Background: When my player's make new characters I give them two options when rolling for stats: you can roll4d6, remove the lowest, and have the choice to reroll 1 time, or roll 1d20 and reroll anything 5 or lower.
Problem: One of my players rolled 2 natural 20's for his stats, and increased (racial bonus) another stat to 20, giving him 3 20's
Questions: Is it fair to ask my player to reroll at least one or two of the 20's they have (the rest of their stats are 18, 19, and 15 respectively)? How should I go about asking this? I did make a comment that if he had more than three when he was rolling I'd make him reroll, so could I jump on that as a defense?
Update: While I intended to highlight just the one particular example, I did not mean to just leave it as "Do I have this player reroll or not?". At the time of writing the post originally, I was more focused on what some players would have liked, and forgot to put that I would have had every player reroll.
Also to the almost 100 people who have seen this and to any other new DM's (this is my third time as a DM in a game that I have only played for less than a year) I hope you are learning something
Interested to hear the responses of more experienced DMs on this one.
My instinct is that you'll lose some credibility if you just force a reroll. If they did everything by your rules, but you're invalidating them anyway, how can they trust what you are doing behind the screen?
I think the only option you have is to explain that you done screwed up. You thought your character rolling method would result in balanced characters, but you've discovered it doesn't. Then you have to change the methodology accordingly. Explain that their character is unbalanced and would impact the fun for everyone else (seriously, back in the day I played Werewolf: The Apocalypse with someone who powergamed their way to a character that made the rest of us redundant and it sucked). Be very, very clear that this was your fault, not theirs (they followed your rules). Then reroll the character. How they react will likely give you good insight on what it's going to be like to have that player at your table.
Part of point of the 4d6drop method is that none of the results can ever exceed 18, so with a racial bonus the max they could possibly ever have is one 20, one 19, and nothing above an 18, and that would include an incredibly luck roll of three 18s.
On a d20, the statistical probability of rolling a natural 20 is the exact same as the probability of rolling any other number, 5%.
On 3d6 the statistical probability of rolling a natural 18 is approximately 0.46%, whereas the probability of rolling a natural 10 or an 11 is approximately 12.5% for either result. (That means 25% of the time they will roll 10-11.)
That means they are around 1,100.00% more likely to roll a 20 on 1d20 than they are to roll an 18 on 3d6. And they are about 500% more likely to roll “average” on 3d6 than they are on a d20.
In other words, there are reasons to not roll a d20 for starting abilities, and you just found one of them.
I'd say you're stuck. Saying "I presented a system. I didn't like the results in one instance so you, particularly player who benefitted from a system I presented, have to do it over to my satisfaction" is just uncool and will set a shaky dynamic for you and the rest of the table, i.e. a DM that won't own their own rulings, or at best is fickle about them. As 'Sposta points out, there is _math_ behind the standard generation methods. You gave them the opportunity to be "high rollers" and these are the consequences of your ruling, someone is a big outlier to the rest of the party. Next game, maybe opt for the conventional character generation method. Or scrap it, and everyone rerolls under a stable method; but players are already invested in characters you said were legit, so....
Why did you make this system if not for the wildness you're now facing?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'd say you're stuck. Saying "I presented a system. I didn't like the results in one instance so you, particularly player who benefitted from a system I presented, have to do it over to my satisfaction" is just uncool and will set a shaky dynamic for you and the rest of the table, i.e. a DM that won't own their own rulings, or at best is fickle about them. As 'Sposta points out, there is _math_ behind the standard generation methods. You gave them the opportunity to be "high rollers" and these are the consequences of your ruling, someone is a big outlier to the rest of the party. Next game, maybe opt for the conventional character generation method. Or scrap it, and everyone rerolls under a stable method; but players are already invested in characters you said were legit, so....
Why did you make this system if not for the wildness you're now facing?
An inexperienced DM, coupled with not having a good grasp of statistics, could easily find themselves in this position. D20s look like a convenient short cut to stats, rather than what looks over complicated if you don't know the reasons for it.
