Quote from: Chris24601;1028133It's kinda charming that you think this, but I game with sailors.

Oh you innocent child.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1028121I've taken so many points in "Craft Disturbing Mental Image" I've lost count.

Quote from: Chris24601;1028133It's kinda charming that you think this, but I game with sailors.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1028189Oh you innocent child.

Okay, a one-upsmanship contest over who is more jaded and disturbed can't just be called "a pissing contest." That's too clean and nearly polite. What do we call this?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1028194Okay, a one-upsmanship contest over who is more jaded and disturbed can't just be called "a pissing contest." That's too clean and nearly polite. What do we call this?

I vote "dick stapling contest" after a competition some drunk sailors had over who had the highest pain tolerance. It was exactly what it says on the tin (using a staple gun).

Quote from: Chris24601;1028200I vote "dick stapling contest" after a competition some drunk sailors had over who had the highest pain tolerance. It was exactly what it says on the tin (using a staple gun).

Oh that's nothing. Try getting a colonoscopy without sedation or painkillers.

Quote from: Chris24601;1028200I vote "dick stapling contest" after a competition some drunk sailors had over who had the highest pain tolerance. It was exactly what it says on the tin (using a staple gun).

I think all branches of the armed forces have their own versions of those.

Quote from: Chris24601;1027966I have to ask, Pundit, "how often have you been on the player side of the screen when using this its all random pitch?"

Because it sounds way better from the perspective of "I want to see how random characters interact with my oh-so-cool/authentic campaign world" than from the player side of "you're going to be handed a random pile* that you don't even get to name yourself."

From the player side it sounds like a near perfect avenue to ensure that players would not be able to care less about either their ostensible avatars or the campaign world they inhabit. I don't know of a single player in my area who would willingly play in a campaign with that premise. The players I know game either to escape real life and/or to experience the life of a character they care about, not play out a simulacrum of real life where you have just as little control only set in a different time period (that's what the SCA is for).

Well, my players over multiple campaigns love it. We ran something around 1000 hours total of the original Dark Albion campaign, and there was certainly HUGE investment in the characters they played with that format.  Likewise, my DCC game, which has run for about as long now, but is less serious.

When you get players to understand that the point is to be able to get into the head of someone else, like acting a challenging role; when they actually experience that immersion, they love it, because that's the actual point of RPG play.

Quote"You're going to have everything about the character you're going to spend hours upon hours playing this game with, even their name, determined by random dice rolls" is legitimately the absolute least appealing game pitch I've ever encountered in my thirty plus years of roleplaying. Picking something to watch on Netflix holds more appeal to me (at least with that I'll be sure that what I choose will be something I think will be interesting... and can drop it for something else if it bores me).

Then you'd probably be unqualified to play in my games, due to lack of imagination.  Dozens and dozens of players of mine have been able to do it over the years to varying degrees. None of them were 'boring' characters, because the point isn't "you have to play this boring character", it's "this is the character you have, now figure out what makes them interesting".

Quote* Frankly, the fact that you get to determine your sex feels a bit hypocritical to me... if your character's sex can impact the quality of roleplay and therefore needs to not be random, then why are names and social classes they could be stuck with determined by a random roll when they can play just as big a role in how well someone can get into their character's headspace?

The point being immersion, there's one thing that tends to be a bit harder for a lot of gamers than others, and that's realistically playing a member of the opposite sex. The characters also don't start out as paraplegics, geriatrics or children, either.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1028023I prefer random creation over all other character classes.  I'd willingly play a game where social class, etc, was all random.

But I play the game to see what happens, not to have a bunch of people telling me how awesome I am.

That's the point, exactly. It's not to punish the players somehow; it's to offer them a chance to access avenues of ideas to play characters they would never have been capable of thinking up on their own.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1028416Then you'd probably be unqualified to play in my games, due to lack of imagination.  Dozens and dozens of players of mine have been able to do it over the years to varying degrees. None of them were 'boring' characters, because the point isn't "you have to play this boring character", it's "this is the character you have, now figure out what makes them interesting".

The point being immersion, there's one thing that tends to be a bit harder for a lot of gamers than others, and that's realistically playing a member of the opposite sex. The characters also don't start out as paraplegics, geriatrics or children, either.

This feels rather hypocritical to say someone who can't handle the randomness of the character creation both is unqualified and lacks imagination but defend the idea of choosing gender over a random role because it breaks immersion. The point  Chris24601  seems to be making is that having a lack of agency in their own character is immersion breaking.

QuoteThe only thing he gets to pick is what career he gets into. Which makes sense, because we do that in real life too.

Clearly, if you are going to be true to your goals there needs to be a roll for gender, birth defects and uncontrollable childhood tragedy.

Edit: Or, include that sidebar on the abundance of Gender Reassignment magic and lack of social stigma for swapping gender.

Quote from: Certified;1028542This feels rather hypocritical to say someone who can't handle the randomness of the character creation both is unqualified and lacks imagination but defend the idea of choosing gender over a random role because it breaks immersion. The point  Chris24601  seems to be making is that having a lack of agency in their own character is immersion breaking.

Which is bullshit. Players choose to play. They have agency.

