02.12
Recently I’ve been reading James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia, which is devoted to oldschool roleplaying of the ’80s/90s ilk. In addition to information on old games like Twilight 2000 and Traveller, it also has some very interesting discussions of the “pulp fantasy” influence on RPGs — fantasy stories of the pre-Tolkien era, such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft (to an extent), etc. Tolkien is still a major influence on fantasy writing, but he’s far from the only influence on D&D. (Michael Moorcock was also a big influence on OD&D, for instance, but he came after Tolkien and saw his Elric books as a sort of anti-Tolkien — his 1978 essay Epic Pooh being the most concise summary of his design philosophy. ^^ )
In his most recent post, Maliszewski writes about the Traveller character generation system, in which it’s actually possible to die during chargen if you roll badly on the various background rolls. Lots of people don’t have the stomach for this kind of thing, and there is something to be said for making the character creation process non-random, as in the Mearls-approved process in D&D4e. I, personally, do not feel that all characters have to be equal, and I think that it’s better when systems allow people to play ‘weak’ or ’strong’ characters without leveling the playing field too much. (Of course, they are all equal in the eyes of me, the DM, even if they are not equal stats-wise. ^^ )
But perhaps the real reason people object to random stats and random character backgrounds is not “fairness” but that it is too similar to what we have to deal with in real life. Determinism based on biology or upbringing is not most people’s chosen form of escapism (unless it is ‘good’ determinism and they are “destined to be awesome because they are the chosen heir of the throne of blah blah blah” etc.) In real life, we don’t get to choose who we’re born to or where we grow up or whether we have Asperger’s or diabetes. But in RPGs, we at least look forward to having an idealized and personally chosen backstory, even if we may get eaten by a dragon or something shortly after actual gameplay begins. In the gray area before actual gameplay begins, in our epic memories, we can all be heroes. It’s when the dice start rolling that the drama and tragedy and mayhem starts.
[...] Theo Dudek, the bright new hope of chaotic evil self promotional/geek/RPG indolence, assures us that he’s on top of the game by using cool words like ‘chargen’ and mak…. Thanks, Theo. One of my old gaming buddies went through our whole ridiculous set of campaigns with [...]
I kinda wish 4e supported random stat generation, I know a lot of people play to be an idealized version of themselves, but one of the main strengths of role playing is to be able to walk in another persons shoes and in a way be that person for a game session or campaign. Stretching beyond comfort zones and thinking, or perceiving the world(even an imaginary one) in ways you wouldn’t normally is the result.
“Recently I’ve been reading James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia, which is devoted to oldschool roleplaying of the ’80s/90s ilk. ”
You might want to back that up a decade, Junior. Surely the Ultimate Game Master would know that OD&D is a product of the 1970’s, not the 90’s.
90’s is “old school”? I weep for the youngest generation.
Back in my day to play DnD we had to walk 30 miles in the snow! uphill! both ways!
While my gaming life started with the red box I, personally, have just slightly more than 0 nostalgia for that gaming experience. Totally random char gen has no appeal to me, because when I come to the table to play I want to play /my/ ideas… not the ideas some table randomly picked for me. If I want to be a dwarven fighter, that’s what I want to be. If I want to be a mage, I don’t need the dice telling me “Oh, sorry, you rolled a 7 for int…”. As you say, I play games for escapism. I get plenty of “reality” in the vast majority of my life where I’m not gaming. In a one shot game (where I will inevitably have little to no emotional investment in the character anyways) I don’t mind totally random things handed to me really. But if I’m sitting down to play a long term game, I need to have some control over that creation process or I will not care about the game.
Take a look at Hackmaster (4th Ed. – the old one) wherein you could die on char gen, too. At least, if you choosed a fighter and used the fighters handbook, too. The chances where small as you could spare points during char gen to reroll certain rolls but if you went too power hungry in the beginning it was possible that you were missing the reroll points in the end when you needed them.
I love the system and am waiting for the new Advanced Hackmaster eagerly. You should get the old edition quite cheap if you like…
@kaeosdad — Actually, I’ve never played a 4e game which didn’t use random chargen. It is at least mentioned as an option, so that’s good! ^^ I’m a little disappointed that it’s not presented as the ‘primary’ method of chargen, though. The characters created by their ‘point-allocation’ system are a little too bland (no negatives?!?!).
@Joseph — Excuse me, I mean 1970s-1990s! -_-;; I’ve read lots of ’70s games, but it slipped my mind. You know, apparently there was a poll on enworld once which showed that more tabletop RPGers were born in 1974 than any other year.
@justaguy — I think that there needs to be a balance between randomness and creative control. Obviously being able to create the character *you* want to create is a major appeal of RPGs. (Actually, this is sort of a weakness in 4e, since I have DMed games where the players created an untenable group because no one wanted to play a Leader or Defender…) But I think there is good to both non-random chargen (like in 4e, Shadowrun or World of Darkness) and random chargen (like in D&D editions prior to 4e). They both have their appeal. I think the main thing is to make ‘weakness’ appealing in its own way, like in a point-based game where you can take disadvantages. Like, you might randomly be assigned some disability, but it could provide great roleplaying opportunities, or (on a mechanical level) it might provide you extra points which could be spent on other stuff but *not* to ‘buy off’ said disability. Basically, RPGs are about escapism, but not all escapism needs to be of the super-heroic ilk. It opens up possibilities if there are character roles for scribes and lettuce farmers and goat herders too.
@Cyric — Thanks for the tip! ^^
“It opens up possibilities if there are character roles for scribes and lettuce farmers and goat herders too.”
Just makes me think of the time we were starting a post lvl 1 page of 3e and one of the players looked at his gold allotment, looked at the equipment list and declared “I buy 1000 sheep and retire. Going into dungeons is dangerous and stupid.”
Regarding randomness… I don’t mind some, to the degree that I enjoy the visceral joy of rolling the dice as much as the next gamer, I just don’t like to be totally stymied by those dice. There really needs to be a balance that fits the group. I’ve had players ask to randomly generate scores even when I say use point buy, and I’ve had players want to point buy when I do random because they honestly couldn’t roll a character to save their life (Seriously, I had a guy who using 4d6 drop lowest, 3 sets of scores, have his best set net a +1 bonus. He was consistently horrible at rolling stats). At this point I just let the player decide how to do scores, because I largely don’t care.