Walked 25 miles through the snow, uphill both ways....

I was leafing through some really old AD&D character sheets and what-not from my university days, and recalled how liberal we thought our DM was being when he not only let us roll 4d6 (drop lowest) instead of 3d6 for our characteristics, but then even let us rearrange them a bit if we didn't have the minimum requirements to play the class we really, really wanted with the six scores we'd rolled in order.

It seems to me that we didn't usually end up with particularly shitty characters, and some of them lasted a very long time indeed (though with a certain amount of resurrection magic at hand, it has to be said). In point of fact, I think we were beating the statistical curve quite convincingly with our character generation rolls, since there seem to be few characters in the pile without at least one characteristic in the 17-18 range, though that's in part because the DM was pretty liberal with characteristic-enhancing magic items and wishes and such-like. Where the old characters differ, stat-wise, from more recent ones is that most of their characteristics were distinctly average, and some were truly bad.

In contrast, these days most people seem to deem a character pretty much unplayable unless they start with at least one 18, and having any stat under 13 is cause for great complaint and doom-saying. It irks me, somewhat.

I'm not entirely blameless, since I've allowed some pretty liberal stat-rolling methods in the past, and people have become used to being able to pick and choose from a vast pool of above-average potential characters. I need to tighten up on that a bit.

I still think that Ye Olde 3d6-In-Order is a bit savage, but I'm very tempted to go back to 3d6 rolls (instead of 4d6, drop lowest) for my Characteristic Wheel stat generation system.

The thing is, I'm not so much keen on making everyone play a raddled, crippled, hideous moron, as I am on making high characteristics a bit special. At the moment, they're not, and I think that's wrong, and a bit sad.

Beyond the Big Four character classes

I've been angsting on and off about how to allow players to customise their character classes without tipping everything out of whack. Not that it's really been much of an issue thus far; most of my players seem to be perfectly happy with one of the base classes. However, I like to have options available.

I've been using add-on sub-classes which tack on to one of the basic classes, adding abilities and increasing the experience required to rise in level thereby. I think the concept is OK, but it still straitjackets players somewhat, and there's no real consistency in terms of abilities gained to XP required.

Ancient Dragon magazine article to the rescue! In Dragon #109, an article appeared called Customized classes — How to put together one-of-a-kind characters by Paul Montgomery Crabaugh.

In it he proposes a system whereby one begins with a basic human-equivalent nobody, without any particular abilities at all. This mannequin begins with an XP progression that appears ludicrously low: only 400 XP required to get to Level 2, and 75,000 to reach the giddy heights of Level 10.  The catch is that, assuming it survived to get to 10th level, it would still be a pretty useless character.

What you do is, you start adding abilities to the mannequin — things like Hit Dice (from d4 to d10), maximum level, armour and weapons skills, spell-casting (and maximum spell level capability), and even weird species-specific abilities like flight or gills tough skin or whatever.

Each of these things increases the XP requirements for level increase by a certain percentage. For example, if you choose d10 hit dice, you're already at 200% of your base mannequin's XP requirements. Add the ability to use any armour and any weapon, and that's another +125%. If you want to be able to amass HD until 12th level before dropping to a standard per-level increase, that's another 40%. If you want to increase your combat skill every other level, that's another 100%.

By now, your 400 XP to reach 2nd level has turned into 400 x 465% = 1,860 XP. And basically you've recreated a bog-standard Fighter. (Note that there's more stuff to be included, such as saves, special skills and allowed magic items and so forth, I just thought I might as well stop there.)

Crabaugh was writing to players of Basic D&D, though there's an editorial note to the effect that it could be used to slightly modify AD&D classes as well. His system is not completely suited to my own Swords & Wizardry-based campaigns, but it wouldn't require too much tinkering to make it fit, and I think I'll give it a go.

What's the worst that could happen? Actually no, don't answer that. I can already imagine.

Character generation — a dream within a dream

I've used at least one oodle, and probably many oodles of character generation methods across a multitude of roleplaying systems. I've even built a character for a game called Space Opera (I think) which had a character generation system so convoluted that by the time we'd finally finished, we were too exhausted to actually play the game.

What I want to concentrate on right now are some of the methods I've used to create characters for my various D&D campaigns, in no particular order.

1) 4d6, drop the lowest, in order

This is the system I was first introduced to when I started playing AD&D in 1981. As far as I could see, from the fairly tiny pool of D&D players in Palmerston North and Wellington in those days, it was pretty much the default method for everyone.

It's a pretty decent method that is reasonably good at not producing a string of crippled gimps, but exceptional characteristics (i.e. anything in the 16–18 range) were still rare enough to be special. We seldom discarded a stat-block as rolled, unless it was really, really bad.

To begin with, we just rolled the stats in order and built whatever character class would fit them. In a revolution in player-enablement, our DM actually started allowing us to swap two of the stats around so that we weren't necessarily forced into (or out of) any given class. Wow! The power!

It was under this system that was born a character whose every stat was either 10 or 11. Naturally, he had to be called Mean Norm the Average Ranger. (That's a statistics joke, folks. They're few and far between, so make the most of it).

2) The 6x6 3d6 matrix

This is a system I came up with all by myself, though the chance of me being the first person ever to have this particular blinding flash of inspiration is pretty small.

In this system, the player rolls 3d6 36 times, writing the results in a 6x6 grid like the one shown here. The order in which the stats are laid out is unimportant as long as they're the same horizontally and vertically.

The player can choose one statblock from any of the rows or columns, or, at a pinch, from either diagonal. The stats can't be rearranged, so if you want to play a specific class you may have to make some compromises — for example, in the set shown here, if the player wants to play a magic-user and get the 16 result into their INT slot, they're going to have to accept a CHA of 6.

This is a fairly decent system for pumping out characters that will perform pretty well. It gives the players a certain amount of freedom to choose which class they want to play, but being limited to 3d6, doesn't often produce terrifying Übermenschen.

3) The 12 x 3d6 decoder ring system

This is another system of my own invention. The player rolls 3d6 12 times and writes the results in a row. Then any contiguous set of six stats can be chosen, depending on which class the player wants to build

The stats wrap around, so if you fall off the right-hand side you complete your set of six from the left — as shown in the animation, the red set (fighter or thief) starts its statblock 5 places from the right, so its 6th stat is taken from the left-most. The statblock, once chosen, can't be rearranged.

Again, it's a system designed to allow for a degree of player freedom without tending towards mega-stat monsters.

4) 3d6 in order, and suck it up

I include this although I've hardly ever actually used it. I would only use it these days in a high-mortality one-off game in which character replacement is going to be very frequent. I know it has a certain masochistic appeal to some grognards, but in my experience most people prefer to play reasonably capable characters; the novelty of having to deal with a weak, clumsy, sickly, stupid, foolish, hideous character wears off pretty quickly for most.