Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

Neon Sequitur · Post by **Neon Sequitur** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 7:48 pm

Longes wrote:Spoony is defending 3d6 in order on the basis of "You haven't tried it!" and "Numbers don't matter, the story does!"

The OneTrueWay is strong in this one.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 8:44 pm

But you're clearly a coward if you can't actually play a character who can't use any of his class features!

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 8:57 pm

Didn't Spoony get kicked out of a D&D livestream for being a dick back when he was still relevant?

Axebird · Post by **Axebird** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 9:14 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Didn't Spoony get kicked out of a D&D livestream for being a dick back when he was still relevant?

This is the first I'm hearing of anything like that, but it wouldn't surprise me. Dude is hilariously out of touch.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sun Sep 06, 2015 9:25 pm

Longes wrote:Spoony is defending 3d6 in order on the basis of "You haven't tried it!" and "Numbers don't matter, the story does!"

that vid @4:49 wrote:The average stat you're going to roll on 3d6 is a 9.

....

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 3:18 am

ishy wrote:
Longes wrote:Spoony is defending 3d6 in order on the basis of "You haven't tried it!" and "Numbers don't matter, the story does!"
that vid @4:49 wrote:The average stat you're going to roll on 3d6 is a 9.
....

You know the worst part of that: Spoony has a college degree in computer science, which I am working on, and you have to take a statistics/ probability class. So what in the actual fuck.

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 07, 2015 7:58 am

Neon Sequitur wrote:
Longes wrote:Spoony is defending 3d6 in order on the basis of "You haven't tried it!" and "Numbers don't matter, the story does!"
The OneTrueWay is strong in this one.

I'd call it a strong dose of CoolerThanThou. Most defenses for unnecessarily terrible things are like that.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 3:13 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Didn't Spoony get kicked out of a D&D livestream for being a dick back when he was still relevant?

He used to be relevant? In what sense?

(Not just me taking an opening to mock someone, I'm honestly unsure what you mean.)

The closest I've heard to him being kicked out of a D&D livestream was that a Pathfinder (or was it D&D 4E?) campaign he was GMing on Roll20 and streaming got aborted because he fell out with a group that included some of the players. Which was happening around when he pulled all his own content from ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, which he later claimed in commentary for To Boldly Flee wasn't particularly a result of personal bitterness but mainly related to how he wasn't paid for having his content on the site.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 5:50 pm

He was relevant when he was part of ChannelAwesome, and was making somewhat funny Final Fantasy videos. And Ultima videos. I don't think he's ever done anything else that was mildly interesting.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Sep 07, 2015 8:01 pm

He used to (many years ago) do movie reviews for Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine, and his reviews of the Twilight series and the last Highlander movie are great fun. Haven't seen him up to much lately, though.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Sep 08, 2015 12:02 am

This does not seem like a topic that could support a full 27 minute video. The argument for 3d6 is pretty simple, as far as I can tell: some people want dwarf fortress style pseudo-random bullshit generators to riff off of and don't really care too much about what kind of characters they end up playing. These players are rarer but no better than other types of players. The fucking end.

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 08, 2015 5:43 am

Whipstitch wrote:This does not seem like a topic that could support a full 27 minute video. The argument for 3d6 is pretty simple, as far as I can tell: some people want dwarf fortress style pseudo-random bullshit generators to riff off of and don't really care too much about what kind of characters they end up playing. These players are rarer but no better than other types of players. The fucking end.

Stats are only important as they relate to other party members' power levels, not the monster power. It's easier for the DM to tailor the difficulty of an encounter if the PCs are about the same.

That point is important, but is not addressed in that video. The thing where the video guy is pretending to be a better human being with a larger penis because he uses 3d6 is a distraction from the fact that he has nothing to say on the topic.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Sep 08, 2015 3:33 pm

The entire argument for roll 3d6 in order is one part nostalgia ("This is how the way the game was written back in the day") and one part the creativity and challenge of artificial limitations in play. It's the kind of thing epitomized in the old Lone Wolf or Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, which also had random stats, where there was the idea that no matter what your initial stats were, if you played smart and made the right choices, your character was viable and could successfully complete the adventure.

Now, the important thing to remember about that last bit is that it was false. In the very first fucking Lone Wolf book, for example, if you didn't pick Animal Kinship as own of your Kai disciplines, you lost the fucking book. Guaranteed. There was just a bottleneck in the fucking book that you couldn't get past without it. But the idea has a little bit of merit to it, in that if there is a wide variability in character attributes by design, you're going to see a greater degree of creativity in play - even if that creativity only takes the form of most elaborate or convenient form of character-suicide so you can roll something else that might not suck.

I don't want to really get into rant-mode about this, but the basic thing is that when you look at the old D&D and AD&D characters, there's a huge amount of variability in character abilities at all levels - and that's not counting when the designers broke out the really broken shit for their NPCs - but the major restriction that it applied was less on "Be careful, your mage only has 1 hit point!" and more "Okay, you only qualify to be a Fighter. Sucks to be you." The whole point of procedurally generating a character is super weird in any modern gaming context because we specifically moved away from that shit because people wanted to choose who they were going to play. Player agency in being able to generate their own character instead of doing the D&D equivalent of picking Dog, Top Hat, Thimble, Wheelbarrow, Battleship, or Shoe is one of the major advances of gaming in the 80s.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Sep 08, 2015 5:04 pm

we specifically moved away from that shit because people wanted to choose who they were going to play

That's pretty much the reason why I refuse to play games with random chargen. I don't want random chargen. I have plenty of ideas for characters that I want to play, and I don't need the dice to dictate me.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Wed Sep 09, 2015 2:54 pm

We probably want random NPC generation, though.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 7:28 am

RadiantPhoenix wrote:We probably want random NPC generation, though.

