Some friends and I recently had a discussion about randomness in character generation and progression. More specifically, we discussed whether we thought it was good or bad to have dice rolling involved in making a character or leveling one. For the most part, I personally dislike randomness in characters… under most circumstances. What do you think? Do you like a random element in your character generation and progression?

Randomness in Character Generation

The example that most players will be able to relate to is randomly rolling your attributes in Dungeons & Dragons. The current 4th Edition rule set has rules for picking and assigning an attribute set using a point system. However, I’d be willing to venture that most players have played a D&D campaign where their game master allowed them to randomly roll 3d6 for each attribute, or 4d6 and drop the lowest, or roll multiple sets and pick your favorite, or some other version of randomly creating your attributes.

The positive aspect about this is that it gives you a chance to get a fairly powerful attribute set. The obviously negative aspect to it is that you can also get a very poor attribute set as well. And really, who wants to play a completely underpowered character in a D&D game? When you have an entire group doing this, it always seems like there is one player that gets a completely overpowered set of attributes and one that gets the opposite. In my experience, it always seemed like that was a black mark for the unlucky player. Sometimes it was even a license to recklessly play your underpowered character because, “Hey, why do I care if this character dies? He is weak and I’ll just create a better one.”

There are also some fun aspects of random character generation. For example, in older versions of Gamma World, the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, and the old versions of Traveller, the random aspect to character generation was half the fun of playing the game! In fact, sometimes character generation in these games would overshadow the actual playing aspect of the game. It was fun to randomly generate your character and see what you could come up with. I remember many nights long ago where I would randomly generate Marvel Super Heroes characters just to see what I would come up with. There actually is a downside to this fun though. Like I said, a fun random character generation like this can almost encourage getting your character killed or retired in-game so you can re-roll another.

Randomness in Character Progression

This discussion eventually led to my friends and me discussing aspects of my friend’s homebrew game. In his game, character’s have a random element of progression. Once you create your character and start leveling him up, he isn’t guaranteed to advance at the same rate as other characters due to random rolling that you do each to you level. The best example I could compare it to would be Call of Cthulhu under the Basic Roleplaying System. Where after each session you randomly roll to see if your skills increased or not. If you roll well, some sessions you may have many skills that increase in value. If you roll poorly, some sessions you may advance little or not at all with your skills.

I definitely think that randomness in character progression is more realistic, if that is something you are aiming for in your game. People don’t learn something new every time they go to school. Sometimes in your training or experiences things click and you learn a lot. While other times you learn next to nothing at all. But sometimes you aren’t always going for realism in a game. Sometimes your goal with a game system is balance.

I remember playing a Star Wars Saga Edition campaign with some friends of mine. This campaign was a perfect example of good and bad random character progression. In Star Wars Saga Edition you randomly increase your hit point each time your character levels. I remember that I was the lucky guy in this campaign. I seemed to always roll nearly maximum hit point each level. While a friend of mine seemed to always roll nearly minimum each time. After several levels, I had over 100 hit points on my character while my friend’s character was in the low 40’s. The disparity was so huge between our characters that he literally could not play his character the way he wanted to. Conversely, my character was an unstoppable juggernaut.

Randomness in Characters – Good or Bad?

In the end, our discussion really didn’t bring any definitive answers on randomness in character generation and progression. We all agreed that there were some instances where we thought randomness in these situations was actually good, fun, and fit the system. While there were other situations where we thought the random element should have been taken out of the character generation or progression aspect of the game. I think the hardest part was games that had a system for both, like D&D. What do you do when you have two players that want to roll their attributes and two players that want to assign them according to a system? Do you let them choose whichever path they want, or do you pick a specific way that all of your players must follow?

What do you think about randomness in character generation?

What do you think about randomness in character progression?