Character Creation: Point Buy or Random Roll? (Part I)

In developing a rules set, a key early mechanical decision for a designer is whether to use Point Buy or Random Roll for a character creation system.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses, so let's take a look this week at the former:

In a well-designed Point Buy system, a player is able to create exactly the type of character that he wants, the PCs are balanced with each other (assuming that they start with the same number of build points), and scaling the starting power level of the campaign is simply a matter of adjusting the starting number of build points.  And it is quite fun to look for interesting combinations and synergies from build options.  I consider Standard Arrays of ability scores a form of Point Buy where the system has preemptively generated stats rather than the player.

On the downside, character creation often takes considerably longer since Point Buy places a premium on initial character conception (although pregenerated templates can help speed things up), which in turn often means that character death is a more bitter pill for the player to swallow since the player has invested more time and energy.  Also, metagaming often increases, with players playing to the system rather than in game considerations, the most notorious example of which is min-maxing.  

Attribution to Gage Skidmore

Moreover, even where a player isn't min-maxing per se, once players figure out the "best" build for an archetype, a blandness of PCs often sets in.  Better systems will offer more choices without a clear "best" for an archetype, such as GURPS.

Other lesser examples of metagaming include players attempting to twist the narrative to fit their character's skills, sometimes in the face of common sense.  Overemphasis of system mastery may sacrifice more organic gameplay, as well.  For example, Gimli of Arabia may never have happened in a Point Buy system where a player is loathe to use a suboptimal weapon.

Also, please note that I wrote "well-designed", as it is often easy to cheese a poorly-designed Point Buy system, with a player able to exploit flaws in the system, such as picking up effectively free build points for Disadvantages that are never enforced in actual play.  "REIGN: A Game of Lords and Leaders," by Greg Stolze, has the best implementation I've seen to prevent this kind of cheesing: In  REIGN, rather than additional build points, Disadvantages give extra experience points (and only after the PC has suffered a tangible setback).

Literature: "Queen of the Black Coast" (1934)

Today, I wanted to touch upon a vintage Swords & Sorcery tale, the great "Queen of the Black Coast" (1934) by R. E. Howard:

While this is ripping yarn generally acknowledged as one of R. E. Howard's finest Conan of Cimmeria entries and while I generally agree with this assessment, something about this story has always irked me.  Specifically, at the beginning, Conan walks into the courthouse open carrying his broadsword and apparently no one tried to relieve him of his obviously lethal instrumentality.  One might argue that the court staff was cowed into submission...except that the judge's behavior obviously indicates otherwise.

This utter lack of self-awareness or sense of self-preservation by the court staff broke my suspension of disbelief.

ಠ_ಠ

Next, Conan brutally murders the judge in cold blood because the latter dared to ask the barbarian displeasing questions.  Leaving aside the issue of the Cimmerian's obvious sociopathy in killing an innocent person, making the court staff unbelievable stupid is, well, unbelievable.  Really, the whole beginning reads like Howard's revenge porn against some authority figure that irked him personally.

Howard then resorts to massive Plot Armor in order to prevent the logical conclusion of this scenario (i.e., Conan's capture and execution).

O_o

Thereafter, "Queen of the Black Coast" kicks into high gear and becomes a fine heroic fantasy story, featuring perhaps the most interesting supporting character in all of the original Conan works, Bêlit, "the wildest she-devil unhanged."

But that first speed bump is a doozie.

Design Philosophy (Part II)

As I mentioned in my last post, speeding up gameplay is a second major design focus for my rules set, Sorcery & Steel.  In grade school, I ran a very loose 1e AD&D game, using a theater of the mind style, which played quickly (e.g., combats rarely lasted more than 15 minutes).  By contrast, my current 1e AD&D GM runs a much tighter, by the book, game.  His style is proper Old School, including a battle mat and miniatures, which is great for highlighting the tactical side of encounters but can take much longer (e.g., combats can run more than an hour).  And he doesn't even include the most fiddly bits of the rules set, such as Weapon v. Armor Class.

So, with Sorcery & Steel, I want to combine the best elements of both play styles to have an Old School rules set with enough interesting tactical options but also with reasonably fast speed of play.

In addition to eliminating in-game look up tables, my rules set also hand waves most in-game accounting, such as encumbrance.  Instead, PCs are allowed to carry whatever they can reasonably explain, with the GM as arbiter of "reasonable".  So, if you want to carry five swords, that's fine so long as you can explain where exactly you are carrying said swords and why you shouldn't be penalized during combat.

Design Philosophy (Part I)

Like many longtime gamers, as I've gotten older, I've become increasingly lazy as a GM.  Part of it is because I simply have less time to prepare for game sessions.  Part of it is because not only have my improvisational skills as a GM improved, but I now enjoy a bit of improvisation during game sessions.

Consequently, the first design focus for my rules set, Sorcery & Steel, is to make a GM's life easier.  One of the decisions I've made is to do away with all in-game look up tables (i.e., look up tables used after character generation).  Back in grade school, I spent many hours memorizing tables like this:

I know that some old school players swear by look up tables, but today I prefer not even needing to look anything up during a session, which is usually possible since I know my rules set well enough.  While my approach front loads complexity, once a GM gets the hang of Sorcery & Steel, gameplay speeds up noticeably, which also happens to be a second, somewhat overlapping, design focus.

Recently, I briefly made an exception by adding Critical Hit and Critical Miss tables.  However, when playtesting a module I'm writing for these rules, gameplay came to a halt when I had to look up the Critical Hit table, so I reverted to the old rules (double weapon damage for a Critical Hit and dropping your weapon for a Critical Miss) for the next draft of the rules set.