We do?
Only if you are talking about scenery NPC's.
If it's potential enemy NPC then, no I don't need an randomly generated Int 11 Wizard.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 7:30 am

I think scenery NPCs was probably the intent, yeah.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Sep 10, 2015 8:12 pm

Every time I played old AD&D video games that made you roll 3d6 in order, I'd just reroll until I got improbably high stats.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Fri Sep 11, 2015 12:18 am

hyzmarca wrote:Every time I played old AD&D video games that made you roll 3d6 in order, I'd just reroll until I got improbably high stats.

Wizardry I used a hybrid system where you rolled a semirandom number of points to add to your racial base stats, as of a 1980 beta. So methods allowing players choice in stat customizaton predate the fucking red box edition.

1988 saw the officially licensed Pool of Radience just allow stat modification immediately post chargen, so you did't need to waste hours on rerolls to get multiple 18s.

Ultima 4 ditched numeric chargen in favor of a series of ethical dillemas which determined class, and the game required recruiting all 7 npcs of the remaining classes, with their prefigured stats.

Later FF games stopped allowing any randomness or customization at chargen. You played the same chracters with the same starting stats each run, and custoptimization only happened with the advancement systems.

And that brings us up to where crpgs were with chargen when the kids in the 5e game four tables over were being conceived.

souran · Post by **souran** » Sat Sep 12, 2015 1:23 pm

Quite honestly, rolling for stats is mental gymnastics anyway.

If people are forced to play 3d6, straight roll one time you just end up with suicide cults where a bunch of the players are actively looking to kill of their shit characters until they get one with stats/class combination they actually want to play. This turns the game into a bad parody of itself.

If players are allowed to assign the ability scores, or reroll X times, or use the rolls of other players, you have done a lot of work for what is effectively a point buy or array generation method anyway.

If you look at a lot of older D&D modules that come with prebuilt parties they tend to have like 5-6 fighters. Most of those fighters exist so that there is a disposable PC to stick his hand through the magic portal, or drink from the weird fountain or other shit like that.

However, the other thing to remember about 1-2E is that if you had a character with great stats you wanted him to be a fighter as well. A fighter with an 18/76+ strength, 16+dex, 17+ con is basically a character who is walking around wearing the level 1-2 wizard/cleric buffs all the time. As people have pointed out the power variance from stats was so great that for the playable portion of the game (10 and below) having high stats, or even a single high stat had a huge effect on the outcome of combats. The characters that you wanted as wizards were guys with like 1 16 in int and then everything else average because 1-2E magic basically avoided using your stats.

Stinktopus · Post by **Stinktopus** » Sat Sep 12, 2015 11:50 pm

Spoony's namesake character, and focus of every D&D story that Spoony tells, is a character that had awesome enough stats to become a 1E Bard.

Perhaps I would take his 3d6 bullshit more seriously if he was constantly talking about the awesomeness of Tar Markvaar, the pathetic Halfling Fighter.

Also, Spoony seems mentally stuck in 1/2E, where stats from 7-13 usually didn't do anything.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 12, 2015 11:53 pm

Stinktopus wrote:Spoony's namesake character, and focus of every D&D story that Spoony tells, is a character that had awesome enough stats to become a 1E Bard.

Perhaps I would take his 3d6 bullshit more seriously if he was constantly talking about the awesomeness of Tar Markvaar, the pathetic Halfling Fighter.

Also, Spoony seems mentally stuck in 1/2E, where stats from 7-13 usually didn't do anything.

Further evidence that only people who cheat on rolls like rolling.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun Sep 13, 2015 6:40 am

Kaelik wrote:Further evidence that only people who cheat on rolls like rolling.

Them, and basket weavers... but yeah, posts like this make me wish for a +1 button here.

Nebuchadnezzar · Post by **Nebuchadnezzar** » Sun Sep 13, 2015 11:38 am

Josh_Kablack wrote:(M)ethods allowing players choice in stat customizaton predate the fucking red box edition.

In 1979 Temple of Apshai had one simply input a character's 6 attributes each time they played. Admittedly, this was to get around having to write data with contemporary consumer-grade tape drives, but the manual skirted the issue by marketing the game as a way for players to have their characters gain experience in between tabletop games, which were presumably filled with stat-modifying magic springs and the like.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon Oct 19, 2015 9:13 am

So, a while ago, there was a GitP poster with many terrible houserules, and one response to him made me think of this board's quantum bears meme.

A_Moon wrote:How many times, when the Fighter says "I draw my sword", did you just want to smack that cheating-optimizer in the face and say "No! You don't draw your sword! You draw Orcus!". When the Cleric says "I run away from Orcus!": "No! You run into Orcus! Rogue tries to hide? He hides behind Orcus! The bard in a tavern on the other side the town tries to order a drink? How about a nice frothy mug of Orcus?