If (s)he's a new DM, and especially if the party are new players, wouldn't it be better to do mea culpe's and have everyone reroll rather than doggedly stick to a campaign that could put everyone off the game for good? Sure, the DM made the bed, but all the players have to lie in it. It took me 20 years to return to RPGs after the game that was ruined by a power-gamed player character.
Thank to everyone who responded. The purpose of this post originally was to just get a second opinion, cause I knew initially this could end up shooting myself in the foot. I do understand that the chance of rolling a 20 with this method increases to ~7% chance (due to rerolls for anything 5 or lower removing 5 numbers thus increasing their odds). This was just a "hey I'm on the fence and need advice cause I don't want this to be something bigger than it is" post, and while I never intended to make the player reroll, I wanted to present this as a good teaching moment as well as the advice of others.
I'd say you're stuck. Saying "I presented a system. I didn't like the results in one instance so you, particularly player who benefitted from a system I presented, have to do it over to my satisfaction" is just uncool and will set a shaky dynamic for you and the rest of the table, i.e. a DM that won't own their own rulings, or at best is fickle about them. As 'Sposta points out, there is _math_ behind the standard generation methods. You gave them the opportunity to be "high rollers" and these are the consequences of your ruling, someone is a big outlier to the rest of the party. Next game, maybe opt for the conventional character generation method. Or scrap it, and everyone rerolls under a stable method; but players are already invested in characters you said were legit, so....
Why did you make this system if not for the wildness you're now facing?
An inexperienced DM, coupled with not having a good grasp of statistics, could easily find themselves in this position. D20s look like a convenient short cut to stats, rather than what looks over complicated if you don't know the reasons for it.
If (s)he's a new DM, and especially if the party are new players, wouldn't it be better to do mea culpe's and have everyone reroll rather than doggedly stick to a campaign that could put everyone off the game for good? Sure, the DM made the bed, but all the players have to lie in it. It took me 20 years to return to RPGs after the game that was ruined by a power-gamed player character.
That's why I suggested scrap and everyone rerolls, presuming the table hasn't built up significant investment. If people were happy, you're not doing so much a session zero but introducing a session -1 which shakes the DM/GM's sense of offering a stable game. These aren't irreparable self-injuries, but things that have to be overcome that don't have to be there.
The one thing that shouldn't be done is a decision exclusively regarding the single character that "won" character generation.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah I would just come to your players and say “Sorry guys, the d20 thing was a mistake.” Have the players who opted for that one re-roll with the 4d6 method.
There’s no reason to make everyone re-roll. The players who already did 4d6 are fine.
Are they friends of yours?? If friends just talk to them about it. If not, roll with it and let him enjoy Thor or Superman. To roll to 20's in 6 rolls is pretty cool and I would be excited. Maybe even get the rest of the party up there some and make encounters a lot tougher. Point of the game is to have fun, and he will have a story he will tell 20 years from now about when he rolled this character up.
And I agree with this. My mindset at the time of writing was focused on what some of my players would have possibly preferred over what should have been fair and accepting what happened.
I think that the biggest risk here is your other players feeling like their PCs are completely overshadowed by +7 to attacks at level one. Therefore, if you don't want to punish that player that simply rolled well (and I don't think you should!) I think it is better to say to the whole table, "This created a major imbalance, so I have an idea to make the rest of your characters feel balanced compared to Superman over here".
And then I would offer a number of feats/ASIs to those other players to help maintain balance. Not sure exactly how many (I'll touch on that in a second), but then at least everyone gets to feel kinda cool at the table, rather than just the one PC. I think that's a fair trade-off, and it still allows for encounter balance ... you'll just have to treat your PCs as a few levels higher than they are listed at.
By my count, the PC in question has a total of +25 in their six ability scores (+5, +5, +5, +4, +4, +2) ... standard array with racial ASI gives +7 (+3, +3, +1, +1, 0, -1) ... 4d6d1 averages out to only about +6 or +7 at the end of the day too. That's a HUGE difference.
Personally, I'd offer one feat for every +5 that a PC needs to make up to catch up to +25 to help allow those other players feel cool. (If they all, smartly, took your d20 offer, then hopefully none are getting 4 feats at player generation.) And then just plan like your game is starting at level 4, at least.