Again, what I've found is that point-buy is great for:

-Autistic Rules-Lawyers

-People who want to play a fantasy version some aspect of their conscious or sub-conscious borders of self-concept

-People who only want challenges that they can control, and are thus not really challenges (this is especially bad in systems where you can pick and choose your own disadvantages, where character-creation gets turned into this betting game of players choosing the disadvantages that give them the most possible extra points to min-max the powers they most want, while picking only the disadvantages that they think won't actually bother them in play)


Now, can tremendously creative people think up awesome and unique characters in point-buy games that aren't tired repetitions of the playing the same thing with slightly different facades every time? Yes, sure. But people that creative also tend not to be scared of taking a bunch of randomly-determined traits and turning that into an awesome and unique character.


The people afraid of random character creation are either:

-People who are afraid that they're too bland or untalented to actually handle a character that is outside their normal range

-Powergamers afraid of having a character that won't be the "best" one in the party

-Rules Lawyers who are upset that they won't get to manipulate the system to get their way

Hm... I'm definitely thinking that a mix of random rolls (eg stats, lifepath) & chosen (eg race/species, sex, class) tends to make the best characters. But for ease of play with large numbers of players I like "choose race, class, assign default array stats or point buy - or just turn up and I'll give you a pregen".

Quote from: RPGPundit;1028784The people afraid of random character creation are either:

-People who are afraid that they're too bland or untalented to actually handle a character that is outside their normal range

-Powergamers afraid of having a character that won't be the "best" one in the party

-Rules Lawyers who are upset that they won't get to manipulate the system to get their way

-People who have badly burned by the random chance that life has thrown at them and play because they want to escape the randomness of life for awhile and have some degree of control over something, even if its just the form their avatar in a fantasy world takes.

-People who build things in real life and take that passion for building into their entertainment where a good chunk of the fun is seeing what you can build within set limits.

I'm more the latter and like helping people with their characters so they're as well built as mine, but I have players who are the former... like the couple with young kids who got screwed over by a business partner and are struggling to get by... they game because its one of the few forms of entertainment they regularly afford (because everyone else owns the book and we play at their house so they don't need a sitter).

I think you're being a pompous unimaginative ass and one-true-wayer who is insulting anyone who doesn't agree with you in lockstep on the issue. Are you one of those people who takes any attack on one of their ideas as an attack on them personally? Because that's the response I saw. When someone says "I don't find that idea appealing and don't know anyone who does" you don't reply with "people have different tastes" or "agree to disagree" or even keeping it to "I think point buy sucks"... nope, if you have to attack the person who disagrees with you like you're a fucking snowflake.... if someone doesn't enjoy how you play you're either a no-talent, a power-gamer or a rules-lawyer.

To think I ever had some degree of respect for your opinions and let it influence my game design.

I'm glad you enjoy your game. I'm going to go enjoy mine. See how easy that is?

Edited to Add: Forgot options C... enjoys the tactical wargaming aspect of the games and setting up interesting tactical scenarios is a lot easier when the PC's fall within a controlled range (array or point buy) instead of the vagaries of random ability scores and the like.

And D... enjoys organized play; which requires some degree of point buy so that the players are transportable from one table to the next with a minimum of difficulty or chance of cheating by players the GM has never met before and may not meet again.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1028784Which is bullshit. Players choose to play. They have agency. ..

That's a whole lot of words from someone scared of a random gender.


Or, are you ready to explain the abundance and ease of gender reassignment magic?

People who can't imagine why other people might enjoy, or not enjoy, any particular method of character creation lack some fundamental element of creative imagination or they are very, very afraid of something. And probably both.

Now someone please pass me the popcorn.

Quote from: Bren;1028822People who can't imagine why other people might enjoy, or not enjoy, any particular method of character creation lack some fundamental element of creative imagination or they are very, very afraid of something. And probably both.

Now someone please pass me the popcorn.

How so? I mean, the lack of imagination is easy. But what does it have to do with being afraid?

Quote from: Bren;1028822People who can't imagine why other people might enjoy, or not enjoy, any particular method of character creation lack some fundamental element of creative imagination or they are very, very afraid of something. And probably both.

Now someone please pass me the popcorn.

I can understand why someone might enjoy random generation; it's practically a staple of certain genres of play.

For a really oldschool dungeon delve where the whole point is to see how far you can get before dying and when you do die you just spend 5 minutes dicing up a new piece to try again its basically a requirement. Some people like the improv of not knowing what you'll get or the challenge of overcoming a set of crap rolls.

But those aren't the only reasons to play RPGs and other reasons mesh better with point buy or array style character generation. Games where the PCs are expected to be more adversarial are more fun when the players start out on a level field, for example, because the satisfaction of beating your fellow player is more genuine when you legitimately outplayed them than stomping them because you rolled great for stats and they rolled crap.

Living campaigns work a lot better off arrays or point buy because its a lot easier to judge when a player you don't know cheated on their chargen when there's no randomness in the process (I've watched a player score a 17, 18, 16, 13, 14, 16 on straight 3d6 in order... but good luck proving that to the jaded DM who's caught players lying about their die rolls multiple times).

Games where the whole point is to play your favorite superhero work a lot better off point buy than random rolls ever could.

My preference and those of those I know are for arrays/point buy. That doesn't mean we're uncreative power-gaming rules lawyers. It just means our preferences are different than Pundit's.