Rolling the Dice and Taking your Chances

[MPHopcroft]

One of the more controversial elements of the MRTQ design is the way it asks players to roll for the characteristics in order and essentially take what they get: no re-rolls, nothing. You play what you rolled.

Now this does have its uses -- it does speed things up over allocvating points -- but it isn't all that helpful when creating NPCs for a GM. So will there be other means avaialble for determining the Characteristic scores?

And will the rolls be alterable depending on what kind of creature you're creating -- a human doesn't quite roll the same dice as a Duck, for example.

[rob]

At 10:01 PM 10/9/2007, you wrote:

One of the more controversial elements of the MRTQ design is the way it asks players to roll for the characteristics in order and essentially take what they get: no re-rolls, nothing. You play what you rolled.

Now this does have its uses -- it does speed things up over allocvating points -- but it isn't all that helpful when creating NPCs for a GM. So will there be other means avaialble for determining the Characteristic scores?

And will the rolls be alterable depending on what kind of creature you're creating -- a human doesn't quite roll the same dice as a Duck, for example.

The user will be allowed to directly enter whatever values they wish when creating an RQ character. The assumption is that the user will be rolling up the character in the company of the GM or other members of the play group, and every GM has his own rules regarding what players can/can't do when rolling up characters.

HL will provide validation that the characteristic values entered by the user are compliant with the min/max values for the selected race.

We could let users "roll up" random characters within HL, but the value of doing so is minimal at best. There is nothing to stop users from simply rolling again and again until they get something they like. So the best solution is to allow the GM to oversee this facet of character creation, applying his/her own tweaks to the process, and then have the user enter the values. Once that's done, the rest of the character can be created with HL properly controlling everything.

[sppeterson]

Sometimes as a GM I'll like to roll up stats for NPCs -- and I'm not worried about verifying those. In those cases it's convenient to not have to get out the dice and roll them next to the computer.

[MPHopcroft]

Originally Posted by rob

At 10:01 PM 10/9/2007, you wrote:

The user will be allowed to directly enter whatever values they wish when creating an RQ character. The assumption is that the user will be rolling up the character in the company of the GM or other members of the play group, and every GM has his own rules regarding what players can/can't do when rolling up characters.

HL will provide validation that the characteristic values entered by the user are compliant with the min/max values for the selected race.

We could let users "roll up" random characters within HL, but the value of doing so is minimal at best. There is nothing to stop users from simply rolling again and again until they get something they like. So the best solution is to allow the GM to oversee this facet of character creation, applying his/her own tweaks to the process, and then have the user enter the values. Once that's done, the rest of the character can be created with HL properly controlling everything.

I've seen that as a criticism of the MRQ chargen mechanic itself: there's no reason not to keep rolling until you get something desirable, which defeats the purpose of rolling randomly.

Will there be a place in the file that the user can alter to change such things as the minimums and maximums when doing something like creating a custom race? And will those maximums also change based on the experience level of the character being generated?

[Colen]

MPHopcroft wrote:

> I've seen that as a criticism of the MRQ chargen mechanic itself:
> there's no reason not to keep rolling until you get something desirable,
> which defeats the purpose of rolling randomly.


Isn't this a criticism of any rolling mechanic? As a group, if you're
worried about that, just roll up stats when you get together for a week.


> Will there be a place in the file that the user can alter to change such
> things as the minimums and maximums when doing something like creating a
> custom race? And will those maximums also change based on the experience
> level of the character being generated?


This should definitely be possible.



--
Colen McAlister, colen@wolflair.com
Chief Engineer, Lone Wolf Development