The Joy of Bad Stats

#1

There was a short earlier discussion about negative stats. @Alex 's take was essentially "If negative stats are included in the heroes of the hammer, it is probably as a reflection of something terrible in that character’s past. "

That’s a totally reasonable approach, but I’d like to put forth the idea that bad stats, like bad rolls at crucial moments, can be one of the most entertaining things to happen to a player or campaign.

As a recent and somewhat extreme example: In one of our D&D sessions I’m playing a cleric with a -3 strength, -1 dex, and -2 constitution. She’s a fantastic healer (high int and wis), but she would be more likely to hurt herself than her enemy in a melee fight.

This character came about because of just terrible rolls (roll 4 keep the 3 highest method) when creating her, but it has introduced amazing complications. It also resulted in having to come up with a great backstory to explain / justify this frailty.

She can’t pick up / move anything of significance (including fallen comrades). She’s likely to fail any strength/athletics check. And now, all of a sudden, I’ve got to think very carefully about where she is in a battle, and how she approaches less dramatic things. For example: She needs to spend the $ on silk rope because of the weight difference. She carries a pulley and pitons because despite the weight, she can use them to help traverse vertical things more safely. She can carry only minimal loot.

As a less extreme example, consider Grog from the 1st Critical Role campaign. He’s got a -2 int, and it resulted in so many wonderful RP moments. His player just kept playing this sweet dopey barbarian and he really was one of the most enjoyable players to watch as a result.

I’d like to do two things:

  1. encourage you all to consider the wonderful RP and even tactical fun that can come from accidentally rolling sub-optimal stats.
  2. start pondering how we might create an alternate stat generation system for ICRPG that is still simple, but allows for the possibility of negatives.

My current plan is to bring my players into ICRPG in the next campaign. For character creation I’ll have them roll stats as per usual for D&D and then just use the modifiers for their ICRPG sheets.

This seems… like an ugly hack (because it is), but maybe we as a group can come up with a reasonable way to roll potentially negative stats that is still ICRPG levels of simple. Because the D&D calculations are… contorted at best.

#2

And my final take on negative stats in that same post was “if that is something you want to do, and it makes sense for you and your players, go for it.” :smiley:

Currently, we are experimenting with negative stats at character creation in my current campaign, and we’ve had a ton of fun with it so far. As noted, playing a suboptimal character can inform RP, especially if you have thoughtful players at your table. Historically, that’s definitely been the strongest argument in favor of mechanics like “roll 3D6 straight down the line in sequence,” and then you live with what you roll. If you want to play this way, my best advice is “No fear!” Do it and see where it gets you.

#3

yeah, some people really want to be the “powerful hero” rather than have “interesting rp”. Not saying that as a negative commentary, as this is literally a “game” and whatever mechanics make that “fun” for you are the ones you should use :wink:

what mechanics are you doing to generate them? just d&d style and throwing out the thing you are deriving the modifier from?

100% couldn’t agree more. It definitely works best for players who are comfortable with the idea of diving in and exploring whatever crazyness the dice provide.

My only caveat would be to generally let players assign the stats where they want, rather than letting the dice choose, because usually they have an archetype in mind and it wouldn’t be as much fun to be a weakling melee fighter who can never hit anything or be forced by the stats to play a type of character you’re not interested in in the moment.

#4

I disagree, precisely for the reasons you espouse. A bumbling melee fighter is EXACTLY the joy of bad stats and an endless source of smart, sophisticated RP from thoughtful players. Roll 3D6 down the line. No fear!!! And live with what the supreme dice gods decide.

#5

LOL…funny not funny topic, but funnier in that @masukomi is missing the modern point of negative stats. Not that it allows for greater variability, though it does. But in that, the characters have flaws that they don’t see as flaws, and their players don’t think they are anymore, and that the players at the table do not see them as flaws, except when Branch with Intelligence -3 insists on using the 2 wands of fireball.

for ICRPG I like the concept explored in Rolling 2d4 - 4 for modifiers?

The Funnel system in DCC and MCC is great at getting you to a point where you love your character despite their flaws.

Making a new character later in the campaign seems like such an outsider, not part of the formation of the group.

The fun of playing suboptimal characters is not the background I make up in my head, its the background we make as a group, a shared history. through hardship, my best-stated character whose name I forgot, died in the mouth of the cave and didn’t even make it through the first portion of the adventure. Molly the Gimp, now she made it all the way through, and she knows her place…next to the treasure!!!

