Why Choice Sucks: the Beauty of Random Generation

[inky]

What seems to be happening here, if you ask me, is you're violently opposed to randomness as a constraint, but you're piling up illogical reasons to defend the position.  I wonder why, since it's used in many parts of lots of games, including gamist ones -- for example, in combat systems.  So what's the objection to putting a little at the start?  A sort of Fortune-in-the-Opening system, as it were?  Why does that somehow break everything, whereas constraint and randomness at any and every other point is perfectly okay?  This is cultural, not logical.

I should point out, though, that people tend to gripe if combat systems are so random as to negate most of the skill -- critical hit systems, for instance, are out of fashion these days primarily for gamist reasons (D&D still has something called critical hits, but it's not a Rolemaster-esque your-head-flies-off-1d6-meters-away; it's a small amount of extra damage that can be rigorously predicted and optimized). Similarly, you mention poker as giving random deals: sure, and good players fold a lot of the time until they get a hand they think they can do something with. This applies to the combat example also; the rolls tend to average out over time and sometimes the players die -- but there's only one chance to get your strength set, and if you get unlucky you're stuck with it.

I think that in general, people are not interested in demonstrating they can step up to specific randomly-generated challenges. What they are interested in is demonstrating they can stepp up to the environment as a whole, but the only way to get at that is to face a large number of challenges sampled from the environment and demonstrate you can cope with most of them. "Most of them" being the key term -- because they're chosen semi-randomly you're going to get nailed some of the time and won't be able to do anything about it, so for effective demonstration of step-on-up you need to look at player performance across a number of interactions and see how they do overall. (So why pick randomly and risk getting encounters that are too easy or too hard? That's the cultural part, I think. There has to be uncertainty in what encounters come up or you solve them all in advance, game over, but you get the same kind of uncertainty in chess or go just by virtue of them having extremely large decision trees.)

The rest of your post gets into "Is it ok to randomly assign someone a character type?". I think this is not the same thing as "Is it ok to randomly determine the power level of the character?" and trying to justify the second with examples from the first just confuses things.

[ffilz]

Hmm, if you think randomness of character is so good, and a good gamist will rise to the challenge of playing the character he's given, would you be willing to play a game of chess where we flipped a coin for each piece to see if you get to start with that piece or not?

I know I used to hate the Avalon Hill war games that were so concerned with being perfectly historical all the way to the victory conditions (you don't win Afrika Corps as the German player by doing better than history, you only win by winning). At one time I was really exploring a space boardgame, Starfire. The first scenario seemed very weighted for one side to win. I solo played it a bunch of times trying to get a win for the other side. I couldn't. Then one time I introduced another player to it. I suggested we skip the first scenario because it was a forgone conclusion. He still wanted to play it. So I suggested he play the side that was fated to win. He wanted to play the other side. I won. He said the game sucked and stormed off.

Gamism is not possible if your character is not able to rise to the challenge raised by the group. It might be possible to play gamist with a wimpy character if the group as a whole plays to the challenge of playing your character. But I've never seen a group do this. I've always seen gamism being played as rising to the challenge of the scenario.

But then I dislike gamism so what am I to say?

All I can do is repeat again, in all of my experience, random character generation has led to unequal play potential. Having the greatest theory in the world about how games should be played isn't worth a damn if the rest of the group doesn't buy that theory.

So am I violently opposed to randomness in character creation? Yes and no, well actually mostly no because I'm not violently opposed. I am against randomness that creates different play potential. I am interested in how to bring in some randomness that doesn't affect play potential (or at least to much of an extent, if randomness means we range from 95% to 105% of average play potential, then it probably isn't all that bad).

Hmm, on clerics. Clerics (in D&D) seem to be almost univerally despised by players. Why is this? Because they don't get to kick ass in a game about kicking ass. Sure, they help the other characters kick ass, but they don't do it themselves. As long as the game is about kicking ass, the cleric player is likely to be dissatisfied. Now sometimes you're lucky and there is a player who really wants something different and he's happy playing the cleric, but that player is probably not gamist, and certainly is playing a different game than everyone else.

On simulationism and exploration of wimpy characters: I personally would not find this interesting. And that's something to remember, for each CA, there are numerous individual goals. I actually get the most interest in exploration of setting. So sure, it's possible to posit a gamist interest in rising to the challenge of a wimpy character,  but it's just as likely (if not more likely) that gamists are interested in rising to different challenges and would see the wimpy character as just that.

