Extended Rant #1

Things I Greatly Dislike About Most RPGs

It's simple; character creation.

There are far too many dice being rolled during character creation in most game systems. I understand that it's "tradition" going back to the glory days of guys with too many G's and X's in their name, but come on. That really is relying far too heavily on old Lady Luck, and as any gamer worth his dice-bag will tell you, Lady Luck can be a fickle wench.

In days of yore, this led, of course, to the "dump-stat"; the one that you never really used and could really live without. I've played with far too many folks with characters who looked like the wrong end of a hemorrhoidal dragon to ever be happy with that situation!

Now, the arrival of the d20 System changed some of that (particularly ugly characters finally found some form of punishment for killing their charisma scores), but still, far too much dice rolling. And for this I have a cure!

Don't roll dice.

It's simple. Don't do it. "How?" I hear you cry. Buy them.

That's right, buy your attributes. At the simplest, each player has a certain number of points to spend on his character's attribute scores. Different systems would need different totals. For any game I run that uses the d20 system, I hand out 80 points for players to buy PC attributes. Each stat starts at 0, and the points are spent on a 1:1 ratio. To make things even more interesting, I establish a minimum score of 3 and NO MAXIMUM score. That's right, no maximum.

If you want to set all your stats but one to 3's and dump the rest into, say, Strength, then you will die very early on, with no hit points, no saving throws, no skills, and no conversational capability worth mentioning. Sure, STR of 65 sounds great. You could wrestle with a dragon. But you're still gonna die. And it won't take much either, you silly person you.

Yeah, there's ways to abuse this idea (slightly more viable than the above example would be a 40 in one stat and 8's in the rest), and some would scream about "balance" and "fairness", but let me ask you this: What's so fair about rolling all 9's and 10's while someone else manages four 18's? Not a gosh-darned thing.

At least with a points buy system you have a character that you can tailor into what you want to play, instead of being subject to the whim of some form of polyhedral random number generators. The balance comes into it when you try to arrange for all the other game-factors that are dependant on the attribute scores you have purchased. You could have those three 18's, but the rest of your stats are gonna suck, just a bit. The idea still retains a form of balance, but that balance is more predictable and more trustworthy than using dice.

More to come on this subject.