That said…as @Alex said, a good group of players at the table can make suboptimal characters incredibly memorable and fun for all.
Who was the most interesting character in the Lord of the Rings book? Who was the biggest Hero in those books? If you don’t think it was Samwise Gamgee, this might not be for you.

In this, you are playing heroes with giant hearts but terrible stats.

Drecta always wanted to be a healer of the green order, but she was just not able to grasp calling the magic into her. She still knows a spell or 2, but they are not reliable. Instead, she makes sure the party is always as well provisioned with healing salves and anti-venom as she can be. During combat, she does her best to place herself in harm’s way, and not her party members down. Shiner may be the real Shield of the party, but Drecta is always where she needs to be assisting.

#6

I am part of this experiment. I chose to play a dwarf thief liberator of items before I ever rolled my stats. As it turns out, my DEX is -2 and my ARMOR is -3. Yeah, that is not very good for the class I chose. However, I have been having a great deal of fun going with my original plan. Sure, I would have loved to swap the +3 I rolled for STR into my DEX. It would not be as challenging though and that makes for interesting games.

That being said, not everyone wants to play with sub-optimal characters. It takes a bit more strength of will on the player’s part to make it work.

#7

I’m all on-board about the flaws for the great RP that results more than i care about the variability. I think sometimes they see them as flaws and sometimes they don’t. My weak-ass cleric definitely sees her frailty as a flaw, and that’s a driving motivator for her. But yeah, it can be spectacular when the characters don’t see their own flaws.

hell yes. love that.

re Rolling 2d4 - 4 for modifiers?

I’m playing with various ideas for how we can get a nice simple way to generate stats that are potentially negative.

I’m working with the assumption that ICRPG is reasonably well tested and that a character that ends up with roughly 6 points positive is going to maintain existing balance. Too much and they’d be overpowered, too little, and they’d be too squishy. So, i put together a little script to test out methods as i come up with them. In the following data blocks the “sums” are what you get when you add up all the positive and negatives from the 7 stats. I just counted AC as another stat so an ac of 12 is +2 as far as these numbers go because adding two is how the rules say to get there.

Judging by the results of 1000 rolls: 2d4 - 4 is as problematic as everything else I’ve tested. It’s just too volitile.

sums: min / avg / max
       -7  6.785  21
highest stat: 4
lowest  stat: -2
  best stats: [4, 3, 4, 2, 3, 1, 4]
 worst stats: [-2, -2, 2, -2, -2, -1, 0]

other things i’ve tried:

D&D style roll 4, take best 3, run through modifiers lookup table:

sums: min / avg / max
       -7  11.196  23
highest stat: 5
lowest  stat: -4
  best stats: [3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 2]
 worst stats: [-2, -1, 1, 0, -1, -2, -2]

1d4 -1 with 25% chance of negative (roll another d4 and make the number negative if you get a 1)

sums: min / avg / max
       -10  3.557  16
highest stat: 3
lowest  stat: -3
  best stats: [3, 3, 2, 0, 2, 3, 3]
 worst stats: [-2, -2, 0, -2, -2, 0, -2]

I’ve run this a bunch of times and seen better and worse collections of stats on all of these. Right now, I’m not comfortable suggestion anyone use any of these methods because of how overpowered or underpowered characters can end up.

I can think of ways to bound this but… it just end up becoming a complex algorithm, and I want something simple for players to use without exerting too much brainpower or feeling stupid.

cc @Chuck_Lemons & @Paxx

Rolling 2d4 - 4 for modifiers?
#8

Edit: changed if to it.

I’m going to preface this by saying you are thinking exactly as I would have 9 months ago. So I was a bit prophetic, but in reality, I just knew exactly where you were coming from.

You then proceed to run an analysis of different dice builds compared to the “average” 6~10 point build.

Here is the thing, this is not a normal build system, this is playing sub-optimal builds, with the possibility on one or two very optimal builds.

As a GM your TN should average 10~12 instead of 12~14. until they get some decent loot…and then it will go to 12~14. Or as Alex seems to run games 2 goblins at a time with TN 12 instead of 3 or 4.

I really love the funnel system, I have now played it 3 times, once at a con, and twice with friends as one-shots with a single let’s play an adventure beyond since we are playing for 8 hours.