On the poker analogy, something to consider is that you don't get one hand in poker that you play all night with. Now if you knew the deck was stacked such that you would never get a hand better than a pair (and usually a low ranked pair at that), would you still find the game enjoyable? Because that's a better analogy for the wimpy character.

Frank

[ffilz]

One more thing...

Is there interest in discussion how to include randomness without including a whiff factor or is this thread just going to be about berating folks for not wanting to rise to the challenge of playing a "wimpy" character?

I've several times raised the point that I am interested in talking about how to include randomness in character generation if we can explore ways to avoid the whiff factor.

One interesting point that was rasied in the discussion of fudge vs. no fudge over on Monte Cook's boars was that you should never roll dice if you aren't willing to accept all possible results. This is particularly interesting as regards to character generation. D&D has steadily been including more methods of generating ability scores in attempt to produce more playable characters.

In my Arcana Unearthed campaign I tried an experiment. I allowed people to roll 4d6 take the best 3 6 times, re-rolling a single die. If they didn't like the scores that produced, they could spend 32 points using the point buy method from the DMG. I even would "score" their rolls and tell them if they were better than 32 points. This was an interesting system, that some analysis I did suggested that about 40% of the time it was worth taking the rolls. At first we saw almost no one take the rolls except one player who rolled incredibly well (2 or 3 18s, worst ability score was a 15 I think). Certainly no one had a whiff, but I also noticed one player running through characters (I made it easy to punt and start a new character). I'm not sure that part of his motivation wasn't seeking a better character (how many folks remember trying to kill off crummy characters in Traveller's previous experience system?).

Based on what I saw from this experiment, I will be going with straight point buy for my next game unless I can come up with a better random system. I did play around trying to create a random system which had opposed attribute pairs (each pair would add up to the same number). I never convinced myself it was actually workable but it was an interesting exercise. I also played around with the system trying to encourage non-middle results (so one thing I did was have one die distribute a bunch of points to one side or the other, while the rest of the dice just distributed one point).

Frank

[M. J. Young]

If were talking gamist, then you need to facilitate choice.

I know Chris has said this, but I think the same thing: gamism does not require that you be able to choose your starting position. It only requires that you have a chance to prove your ability.

Look at Bridge. With each hand, you get a randomly determined set of cards. You can see a quarter of the deck. If you win the auction, you get to see another quarter of the deck--which is revealed to everyone at the table, but played by you. At that point, you've got to decide how to do what you said you could do before you saw those cards.

Meanwhile, your opponents, who can't see each other's cards, have to figure out how to stop you.

You could win with lousy cards if they play poorly and you didn't set the bar too high for yourself. You could lose with great cards if they outplay you and you've set the bar too high during the auction. It's not as much about what you're dealt as what you do with it.

I've seen the same thing in games of partnership pinochle, where one partnership managed to outplay the other despite having a much worse lay of the cards, just because they paid more attention to what they had to do and they did it.

One of my favorite fantasy characters was in a modified AD&D campaign. The fact is, the referee gave out stats like candy--roll 4d6, reroll all ones and twos until you don't have any, then take the best three. Despite this, my notoriously bad dice luck gave me a best score of 15, and the referee had to give me a few points so I would qualify for the minimums of playing a kensai. The other players had high-powered attributes and carefully chosen abilities. They were powerhouses. I was an also-ran.

By the end of the first adventure, mine was the only character who made third level, and was the most respected character in the game. I played smart, and took calculated risks when I needed to, and won them more often than not. I strategically out-maneuvered a skeletal warrior and out-talked a demon, as well as leading the party in and out of serious danger to complete our mission, and making them all rather wealthy in the process.

The question is not what you've got, but how you use it. Some players need those high scores because they're lost without them. The challenge arises when you can do as well or better without them.

As to clerics, oddly my kids are organizing a D&D game right now. I was thinking of playing, but then I found out that the cleric slot had already been filled, so now I'm not sure what I would do. I find clerics incredibly useful in play, particularly shukenja, and like playing them. (Not my only choice, but a good one.) I think again this is a matter of people not thinking about how to use what they can do effectively. In short, people who don't want to play clerics probably are having trouble figuring out how to play a character effectively if the character's effectiveness isn't obvious on the front page of the character paper.

