Today on The Dice Chest : Rolling Stats?

There has been a growing phase in the Role Playing and Tabletop gaming community that interests me. And if you have been reading my Blog enough now you know I can’t let something that interests me to pass by without throwing my brain at it. (Not literally of course or else what would my zombie minions want from me?) That Topic of course is Rolling Stats.

Rolling Stats has been around in the tabletop RPG community for, well as long as Dungeons and Dragons has been around. Even in 2nd edition you rolled some dice and took what you got. Now there are some variants to rolling your dice for stats that usually involve rolling extra dice and dropping the highest or lowest, rolling in sets and keeping the best set, rolling an extra set and dropping the lowest, starting at a particular number and adding a couple dice, and the list goes on.

What is interesting is this kind of random character building is starting to go away with the ages. As Tabletop gaming is coming up to the new millennium and more and more are playing online or in adventure leagues, it seems less and less are rolling their stats and using a point buying system.

Now before you start lighting your torches and raising your pitchforks at me, please remember I’ve been playing these games since I was a kid, and Dungeons and Dragons since I was a teenager, and rolling your stats was part of the fun of building a character in those days. I’m not saying it’s a terrible system and in fact a lot of DMs recommend this because it prevents a single player from being over powered in comparison to the others in a group, or the opposite, and it helps to keep the players on a more even ground. And please choose what you want as it isn’t a BAD system just not my preferred system.

But on the opposite end of this magic coin the shear amount of role play that can be brought to the table by someone rolling poor stats, or someone is forced into a different class then they had planned before hand, can bring some of the best moments in a game. As usual though, make sure you players are ok with this type of character building because if they aren’t game then you may start having issues with keeping them interested and likely will try to find ways to kill off their character just to try again.

In the end it is all up to the DM and the Players on how they want to play the game, the new style of setting up your stats can be a great way to introduce new players to the game indeed, but sometimes it can be more interesting to see how someone reacts to being on the bad end of the dice.

What is your opinion? Do you like to have your players roll stats? Or are you all about Point buying system? Or do you have your own system? Leave a comment below or fill out the Poll!

Til next time!