Funnels

In a funnel, you play level 0 characters. with straight rolled stats and 1d4 HP. or 1d4+2 no loot.
Each player plays 3~5 characters. The GM plays 5 semi-passive PCs just in case.
(Prisoners of Molack) 3 intro sessions, Machines of Molok, finish up Molok. is a great series to fit into this. So instead of 4~5 level 1 character, it’s 15~20 level 0 characters.

(for ICRPG level 0 is no loot, whatever straight stat system you come up with, no starter rewards, but bio-form bonus)
So a starting character is select BIO-form, then roll stats straight, they give you whatever 2 they want to. the best of those extra you have from the beginning, allowing any player who has run out of characters to play one of the GM controlled characters. The worst of them, are used as you feel another player needs a character.

You probably will kill your GM PCs as you target the best of the player PCs.

As they progress, you drop loot, 2 to 3 pieces per room including the first room, one in every other room being equipment and weapons. Other than the 1 piece all are shabby loot. After the last battle, there is an antechamber with one of each starter reward, …but for some reason, each player can only pick one…you figure that out, and bizarre loot placed somewhere before the last boss = to number of players.

Those are now your PCs for the rest of the story.

The initiative goes, 1 character per rotation, with the GM being able to jump in on his turn with 1,2,3,…many NPCs as he wants.

To set the tone, I would have the initial room be long as the players choose to activate their characters they are further back from the exit. All the characters are tied up and hanging, it takes 1 heart of effort to get untied. At 5 effort the PC has one arm free…can choose to attack or free themselves.

Guard Ghouls are +2 to all D6 effort on attack, 2 hearts of HP. It takes them 2 rounds of time to take someone from being tied up and hung, to toss them in the pit.
A D6 timer is when 2 more Ghouls come in.

If being hardcore, the first PC to awaken will be the first thrown into the pit. The Gouls ignore their damage and simply do their job. Furthest from the pit is the first in the pit. at 1 heart HP they defend themselves attacking those who did the most damage.

In the first room your goal as GM is to set the tone, first to go might be worst off.

Second room and third room, you target the best stats with AOE attacks when you can. This will get them to spread their PCs vs the I control this group here, and you control that group there…but players can be stubborn.

The goal is to end the adventure with one character each, and 2 GM controlled that die in some gruesome way. But you may end up with one player with 3, another with 2 all other players with 1 and you with 0. As long as those with more than 1 don’t take advantage, each PC should end with 1 Starter reward and better than starter loot…+ their 1d4+2 HP, any character that starts from that point on, doesn’t get that. They start as “Level 1” 1 heart characters.

The Real Goal

Is to run your players through the wringer while granting them a small advantage and a comradery and an artificial sense of luck. Sure, my character only has +1 total…but she survived a meat grinder!!! She knows what she is about. Jake brought in a new character built with 6 Points…but he has 1 heart of HP and does not have the weird loot I do.

Anyway, that is my hypothesis. I am probably wrong.

#9

I’m confused. I’m assuming TN is “Total Number” but i’m not sure. I’m assuming that because

I was shooting for a total avg of +6 since that’s how many points you get to distribute to start with, so makes sense that you mean TN as the sum of all your pluses and minuses.

BUT i’m confused because you said it should average 10~12 until they get some decent loot. How would that happen? Are the additional points coming from the starter loot? If so, i don’t understand how those are relevant to the discussion of base stats of a starting character since loot is ephemeral.

…

Re the funnel. I still need to watch those videos but I think you’re basically suggesting a DCC RPG style of each player starting with a bunch of newb characters and keeping the ones that survive. This is certainly a valid approach, but it’s based in the old-school “don’t get too comfortable with that character as they’ll probably die next week” mindset.

This is fine for one-shots, but over time the RPG approach seems to have migrated towards building a character with a rich backstory that you want to imagine yourself as over the next few months while they go on interesting adventures and grow" Grow both in power and story richness. Now, we can ignore the “power” part because that’s not really needed, although it can be nice and I see why people like it. I do too.

if you are really into RP having a character you can work with for a while is pretty awesome. It’s the difference between, for example, a skit comedy show where everything’s new every week except the players, and an ensemble cast drama where you come to love (or hate) the various characters and definitely enjoy watching them grow and change as the events of the show effect them. Both are good, but they serve very different emotional needs. One’s a cookie. The other’s a rich multi-course dinner.

