Quote from: HappyDaze on February 18, 2025, 11:31:40 AMSo the person that came up with the tables is presumed to be smarter and/or more imaginative than any player could be?

That's not at all what's being said.  I hate random tables and never push them on my PCs.  Here's the upside:  a player with a vision of what they want to be can be it, and be at least above average at it.  Here's the downside:  no one is embracing creativity with a set of down-from-on-high givens.  Yes, it's "within the rules", but you'd be a fool to roll on a table when everyone else is picking stuff. 

It's not about who created the table, but a good table has a lot of options that a given player wouldn't consider.  If the table gives you dramatic start, you aren't picking one to be dramatic, you are just drama history guy that game. 

There's lots of great arguments for random tables, and it's a time-honored part of old school gaming.  Time has also taught us that it's better if you are going through characters faster versus having the same dude for a ten year campaign, and I personally hate the entire idea because on the off chance I get to play I always want it to be a specific thing I pick, which also flavors how I run games.

But I won't pretend there's no benefit to the random background generation table and the on-the-spot creativity it generates.

From a practical perspective of supporting as many people as possible, if you only do one, then random is the better choice.  Because it's easier to house rule random into picking than it is the opposite.  That's true even when the random way is not so well designed, and thus harder to house rule into picks than it should be.  If nothing else, you can always do the quick and dirty version of "instead of rolling, pick one of the options on the random chart."

Of course, once you get into something like Hero or GURPs, that doesn't work so well, because of the sheer scope of the options.  However, that's also because those are half tool kits instead of games. Make a particular setting for a campaign, it's not that hard to come up with some random tables to speed up making characters for players that don't want to control every little thing.  (I've done it a couple of different ways in Hero System.)

Now, ideally, the system would support both fixed and random at least somewhat cleanly.  The WotC design problem(s) are that they keep trying to change this, change that, tweak here, mangle there. In the process, they lose sight of what widget X is supposed to support, and then they take out the parts that would have any value in a random selection system. They've deconstructed their own game so much they've reduced things to useless vestiges (e.g. 5E encumbrance).

In theory, I have no beef with designing a system as fixed first, then layering the random on top--as long as the second part happens and gets tested.  If you can't build the random layer on top, then that's a design smell that the underlying fixed part likely has issues.

Quote from: Venka on February 18, 2025, 01:21:39 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 18, 2025, 11:31:40 AMSo the person that came up with the tables is presumed to be smarter and/or more imaginative than any player could be?

That's not at all what's being said.  I hate random tables and never push them on my PCs.  Here's the upside:  a player with a vision of what they want to be can be it, and be at least above average at it.  Here's the downside:  no one is embracing creativity with a set of down-from-on-high givens.  Yes, it's "within the rules", but you'd be a fool to roll on a table when everyone else is picking stuff. 

It's not about who created the table, but a good table has a lot of options that a given player wouldn't consider.  If the table gives you dramatic start, you aren't picking one to be dramatic, you are just drama history guy that game. 

There's lots of great arguments for random tables, and it's a time-honored part of old school gaming.  Time has also taught us that it's better if you are going through characters faster versus having the same dude for a ten year campaign, and I personally hate the entire idea because on the off chance I get to play I always want it to be a specific thing I pick, which also flavors how I run games.

But I won't pretend there's no benefit to the random background generation table and the on-the-spot creativity it generates.

Greetings!

Well said, Venka! I agree. I generally enjoy random tables, though I can appreciate menu-picking, point-buy and so on.

HappyDaze and Mistwell are essentially trolls that routinely enjoy being snarky, acidic, and rude towards Pundit. Everything or anything he says, it doesn't matter. HappyDaze and Mistwell always have something negative and critical to say about it.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 18, 2025, 11:31:40 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on February 18, 2025, 09:59:41 AMBut the benefit of random rolls (and in my games, by default at least, you roll randomly for ability scores, social background, and a past event, and there's even medieval-authentic name tables) is that what you roll up will likely NOT be something you could have come up with, and provides an opportunity to fit together a new character that you would not have imagined on your own otherwise.

So the person that came up with the tables is presumed to be smarter and/or more imaginative than any player could be?

It seems like you don't understand the mathematics between combining multiple random generators.

But actually, a child could make a table of 12 choices, and there's a good chance that you might not have considered any one of them for a character detail. Most people will only have a reference based on their own creativity (which is different degrees of limited) and pop culture references they may have watched.

It's not so much that the person is smarter than you, its that they're not you.

Quote from: RPGPundit on February 19, 2025, 04:13:58 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 18, 2025, 11:31:40 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on February 18, 2025, 09:59:41 AMBut the benefit of random rolls (and in my games, by default at least, you roll randomly for ability scores, social background, and a past event, and there's even medieval-authentic name tables) is that what you roll up will likely NOT be something you could have come up with, and provides an opportunity to fit together a new character that you would not have imagined on your own otherwise.

So the person that came up with the tables is presumed to be smarter and/or more imaginative than any player could be?

It seems like you don't understand the mathematics between combining multiple random generators.

But actually, a child could make a table of 12 choices, and there's a good chance that you might not have considered any one of them for a character detail. Most people will only have a reference based on their own creativity (which is different degrees of limited) and pop culture references they may have watched.

It's not so much that the person is smarter than you, its that they're not you.

Your theory is correct, but your example is slightly flawed.  Based on available evidence, any random child is almost certainly smarter than HappyDaze...

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 18, 2025, 01:53:20 PMFrom a practical perspective of supporting as many people as possible, if you only do one, then random is the better choice.  Because it's easier to house rule random into picking than it is the opposite.

I didn't think of this, but I agree with this as well.  And I'll go further- it's good to have such restrictions baked into any number of things ("dwarves can't be wizards", "paladins must be lawful good"), because tables who want fewer restrictions will waive them no matter how much Gygax tells you to not allow demihuman level limits to be removed or whatever.  By contrast, it's much more hassle as a DM to add a meaningful restriction like this, and leaving them out of the hard rules implies that no table should have any restriction, versus the much better "here's the default restrictions, but try your hand at whatever you like for your own worldbuilding". 

Quote from: SHARK on February 18, 2025, 01:59:50 PMtrolls that routinely enjoy being snarky, acidic, and rude towards Pundit

Yea I should be more aware of that. 

Quote from: RPGPundit on February 08, 2025, 01:46:33 AMSome very interesting comments in here.

i second that.

@here: very good thread guys, thank you <3