Based on what I saw from this experiment, I will be going with straight point buy for my next game unless I can come up with a better random system.

Take a look at the http://www.mjyoung.net/dungeon/char/step005a.html">D&D Method V rolling system (the version linked is expanded to cover more character classes than the original). I did the math now, although I don't recall the details. As I recall, you had something near a 50% chance that your single best attribute score would be an 18, but because of the declining rolls the odds for each successive score went down to about 0.5% on the last roll.

There's no reason you can't design a randomized system that gives solid returns. You just have to take the time to figure out what you want and how to get it.

--M. J. Young

[ffilz]

By the end of the first adventure, mine was the only character who made third level, and was the most respected character in the game. I played smart, and took calculated risks when I needed to, and won them more often than not. I strategically out-maneuvered a skeletal warrior and out-talked a demon, as well as leading the party in and out of serious danger to complete our mission, and making them all rather wealthy in the process.

That sounds cool. But I'd say that your GM enabled your play. I've seen too many games where the GM only enabled straight up combat effectiveness. In the games I've played where I had crappy characters I basically had nothing I could contribute to the game (especially in the ones where I was playing a fresh low level character in a higher level party, where the existing players had much more knowledge about the world, so if any sort of talking came up, they dominated).

Of course the key here is that the GM has to enable his players to have a good time. For the most part, the GMs I have played with didn't consider this part of their duty. They ran games where you had to "earn" your way to an effective character. Is it any wonder I'm soured to playing in general, and a lot of character generation techniques.

You bring up more card games,  but again, they aren't really fair analogies. You aren't stuck with the same hand for a seasons worth of bridge nights (and in fact, in a bridge tournament, 1/4 of the players will get the the same hands you got).

Take a look at the D&D Method V rolling system

But you could still end up with a pretty crappy character. Sure, it becomes exremely rare, but still (and one thing using the normal distribution combat chart I've mentioned here before has taught me is tha tthe improbable will happen)... Of course that method is still dependent on chosing class first, so it wouldn't meet the test of "roll a set of ability scores and decide what to play with it."

But certainly Method V is one way to approach a more reasonable system. And probably had such been used in the games I played in, I would have wound up a lot happier (though I think definitely everyone would have been playing a spell caster in Cold Iron, but then perhaps that's ok for that system - I'm not sure).

Frank

[Callan S.]

How do you judge step on up in a player?

By his choices. Suppose the GM in collaboration with a group expectation, decides to test your fighting tactics? Mostly an opportunity for melee combat. And you rolled 5 strength (which puts your probabilities down the plug hole). What choices can you make to be judged by?

But, you might say, quickly change the challenge to being a leader, or a researcher or such like.

So you dodge the challenge. That's step on up? Eh? Your stepping on up to the challenge of avoiding the step on up given?

I'll grant, there is gamism there. But quite frankly it sounds like a certain article:

"my GM Herbie can run anything. The game can suck, but he can toss out what he doesn't like and then it rocks." OK, fine. Herbie is talented. However, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have to spend all that time culling the mechanics.

In that one of the primary methods of challenge (melee combat), sucks a great deal of ass because of another part of the system (random strength). But ah ha, one can dodge over to one of the parts of the game which isn't the focus of the game. And therefore this part hardly has step on up assistance built into it (usually something like a 'roll and add your stat' deal, which is not influenced by player choice at all).

Imagine how good the step on up would be if you didn't have to dodge over to the more shabby parts of the system. Imagine if system did matter to the designer! >:)

If there's one thing I've noticed about men, is that like not mentioning anything about the emperors new clothes, they will embrace a shitty challenge like they have some meaningful chance at it. A crap challenge often gets accepted because nobody wants to be thought of as a wimp in calling it out as crud. "It's not crud, your just wimpy!"

Can I say 5 strength is crap, without being called wimpy? Much like only an intelligent person could see the emperors new clothes and what must I be if I can't see them and say so?

Has crap gamist design been leaning on this sort of thing for quite some time?

[greyorm]

...or is this thread just going to be about berating folks for not wanting to rise to the challenge of playing a "wimpy" character?