I, and many others, aren’t huge fans of the idea of playing the randomly generated character that happened to survive the great culling. “great… i’m a fighter… i don’t really enjoy playing fighters but ok, i guess i’m stuck with this for the next N months” And sure, maybe we modify the approach a little and I just roll up 4 different casters (because i like casters) and I take the one that survives and at least have the type of player I want. The DCC approach of not choosing a class until after the culling is decent too. Both are better from a player enjoyment standpoint but again I’m playing the random survivor. I’m not going to put the effort into making all the characters distinct when most of them are about to bite the dust, so now i have “the one that survived, named …bob” Is bob an a-hole? is he a sweet-heart? I dunno. I didn’t care enough to invest the energy because it was unlikely bob was going to survive.

I’d much rather create a character, care about them, and nurture them knowing that there’s a reasonable likelyhood that they’ll survive the upcoming campaign.

Also, it sucks for continuity for the group and storytelling if every week one of your “friends” gets swapped out. Friends that you’re literally asking to help save your life when things go downhill. It’s like they’re low wage laborers and you can drive down to the nearby home-depot to hire the next one waiting inline. Pull up. "hey, we need an adventurer. Don’t really care what you can do. you’ll probably die tomorrow. Wages are decent but again, you won’t live to spend them. " one guy raises his hand “excellent! Hop in!”

#10

TN = Target Number.

As to the Funnel system…there is nothing stopping you having a funnel to level1, and then a nice safe-ish RP game.

Regardless, we are talking past each other in reference to RP.

Good luck with your goals…perhaps a build system will fit best. I know for most of my games, build has been the only way to go…but the build and background does not ensure RP…it just ensures it was thought about.

Good players and a good GM is all you need for good RP.

#11

This is so true. You can have an awesome ruleset, the best adventure, greatest terrain, perfect music, and still have no role-playing if the GM and players don’t step up and do it.

#12

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

I was just going to post about this until I saw there was already an existing thread. I was looking thru the DnD5E PHB and noticed the stat modifiers formula again: take the 3d6-generated stat minus 10, then divide by 2, rounded down to get the bonus (I think I recalled that correctly…).

Then it occurred to me that the “average” roll statistically on a d6 is 3.5, so an “average” stat of 10 or 11 makes sense. So, using ICRPG 6-point stat creation approach, unlike the 3d6 method of stat creation, there are no “below average” stats in ICRPG, at least not initially.

I’m going to play with this concept in a very simple way. I am considering allowing players to take negative stats, and use those to add to the 6 point given at creation. I’m considering a cap of some sort, maybe no more than a -2 on any given stat, and no more than 2 stats can be negative.

so a fighter can have some extra points to use at the expense of his intelligence, for example. Opposite for a wizard, he could rob STR and CON to boost other stuff like INT.

But as with all things, I worry about unbalancing stuff and ending up with some bizarre munchkin character I never anticipated.

#13

I’m late to the party, but for me it depends on the subgenre of fantasy I’m running.

Standard heroic fantasy? No, or extremely few, negatives.
Dark fantasy? Equivalent of 3d6 (negatives welcome)

My only caveat is that I don’t screw players and make them take shit characters. Weaknesses? YAY. Below average in everything? NAY.

#14

Are you saying you wouldn’t want / let your players be below average in everything? If not, why not? Why does it matter to you as the DM? As long as they’re playing an interesting character and not making the game unpleasant for others. Imagine, for example, you had a friend with Down Syndrome in real life, surely you’d accommodate the fact they weren’t as “fast” as everyone else in the group. Surely you’d have fun with them? Maybe you have a player with a “slow” friend, and they want to try and empathize with them and learn a little about what it’s like to be them. Just like those humans can be valuable and enjoyable to be around, so can imaginary characters like them.

Who are we, to judge what our friends want to try envisioning themselves as?

#15

That’s… exactly what I’m saying. If I’m running a high/heroic fantasy game, the characters by definition are not below average in all regards. That’s a prerequisite for high/heroic fantasy. You can try to spin around it any fashion you like with hypotheticals, but here’s the bottom line: I don’t enjoy running games for characters that are 60-70% likely to FAIL any given roll. So I don’t run games where those characters are the Player Characters. Simple as that. I don’t judge what other people want to play - I only determine what happens at my tables.