Recent content by prabe

That's a thing that older editions did, and it's not unreasonable. Somewhere on this site is a long post (that someone else wrote) about classes being balanced by rarity. Given that the edition/s I'm running don't do that, it's not relevant to me.

I don't wildly disagree with you. I'd rather purchase everything out of the same point pool, and setting limits on ability scores does tend to make SAD characters easier to build, and the games that don't have randomly generated ability scores work more than well enough. On the other hand, if...

None of this is really about stat generation, though. It's all about expectations and experiences and preferences.

For your 2) I'm willing to suggest it might be people finding out that what they signed up for frustrates them. I've found myself not much enjoying some games I've signed up for, and it wasn't really a communications breakdown.

If the people with the better stats are frustrated, and the people with the worse stats are frustrated, how can it not be worse gameplay? Or at least, how can it not be a worse experience for the players? (And isn't "better/worse experience" more important than "better/worse gameplay?")

It might feel that way to one or more of the other players at the table, who might feel as though they're carrying some extra dead weight. It's not just the players with the weaker characters who are having less fun, is what I'm saying.

Or maybe not, but if it's still in good shape someone else can plausibly enjoy it.

There are some people who don't like being in someone else's multiquote, which might or might not overlap with there being some people who don't like their posts broken up by sentences (or smaller) and responded to that way.

"Because that wasn't the experience they wanted the game to deliver" is, in fact, an adequate answer, but I find that asking "why" questions about human behavior/s (at least on smaller scales--and designing a TRPG is smaller-scale) is most effective when addressing one's own behavior/s.

Well, what I was asking was, "Why wouldn't I want people at the table to have fun?" This does not seem like a question I'm likely to find an answer to in TRPG design. Because the designers don't like random stats, or at least felt they wouldn't suit the game experience they wanted to deliver.

'Salem's Lot always struck me as a gloriously creepy novel, especially when the vampires start coming out of the woodwork in the last half-ish. Pet Sematary is literally the only novel to have given me nightmares. Granted, I read it probably within a year of my mom dying, and I would have been...

The campaigns I've run have been every-other week for 130+ sessions (so somewhere over five years) and PC deaths are rare. I figure A) there's more enjoyment playing a competent character that long than in rolling dice for a couple of minutes and B) actually making the choices has its own...

It is useful, yes. My understanding was the conversation here was in the context of D&D--and most probably in the context of newer editions thereof. Obviously I wouldn't roll for stats in Cypher or Fate or Blades in the Dark or ...

This does a good job of summing up why I moved away from rolling for stats. It's not that the people who would have less fun if the dice shafted them are bad people or bad TRPGers, it's that they'd be having less fun, and why would I want that?

My current x is set to give substantially better stats than the standard array, but you could obviously set it to anything, based on the sorts of characters you want to see. I kinda wanna see badasses I can push hard, others will have other preferences. I've heard of GMs doing things like what...