<moderator hat on> Snarky attitudes characterized by leading questions will absolutely not be allowed here, Frank. If you can not handle a valid and challenging criticism of one of the standard dismissals of randomized character generation without mischaracterizing such as an attack or smear, I suggest you need to rethink your involvement in this thread (in more than the obvious sense). </moderator hat off>

Now, Frank mentions one of the main hurdles to acceptance of randomized systems in his statements, and likely unintentionally reveals why there is such a reaction to their suggestion as valuable:

That would be great if that was the way campaigns were run...I spent a lot of time not contributing to the game...I am interested in seeing how randomness could be used in character generation without it writing players out of the game, but all the players (including the GM if any) have to buy into the system.

First, notice there are actually two seperate subjects in the above: the subject of player choice to play under a given set of restrictions (which must include understanding those restrictions first), and the much less obvious subject of Dysfunctional Play. I fully agree that everyone at the table must buy into a system for that system to work (which includes the Social Contract, expectations of play, etc.). I have no argument with you there.

Basically, Randomized Generation is not going to solve dysfunctional play, but neither is Choice-based Generation. Yet CBG is being touted as the cure to the problems encountered. This is where my problem with the statement comes in.

In fact, Frank even points out very well why this is a situation of dysfunctional play affecting the result, rather than a problem of randomized generation: when he notes that the crappy characters he has played were crappy precisely because they were not combat effective in a game where the GM rewarded combat effectiveness.

When Frank claims that "random character generation has led to unequal play potential," I must respond that random character generation has done no such thing. As we can see, this is clearly a problem with the Social Contract and the choices of the GM in regards to his players. The problem lies with things completely outside the boundaries of the mechanical level. This problem of inequality/ineffectiveness rests almost entirely on the GM's shoulders, it is literally a case of the GM hosing the player (through choice or ignorance) and NOT the system. The system...has nothing to do with the problem.

How so? Note, the exact same complaint would arise from a gamemaster doing the following: "Ok, player one, you face three orcs. Player two, you face an ancient red dragon." Or from a player choosing a rogue with low hit points, or taking a non-combative cleric. In any of these cases, is play inequality the fault of random generation? Clearly not.

Yet for some reason, in this thread, these two exactly similar situations are being regarded as completely seperate.

Frank concludes that

Gamism is not possible if your character is not able to rise to the challenge raised by the group.

But it must be noted that this inability to do so is not a problem caused (inherently) by randomized generation, as the source of the difficulty is being made out to be. It is a problem with the GM, poor social contracts, and just plain bad group communication.

The above is illustrated in no greater way than in the futility of changing the mechanical system in such a case. The problem will remain, masked, perhaps, or this symptom of it covered over, without really being solved, ready to leap back out at the players at any given time -- as multiple orcs, angry red dragons, and crippled beggars.

In fact, this goes right back to the "starship captain" scenario: if the game is about starship captains, then you play starship captains, randomly generated or not. If the game is about starship captains, and you cannot create a starship captain with the rules...then it is obviously the RG system to blame, right?

No. Generation itself is broken, and the whole system may be broken. The problem is not that randomized generation is to blame for the difficulties, because CBG rules would be broken on this count as well (one could make a non-starship captain with the system and end up in the same pickle). So, yes, the problem is with the rules, but no, the problem is not with randomization.

Rather, regardless of "who/what is to blame" The players have simply made the choice during character creation to avoid the problem, without addressing the underlying problem. "I'll make a superior fighter!" they say, and play into the supported agenda of play on the part of the group or GM.

The belief is then that they made "A Choice" that was not constrained, disrupted, or ruined by randomized generation...and that is frankly just bullshit. They've altered one thing only: their own willingness to participate in the restrictions upon play, their own understanding and expectations of play. In this case, the unspoken GM-based restriction that characters be about combat prowess. Ultimately, they've actually "chosen" nothing, except to play along.

Suddenly we see exactly where the real problem lies, and it is not with whether character generation is random or not at all.

The problem is not with the randomized system, but expectations of play on the part of one or more participants (which includes, in this case, the designer(s)). Blaming "randomized generation" for the problem is completely missing the mark; the problems caused by character generation are symptomatic of a greater problem underlying the ineffective results produced by the system, regardless of whether it is CBG or RG.

ie: "Well, you COULD make non-starship captains with this system, but you're not SUPPOSED to..."

