Honest Rolls Character: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
In [[Tabletop RPG
This method of generating character stats isn't popular these days (indeed, even back then [[House Rules]] frequently circumvented this) because, since the rolls are honest, they are also completely random. You will get average or below-average stats more than half the time, and stats well below average on occasion, especially if you forgot to pay homage to the [[Random Number God]] before you rolled; and if you had your heart set on a pre-conceived character concept, the dice were more than happy to mess up your plans, [[Finagle's Law|usually by placing a low number into a score that you really needed a high number in]]. Another reason this died out was it made it impossible to generate a character without the [[Game Master]] present, which is a waste of everyone's time in a session.
D&D consequences: One stat below 8 will severely limit your character classes, sometimes even to a single class (earlier editions of AD&D even had stat requirements for playing specific classes); two or three can render it unplayable as a PC. And that's ''before'' you actually try to play the character and have to deal with the penalties for below-average stats, which was anything from a -1 penalty to hit and damage for a low Strength for the earliest versions, to a big penalty to AC if your Dexterity was the stat that took the hit in the later versions.
Some [[Game Master
Usually, when a video game version is released, random stat generation is removed and a [[Point Build System]] is implemented.
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* ''[[FATAL]]'' rules include "the dice don't lie" and require honest rolls for your character. For almost every trait except gender. Including race, background, ''hair thickness'', and [[Memetic Mutation|anal circumference]]. It also heavily normalises the rolls, making anything significantly different from average nigh-impossible to get. And on the other hand, it is theoretically possible, if [[One in A Million Chance|very improbable]], to get physically impossible parameters.
* The French [[Le Donjon De Naheulbeuk|derivative]] RPG ''Naheulbeuk'' uses this method for stats and to determine which races and classes are available to the player ; however, the values stay rather average even with crappy throws (oscillating between 8 and 13 while the maximum value of a stat is 20).
* ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]]'' and ''[[Dark Heresy]]'' (as well as ''[[Rogue Trader]]'' and ''[[Deathwatch (
* Many [[Roguelike]] games, like ''[[Nethack]]'' and ''[[ADOM]]'', make characters like this.
** [[Ancient Domains of Mystery]] is nice enough to let you "choose" your stats through an arcane personality quiz (which ''can'' be gamed), but you don't get to choose which zodiac sign you were born under- sucks if your barbarian was born in the month of The Wizard. Newer ''[[Angband]]'' variants have auto-roll, which is a stat rolling that can create a more favorable character since the computer rerolls until some of the minimum specified are met.
* The original ''[[Traveller]]'' had a lot of rolls during character creation. In fact, stay in a career too long and your character was likely to fail a survival roll and die before you ever got to play him.
* Used for nostalgia in the [[Order of the Stick]]'s [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html Gary Gygax tribute strip]. Roy and {{spoiler|his archon}} break out an old copy of the 1st Edition rulebooks for the occasion, which use the "3d6, in order" rule. Also, the characters are very much like this, as the rest of the party seem to have mostly average stats with one standout stat (especially Elan and Belkar) while Roy appears to have above average scores in every stat. And then there's [[Made of Iron|O-chul]], who canonically has a "constitution score in the mid 20s". He mentions making Charisma his [[Dump Stat]], which implies they either assign their dice rolls or that O-Chul used some manner of point buy. Though he may have simply been using self-deprecating humor about his lack of people skills (and/or grizzled and scarred appearance). Belkar once made a scatological pun comparing a recent bowel movement to Elan's Intelligence score.
* [[Dungeons and Dragons]]
** [[Averted Trope|Averted]] for NPC in many of the D&D books, especially AD&D2 era. The reason being "aposteriori probability" approach: ones who become famous or survived to acquire status making them noteworthy where others didn't more likely than not had some advantage, thus more often than not are given an outstanding key abilities for their role.
** In 3rd Edition, sample monsters are almost universally given strictly average stats (10s and 11s) before their racial bonuses are applied. The DMG explicitly encourages the rerolling of characters whose stats are too below average, though, and makes the default rule "Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest" (a widely preferred, but not default option in AD&D2), so above average results will be more common.
** Fourth Edition makes point-buy the default, though the Player's Handbook mentions rolling as an alternative (if one slightly slanted to produce worse stats than one could buy, on average).
** ''[[Pathfinder]]'', also adopted the "Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest" as its standard character creation rule, but there are a couple of other options available, including the tournament standard of points buy.
* Older editions of ''[[The Dark Eye]]'' included a milder form of random stat generation: Determine 6 (later 8) values with d6+7 (range 8-13), discard the lowest, assign the numbers to the basic 5 (later 7) attributes at will.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Tabletop
[[Category:Honest Rolls Character]]
[[Category:Randomness Index]]
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