've done. I'm mildly surprised that I could even find this character sheet after all these years.)

My favorite AD&D 1st ed. character was a Gnome Thief named Nelson Stonecutter, generated by rolling 4d6, drop the lowest, arranged as desired. (Method I, Dungeon Masters Guide, p.11 [©1979])

STR 11 INT 9 WIS 9 DEX 12 CON 12 CHA 7

The DM offered to let me reroll, but I was too amused at my dice luck to take him up on it.

Nelson was a hard-drinking True Neutral "agnostic"; gods demonstrably existed in the campaign world, but none of them were worthy of worship, in his opinion. He would make WIS rolls to stay awake during the Lawful Good Cleric's weekly sermons, and CON rolls to avoid snoring when the WIS roll failed. (I only remember him ever staying awake once; he complimented the cleric afterward.)

[Ultraviolet]

Originally Posted by capnq

(Oh, now look what you've done. I'm mildly surprised that I could even find this character sheet after all these years.)

My favorite AD&D 1st ed. character was a Gnome Thief named Nelson Stonecutter, generated by rolling 4d6, drop the lowest, arranged as desired. (Method I, Dungeon Masters Guide, p.11 [©1979])

STR 11 INT 9 WIS 9 DEX 12 CON 12 CHA 7

The DM offered to let me reroll, but I was too amused at my dice luck to take him up on it.

Nelson was a hard-drinking True Neutral "agnostic"; gods demonstrably existed in the campaign world, but none of them were worthy of worship, in his opinion. He would make WIS rolls to stay awake during the Lawful Good Cleric's weekly sermons, and CON rolls to avoid snoring when the WIS roll failed. (I only remember him ever staying awake once; he complimented the cleric afterward.)

The most memorable rolled stats I remember, is from D&D 3rd ed. We started a just-for-fun campaign following a more serious one. We decided upon some rules, and saw how it went.
The rules were: First choose Race, because this modified Attributes. Then roll Attributes individually, 4d6 discarding the worst die, but no switching around or lowering one stat by 2 to raise another by 1 or any other typical rules. One player ended with a DEX of 5 anyway.

Back on topic: GURPS is a system where points are used to buy elements, discarding any random elements. Otherwise you'd end up being dictated by luck, rather then being equivalent regarding total "power". How many D&D PCs have stats way ober 10 than under 10? A lot, is my answer. Few people want to play with sub-average stats. Sure, some people think this is funny, but it'll have to be a non-munchkin group, otherwise it'd suck IMHO.
In GURPS, you might have shockingly low attributes/skills in one place, but then you'll ace something else. Or a super-specialist sacrifices something, while a generalist spreads his resources.

Rolling 3d6 is way too much spread, and the extremes are too high/low, I agree with many previous posters on this.
The Point Total I believe affects what numbers/dice I'd recommend for randomly rolling. And then look at what stats that'll buy. Set some number (e.g. 12 or 13) and then 1d-2 or some modifier. For 12+1d-2 you get the range 10-16.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by Ultraviolet

The Point Total I believe affects what numbers/dice I'd recommend for randomly rolling. And then look at what stats that'll buy. Set some number (e.g. 12 or 13) and then 1d-2 or some modifier. For 12+1d-2 you get the range 10-16.

11-16.

Why not just simplify this and roll 10+1d6? (similar to the 9+1d6 I suggested upthread?)

[Ultraviolet]

Originally Posted by copeab

11-16.

Why not just simplify this and roll 10+1d6? (similar to the 9+1d6 I suggested upthread?)

Sure...if you use conventinal mathematics... ;)

And in hindsight, it does seem needlessly complex of me to use a higher number and a die minus something. 9+1d does seem both the easiest and giving a good range.

But how to treat this?

Do we want to make attrubutes totally random? Do we roll 4 times and place them ourselves? Or do we roll for them individually, keeping the number rolled?
Do we then assign a point total for buying Adv/Dis and Skills? Or do we calculate the point cost of the rolled attributes, and subtract from the point total budget?

Or you could say, all Attributes start at 9, and each die added cost points, based on the cost of the average roll. So adding ST/HT dice would cost 35, since the average roll is 3,5 - and DX/IQ 70. To avoid having the increments in huge chunks, perhaps consider using d3's instead? So each 15 points buys +1d3 to ST/HT or 30 points for each +1d3 to DX/IQ. Or perhaps this isn't random enough? *)
And what to to when only one player wants to "roll up his character", and the rest don't? A munchkin might suddenly re-roll again and again until het gets all 4 in the 15-18 range. Perhaps the rest will resent this, what with their expensively bought 12s and 13s.

*) This reminds me a lot of Millenium's End. In there you have a bunch of stats, in the 1-100 range, each with a starting value of around 20 (some things might change one or two to 15 or 25). Then you get some number of d10s to assign to each, minimum 1 and maximum 4. Each d10 rolled gets multiplied by 2 and added to the starting value. So the lowest value would be a (rare) 15 with only a single die, rolling 1, for a total of 17. And the maximum would be a (rare) 25, with 4 dice added, all rolling 10, for a total of 105. Thats somewhat random, but still selective where you want to assign a set number of resources.

[Almafeta]

Originally Posted by Harald387

About the only reason I can think of for wanting to roll stats is being able to get an edge over the other players because you rolled well. Does anyone ever keep the character who rolled 6, 8, 10, 12, 11, 9 for his stats? No.

True story -- the last d20 character I rolled up (Stargate SG-1) had this stat spread, rolled with physical dice with the GM watching:

12-12-12-12-12-11

[Brandy]

Rolling should mean less choice, not more power. Here's how I would handle it:

Suppose your characters are built on 150 points.

I would say that at minimum 30 must be reserved for skills and other traits. So, I'd let him roll by any method you like with a maximum allowance of 120 points of stats.

Suppose he rolls 14, 11, 14, 12 (what I just rolled with so-called "average dice"). That's 40+20+80+20 = 160 points of characteristics. The player is now required to pick up at least 40 points in disadvantages and has 30 + whatever number of disadvantages are in excess of 40 to spend on skills and other traits.

He can roll randomly, but he gets what he gets. In exchange for potentially exceeding the campaign's disadvantage limit (if he rolls very high), he'll have no opportunity to optimize the character for a particular role.