Of course this is rather simplistic example, but there's something hidden in it, something I didn't realize until just a few moments ago that it quite likely very telling to the whole discussion up to this point:

Gamism says step on up to the challenge. If one of the challenges is a randomly-rolled character, then you have to step on up to it. That IS the challenge.

To which I say "Bingo."

On the other hand, Frank appears to say the same when he notes,

"Gamism is about meeting the challenge of the particular game."

In all these cases, we are talking about "the challenge." Or are we..?

First, what is "the challenge"? Is it the scenario? Is the scenario the end-all, be-all of a game? To me, "the challenge" seems fairly wide-open in the context of an RPG, even in a fairly normal game of dungeon-based, kill-and-loot D&D.

It seems to me that it is the player who always sets what "the challenge" comprises, for him. This is something that occurs even in traditional games: in chess, for example, you may decide your goal is not "to win" (for whatever reason) but to take down as many of the other player's pieces as possible before endgame. The other player may not even be aware of this goal, and may be playing "to win," but that does not render empty the challenge set.

In fact, the game (and GM) may dictate the circumstances, but it cannot (necessarily) dictate the challenge. Nor can there be only a single challenge to overcome, which ties into my next point: Stepping Up is not about winning. Stepping Up is about...Stepping Up. That's right, the ability to win/overcome/beat the challenge has nothing to do with Stepping Up. (I am beginning to see why Ron stated that Gamism is both the most and least understood mode.)

Secondly, and importantly, what I noticed above was that we must ask if there is ever only one "challenge" to meet or that can be attempted in a game? Where Frank states "the challenge" exists in the singular, Chris talks about a character's makeup being "one of" the challenges, implying that "the challenge" is not a set or singular item.

For any given player Stepping Up, a challenge they are responding to may or may not be the same as the one the GM is offering, and there may be more than one challenge occuring during a given game.

[greyorm]

I've several times raised the point that I am interested in talking about how to include randomness in character generation if we can explore ways to avoid the whiff factor.

That would be great, and I'd love to see some discussion occur in that direction. I, personally, am unsure of how to proceed from this point with such a subject, as (for me) it would seem that such a thing would be highly dependent upon the specific mechanics of a given system.

Also, I would have to be convinced the real problem is the whiff-factor (ie: competency-showcasing-failure), and I am not so certain "whiff" has anything to do with the problem of character effectiveness in this particular situation.

[clehrich]

How do you judge step on up in a player?

By his choices. Suppose the GM in collaboration with a group expectation, decides to test your fighting tactics? Mostly an opportunity for melee combat. And you rolled 5 strength (which puts your probabilities down the plug hole). What choices can you make to be judged by?

But, you might say, quickly change the challenge to being a leader, or a researcher or such like.

So you dodge the challenge. That's step on up? Eh? Your stepping on up to the challenge of avoiding the step on up given?

This is a false example.  Note the highlighted passage.  Who says that's what has to be tested and challenged?  If that is indeed the challenge, and you have randomly rolled a character who is terrible at combat, then yes, that's a problem for Step On Up.  But who says that's the challenge?

If the challenge is to "beat" a dungeon, for example, that does NOT have to be done through pure combat tactics.  It can be done that way, of course, but it doesn't have to be.  If that's the challenge, and your group is made up of non-combat-effective characters, then clearly everyone will together need to step up to the challenge of finding another way.  Which is to say, suppose you are given low points to build non-random characters, then you are all thrown against a combat-tough challenge, the assumption is that either (a) the challenge isn't fair, or (b) you shouldn't approach it through combat tactics -- the challenge is to find another means to beat the situation.

Now suppose that 50% of the group has non-combat-effective characters, because of random rolling.  If the rest of the group says, "Screw you, we're going to do it the combat way," I would hope the GM would hose them for criminal stupidity.  What needs to happen is for the group to say, "Okay, what are we good at, and how can we work together to make the most effective team?  What approaches should we take to these challenges?"  And then they come up with an appropriate strategy, which clearly isn't going to be 100% combat, since 50% of the party isn't strong in that area.

You continue to assume that the challenge is always in combat, and thus if you have a character who's weak at combat the whole thing isn't fair.  But if the challenge is elsewhere, or if there is another way to approach the challenge, then stepping up means using the resources available, not whining because your character isn't good with a sword.

