Back in the heady days of first edition D&D, you rolled 3d6 six times for your stats, and created a character around them. Your scores ranged from 3 to 18, and you worked with the strengths and limitations of those numbers to create a three dimensional personality. Usually, if you rolled an 8 or less, you were given the option of rolling a new set or playing with what you had. That evolved into rolling 4d6 seven times and dropping the lowest result. In any case, however, the set of rolled stats defined your character.
You worked with the stats you rolled. If you rolled a 6 intelligence, you played an imbecile. If you rolled an 18 dexterity, you played a cat burglar. I remember a game where the player wanted to play a barbarian. He rolled an 18 intelligence, so I ruled he could talk to animals. The numbers defined the possibilities. Sometimes you got super powerful characters with lots of stats in the teens, but those characters were no fun. There was no challenge. The diversity of the numbers created the personality, and the role-playing that randomly generated personality was past of the fun.
Today, point buy has become the norm. The paying field has been leveled. Every character is practically the same. The scores are optimized toward a preconceived concept defined by myriad other statistics, and the numbers are all that matter. There is no personality in the numbers anymore. Now they are just vehicles to other statistics. Many games are played these days whe the characters have no personality at all. The goal has become the collection of power and epic level numbers battles.
I have played in many games over the years where my attempts to introduce personality into my characters has been received with animosity, my lengthy character backgrounds ignored, and the emphasis placed on advancing characters to face statistically more challenging opponents. In recent years, I have moved to stat light games based on the Fate system or Savage Worlds. I see the trend moving back toward creativity and personalities.
I prefer role-playing to roll-playing. Though I must confess that I don’t like diceless systems. I need a little structure to my randomness.
your argument lost its point once you got to picking which roll goes to each stat. after that, you either have an average character, or an over-powered one (since you can re-roll away any underpowered ones.) _then_ it’s just lucky-rolled (or cheat-rolled) vs. average-rolled. and an interesting character background only goes so far with a stat-cripple character.
point-buying SAVED role-playing. no more of the vagaries of random dice rolls setting the fate of your character from the beginning, but instead it’s what you CHOOSE to create, and later develop over time.
and if you want your character background, etc. to be the prime force, then diceless is it. you can’t say you didn’t enjoy playing Amber.
I didn’t enjoy playing Amber. It was confusing, only one person played at a time, and I never knew what the goal was or how to affect the outcome.
With point buy, every character is an average one. Everyone starts with all the stats at 12 and moves one or two up or down from there. Rolling the stats allowed you to work with your predestined strengths and weaknesses, and with a good DM use them to an “underpowered” character’s advantage.
with point buy, every character starts equal, but not necessarily average, that all depends on how many points you have to spend. however, it’s the same with any of the later developed rolling systems. once you go to 4d6 drop the lowest, you’re evening things out; once you do 7 rolls drop lowest, you’re evening things out. if you’re doing all that to smooth out the dice rolling, why bother with the pretense and just use point-buy.
if you really believe what you’re saying about rolling vs. point-buy, then you should be rolling old-school-style, 3d6, in order, that’s it.
The conventions of 4d6 or roll 7 keep 6 were introduced to reduce the number of complete rerolls of characters. I preferred the 5d4+2 method, which allowed for playable characters, but that never caught on. The point is that evening things out made the personality of the character independent of the statistics. That led the way to characters not needing personalities, the rise min-maxing, power gaming, and rules lawyering.
Role playing used to have statistics for structure. Now the statistics are everything. You might as well play Warhammer 40K.
utter nonsense. min-maxing, power-gaming and rules lawyering have been with the game since the beginning. if you the point of the extra dice-rolling is to avoid complete re-rolls, then allow the player to designed the character they want from the start. you’ve already lost most of your argument once you allow arranging of rolls for stats. 4d6-drop-one, or 5d4+2, is just flattening out and pushing up the statistical curve of possible rolls. after that, it’s just a matter of picking the dump-stat.
Not in my experience. Point buy, min-maxing and power gaming didn’t show up until 3rd Edition D&D when suddenly anyone could do anything, the number of rules exploded, and manipulating the numbers became the goal of the game. That’s why rules light games have started to reappear.
In Fate, you roll dice equal to your stat that are either +, blank, or – and the result is success or failure. The setting and the role playing determine any bonuses or penalties. In Savage Worlds, the stats are die types, you roll for 4+ to succeed (with multiples of 4 raising the outcome in your favor), and regardless of the die type, if you roll the highest value, the die explodes. So you could have a d4 in a stat and have a magnificent success, or a d12 in a stat and fail miserably. Both of these systems only have a few stats and a short list of broad skills that you as a player justify the applicability of in specific situations.
Perhaps point buy isn’t the source of the problem, but rather the proliferation of expanded rule sets that make the personality of the character less important than what it can do. Not to mention their introduction of such things as whether these books as balanced when used in combination with those, etc.
unbalanced splat-books were definitely a problem in 3.0/3.5. Paizo, I feel, has done a good job in making sure their expansions off the core-rules are well balanced.
I feel that the expanded rules, classes, archetypes, etc. add flavor. it allows one to reflect the differences in their characters, not JUST in the description, but also in the mechanics. without those mechanical differences, there’s no difference between a vanilla fighter and a samurai. in rules lite, you can role-play them differently, but mechanically you’re doing the same thing. with the expanded rules, you can now reflect those difference in BOTH the role-play AND the mechanics.
if you didn’t experience munchkin power-gaming before playing in 3.0/3.5, consider yourself lucky. I remember it happening back in the AD&D days, and I’m sure it goes back further.
does character generation in Fate or Savage Worlds force your character into some niche due to some good or bad dice rolls, or can you customize the character you want to play?
and, FYI, Fate came from Fred Wolkes making a version of FUDGE to play Amber.
In both Fate and Savage Worlds, you don’t roll up characters. You use Edges and Hindrances to enhance the narrative. They generally add +1 or +2 to a skill roll. The character is not married to the dice. In Fate (I’m using my experience with Icons and Dresden Files as the basis of my descriptions) characters are generated by selecting skills and powers. Skils are slotted into ability levels that amount to roll target modifiers, and you can swap skills around between adventures. In Savage Worlds (based on Deadlands Reloaded and Realms of Cthulhu), characters are based off broad templates that suggest starting die types for each stat, and you can advance die types, among other things, when you earn five experience points (you earn 1-3 XP per game session).
Joab Stieglitz, PMP, MSOM jstieglitz@st-i-e-g.org
I have to admit, the barbarian character with the int of 2, and the list of 20 words he understood was one of my favorite rp encounters. It was a lot of fun, but would never have happened in a point buy game. But, on the other hand, your rp was determined by your stats, and if you wanted to play a barbarian, and got a 9 str, you were stuck.