Saturday, January 15, 2022

Alternate Ability Rolling Method


Here's something for Black Pudding 7. I haven't used this in play, but of course I played around with it myself and kinda dig it. Maybe it's not new, I'm not sure. I hadn't seen it.

This method does not get you a nice bell curve. For example, it's far easier to get an 18 since it is a 1 in 8 chance. If I was "gaming the system" with this, I'd just always roll that d8. Which, of course, is totally valid. It's your choice. You aren't breaking anything

Just rolling the d4 all the way gives you an average PC that has no negative and three +1 stats... which is pretty nice too.

EDIT: I posted this in haste from an old thing I forgot about and it has shitty formatting so you should ignore it. I didn't proofread bc nobody got time for that.

7 comments:

  1. Nice. I don't have 3d6 in my fav jumbo dice set, just the 6 noble polyhedrals, so I roll d4+d6+d8 for ability scores.

    This gives a near identical distribution as 3d6, with slightly more spread. So you get a 2% chance of an 18 or 3, rather than a 1% chance, for example. If memory serves. Meh. It works.

    Your method also works, in absence of a 3d6's.

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  2. Would the tables be easier to read if they went highest to lowest.
    d6
    1 -1
    2-3 0
    4-5 +1
    6 +2

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    Replies
    1. Two confessions. 1) I didn't think this through very hard, thus the misaligned grays. 2) I don't understand what you mean, actually.

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    2. Lol. Formatting is hard.

      Take your d8 table on the left. It goes from -2 to +3, but that's hard to see because it doesn't go from lowest to highest. So if you roll a 1, if that were a -2, and if you roll an 8 for +3, it would be easier to see at a glance that this table goes from -2 to +3. And it makes more sense for a low roll to be the worst outcome, and a high roll be the best outcome.

      So the table would end up being
      Roll d8
      1 = -2
      2 = -1
      3-4 = 0
      4-5 = +1
      6-7 = +2
      8 = +3

      (that likely looks like crap, I dunno how to format in web comments) :-)

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    3. Oh, I see. Yeah that makes sense.

      My logic was this:

      I have a d4 table and I can't get a negative but I can possibly get a +1. Cool.

      But what if I want a potential for +2? I go up to d6. So I just took existing d4 table and added more numbers to it. I made a slot for a negative result to give some risk to the potential for a better bonus.

      In each case the die goes up but the base of the table remains the same. This is because of my process of literally shoving these things around on a canvas until they look and feel ok.

      Your way suggests planning. lol

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    4. Dude. Doing shit is way better than planning shit. Every time.

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    5. I do try to live by the motto "Strike while the iron is hot"

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