John Kim designed (but I think never quite completed) a tournament module that is very applicable here as an example.  It has two stages.  (It's OAD&D, I'm pretty sure).

Stage 1:  You are a team of rangers, heavily armed and well trained, and your job is to wipe out a "nest" of kobolds, which is to say you have to go into a complicated maze of caves filled with kobolds.  The problem is that the kobolds have a nasty habit of setting up traps and generally using trickery to gain the advantage.  This part isn't very difficult, though, because you're very tough.

Stage 2: You are the tribal elders of the kobold cave-town.  A bunch of psychotic fascist rangers are coming to wipe out your happy village society.  You must stop them.  The problem is that if you fight them head-on, you will die, because kobolds are wimpy compared to rangers.  So you have to come up with other means: tricks, traps, deception, cutting the party into sections, etc.  Now John I think got bogged down here, because his idea was that the rangers do not have a brain: they have a flowchart, and the DM simply follows it rigidly.  This means, among other things, that if the kobolds can figure out how the flowchart works, they can use it against the rangers.  The rangers work by semi-SWAT tactics: one guy covers a hall with a bow and yells, "Go go go!" and the next guy runs down the hall, dives behind cover, and scans the new area with his bow, and so on.  This makes them tactically effective but rather narrow-minded.

The point of the example is that combat is the point here, but the kobolds suck at it.  So is it unfair?  No, because the point is not to fight head-on.  A player who says, "But we can't win, because they're tougher than we are" is a wimp and a baby who's missing the point.  The point is to beat the rangers by not playing their game.

You can't tell me that's not gamism!

[contracycle]

I'll agree that the above is a valid and really existing form of gamism.

But compare chess with poker, they are nearly diamteric opposites.  In chess, the sides are exactly even, and everything is in the open.  In poker, the sides are definitely not even, and little or nothing is in the open.

These are both games that you can step up to, but I suggest that are very different experientially and aesthetically.  I like chess, I dislike poker.  I like point systems, I dislike random gen systems.  I think its quite possible that different gamists are attracted to different forms of game.

[greyorm]

I think its quite possible that different gamists are attracted to different forms of game.

This is completely true, and definitely unarguable. The problem I am seeing here is not that anyone is claiming that different types of Gamism and Gamist preference do not exist, but that certain claims about "what works" for "real" Gamism/challenge/fairness/RPGs are false or misdirected.

Disputation of those claims is certainly the goal I have aimed towards in this thread, and I warn everyone not to confuse the doing of this with a claim, disputation, or judgement of the former inarguable statement.

[ffilz]

Sorry for getting snarky. I admit that I've got a pretty big chip on my shoulder from dysfunctional play. Thank you for responding to my attempts at opening something for discussion, that was most of what was frustrating me, it seemed like we were talking past each other, and if I was misreading posts, I appologize. Perhaps there's also a misinterpretation that a gamist should be willing to step up to all challenges.

I'll grant that you are right about the dysfunctional play being most of the problem. However, I'll raise one thought: I see GMs who look at using choice over randomness as one way of recognizing dysfunctional play and seeking to change the way they play. So in one camp, we have dysfunctional play groups insisting that you suck up your 5 strength, and the other camp deciding that as part of making play functional, we won't force a random strength roll on the player. Of course there is a valid third camp which says rather than eliminate the randomness, let's make it part of the system.

My hackles were raised by the insistence that if one is dealt a 5 strength, then the step on up response should be to find another way to step on up than be a combat machine. This disregards the fact that the play group has to support the alternative step on up.

So I think part of the problem is that we're trying to talk in generalizations when we really need to be more specific, at least in examples, there ought to be some generalizations that can be made.

Frank

[Mike Holmes]

There's no argument going on in this thread. (further, people are moderating other people for very little reason).


One side says that the other says that there's only one sort of gamism, and that their argument is that randomness messes with it.

The other side says that there is a form of gamism which is messed by with randomness.

See the subtle difference everyone?

What's really the case is that we all agree that there are some forms of gamism, PVP being the obvious one, in which it's desirable to have a balanced starting point, which is made problematic by randomness. And others where randomess is not a problem.

So gamism does not suggest one solution or another, automatically, you have to know what sort of gamism you're shooting for. Which is personal preference, so there can be no indicator of what's generally better or worse for a design.


