Mythopoeic Rambling: Rolling Lots of Dice

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Rolling Lots of Dice

You need a large enough surface for the Big Bang.

Yesterday, Beedo posted, asking about people's opinions regarding hopeless characters. This made me think of my current favorite method of character generation: rolling all the dice at once. Now, if anything but 3d6, in order, no rerolls, no point swaps, etc, is the only thing that satisfies you because one morning while sitting on the can you had a vision of Gary Gygax, dressed in a white robe and strumming a golden harp whose six strings were tuned to the Fibonacci scale, singing, "Lo, 3d6 ordo," just skip this post: I've got nothing to offer you, so why bother? But if are open, pray continue. It may not be new to you, but it doesn't seem very common to me and may be worth your consideration.

Taking 18d6 and rolling all of them at once instead of six times of three together has the following benefits, in my view.

Rolling eighteen dice all together is fun. I like it better than dragging the rolls out, and the kids I've introduced to this method seem to like it more, too. (Go ahead, judge me.) The birth of a character starts out feeling like an event because of the veritable explosion of dice.
While there should be no significant statistical difference in the total outcome, you now have 18 dice to arrange, three to each of the six ability scores. This introduces an element of control, planning, and customization that is something like a point buy system, but without eliminating dice or variation.
You are working not simply with math, but with manipulatives. For lots of us, this is more fun.
You have a better chance of getting an 18 in something -- certainly a 17 or 16.
All that talk about it being fun having a low score in something? Yeah, chances are your allocating your dice to suit your character concept, class, and/or race are going to leave you short somewhere. Voila, fun. And fun you chose, weighing your options and using the resources the dice gave you.
Chances are lower that you will roll a hopeless character, since you can weigh the dice totals against the modifiers they will yield in whatever system you are playing, and assigning them to scores you want.

Here are three characters that I created by this method. Note that, to illustrate the basic method in such a way as to be applicable to the widest number of systems, I did not add any bonuses given to certain races in some systems, not did I observe the limits placed on scores for some races in others. Just a bare bones approach. (X is for Charisma, by the way. I'm trying to spread this handy help from the Greek, where chi is written like X.)

Human Fighter