Then people go on to point out all the badly designed games where either randomness or point-based choice doesn't work. None of these arguments is worth anything, because they're all predicated on the idea that the designer using that method will design inappropriately. We have to assume otherwise.

What I will say is this. The reason that I believe we went to point based modes of generation is because it's easier to ensure that the problems of bad random design don't crop up. That is, if you rely on player intelligence, then the system can't be blamed for bad character's produced by the system.

Yes, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But then I also agree with Simon and others that this all assumes you're attached to the baby. Frankly, personally I can get along completely without it. I don't have the problems of players who make the same characters, or any desire for the immersion that might come out of randomization.

Which is to say that any and all arguments about this are invalid, because they're all based on personal preference. Use randomization if you want these things, don't if you're not concerned.

Basically it all comes back to preference. So no argument that's been made so far has any validity.


Raven, you say now that your idea was simply to say that randomness is no worse than any other method. Well, you'll have to understand how some of us made the mistake of thinking otherwise in the early part of the thread. Look at the title. Look at your rhetoric, the actual things you said. Until you said that you weren't trying to promote the superiority of randomness, I sure thought that was what you were trying to do.

So, sorry, but I think you've lead us all on a wild goose chase here. Which, BTW, we've gone over before, with the same result.

Mike

[Manxome]

I am going to take the risk of trying to add comments to the thread after reading only about half of the replies (some from the front and some from the back).  I apologize for any redundancy.

First, I see no reason why players who don't want to design characters should have to, but that doesn't mean that players who want to design characters shouldn't be allowed to.  It seems like you could have a nonrandom character generation system, but also a random generator that only creates characters obeying the rules of the nonrandom system.

It's been argued that players will somehow benefit from being forced to play something they don't want to play.  I think that if you can convince the player of that, you shouldn't need to force him, and if you can't, then he's not going to play with a random system anyway (or not happily, at any rate).

Second, while starting equality is important in some games and not important in others, I submit that balance (in a more general sense) is very important in any gamist setting.  All characters don't need to be created equal, but you should know how powerful a character is (or is going to be) or the GM can't even set the challenges at the right level for the player.  Perhaps what we want here is a parameterized system, where you can create a character with more or fewer "points."  Of course, this only works if "points" are actually an accurate measure of a character's effectiveness, which is a nontrivial design challenge, with or without randomness.

Either a random or a nonrandom system can be good or bad at keeping characters at a desired level of effectiveness.  However, there is an important difference in performance, which arises from the fact that game designers are not perfect:  nonrandom systems which are exploitable can be exploited systematically, whereas random systems which are unbalanced can only be exploited probabilistically, which tends to make overly powerful options more obvious in nonrandom systems (because they can be reliably exploited) and excessively weak options more obvious (relatively) in random systems (because they cannot be reliably avoided).  Which, again, seems to argue that giving players both options may be a good idea, but traditional wisdom holds that overpowered options are worse for balance than underpowered ones, so a nonrandom system (even if it's only for play-testing) strikes me as more important in developing balance.

[Callan S.]

I'll pose a question in terms of design, so were a little more concrete.

Now, if I can randomly produce a strength of 5, does that mean such a strength will be supported by the rule book for gamist play.

Will it? It can be, and in that case yes, it's really pretty wimpy to say you can't handle the challenge with your PC.

But quite frankly we have a history of 'system doesn't matter' in the industry. And I believe that random stats are something you have to work on very, very carefully so any result (like STR 5) is supported. I'm reminded of the rules 3E has for scrapping rolls if their just not good enough. Instead of accomidating a strength 5 in the design, that proffesional team decided to trash such results (as well as making them highly unlikely).

Now, can you play gamist with 5 STR where it isn't supported? Yeah, I'd say you can. But you'll be doing more work than other players just to keep up with them, typically (if not...well done, somehow the system did support STR 5 and you found it. That or your group has introduced house rules and play elements they'd probably swear they didn't).

The idea of 'system does matter' is a repeating one on the forge. Casually throwing in random stats without thoroughly checking the consequences of it isn't working under that idea. You have to work on random stats for them to support the play envisioned.

Also, yeah, this is just one type of gamism that STR 5 usually messes with. I just find it odd that if I buy a book about gamism type X, I should have to switch to gamism type Y if someone rolls a poor strength score. Weird product.