ETA: Keep in mind, a single feat is usually equivalent to only +1 in ability score modifiers. So those other players are STILL gonna be way behind, competitively speaking. But pushing monsters with Telekinetic or stopping foes in their tracks with Sentinel can often feel a lot better than simply hitting on 10% more of your attacks.
My plan (unrelated to this thread) was to allow every player to have 1 free feat at level 1, as this is a homebrew game and most of their characters were humans in another life. I completely agree with not punishing the player in question (as I addressed in my edit). This is actually great, so thank you!
My plan (unrelated to this thread) was to allow every player to have 1 free feat at level 1, as this is a homebrew game and most of their characters were humans in another life. I completely agree with not punishing the player in question (as I addressed in my edit). This is actually great, so thank you!
All good! I think you're on the right track. The biggest hurdles now are balancing. If you throw normal level one monsters at them just because they're level one, that Super-PC is gonna wreck stuff while the others are balanced. If you throw stronger monsters, that Super-PC will be fine and slightly more balanced, but then you risk the other PCs being worthless or, worse, cannon fodder.
You need to bring the rest of the party up, then scale up challenges, I think. Just be cautious! No reason this needs to break anything.
Another idea: Send lots of high INT and/or high WIS creatures at them in combat. Those creatures are going to go STRAIGHT at the Super-PC once they see they are more powerful, with good reason. Then you don't have to risk strong monsters killing weak PCs in order to balance encounters.
The problem is that the stats of one character far outshine the other characters. In addition, due to the die rolling method chosen, a little bit of luck results in ridiculous stats due to the flat probability distribution. The odds of rolling 3 20's when rolling d20's (reroll 5-) is far higher than rolling 3 18's rolling 4d6 drop one.
However, the real issue is that one of your players followed your dice rolling conventions in good faith and has a character that is far beyond the norm for level 1. Trying to compensate other characters by offering them free feats to help them bridge the gap to the character with ridiculous stats isn't fair to the character that rolled well.
The imbalances caused by rolled stats are one of the primary reasons I stopped using rolled stats and switched to point buy a long time ago. Point buy generates fun, usable, good characters that are fundamentally even for all the players.
There are several ways to address this depending on how well you know the folks involved. If everyone is friends and they are cool with it you could just let the player run the character with ridiculous stats. A team player and good role player will be able to play the character without overshadowing everyone else as long as they don't optimize the character too much. It also lets them play characters that would normally be very MAD like a monk/warlock or others - or create a wizard with a high strength and constitution.
However, the full set of numbers is almost as high and racial bonuses haven't been added.
For a mature group of folks, a DM mea culpa might be best. Saying that you have realized that rolling d20's for stats is just a bad idea because of results like this one or the equally probable set of 7,8,9,10 stats that would not be fun to play at all. In which case, have the character reroll using 4d6 drop one but allow them to substitute one 18 for one of the rolled stats to compensate them for the loss of the character with 3 20s. Not ideal but better than the current situation.
Alternatively, if the game hasn't started yet, you could ask everyone to rebuild using point buy and if you want stronger characters then increase the points available (from 27) and possibly allow for the highest assigned stat to be 16 or 17 so that starting with an 18 is possible.
Good luck! :)
P.S. Even rolling 4d6 drop one, you can get some ridiculous stats. I rolled a character in 1e, with witnesses, that had 3 18s and rolled 97 for exceptional strength. The odds were miniscule but events like that do happen. However, campaigns where there are large discrepancies between player capability often don't seem to last as long in my experience.
Background: When my player's make new characters I give them two options when rolling for stats: you can roll4d6, remove the lowest, and have the choice to reroll 1 time, or roll 1d20 and reroll anything 5 or lower.
Problem: One of my players rolled 2 natural 20's for his stats, and increased (racial bonus) another stat to 20, giving him 3 20's
Questions: Is it fair to ask my player to reroll at least one or two of the 20's they have (the rest of their stats are 18, 19, and 15 respectively)? How should I go about asking this? I did make a comment that if he had more than three when he was rolling I'd make him reroll, so could I jump on that as a defense?
Update: While I intended to highlight just the one particular example, I did not mean to just leave it as "Do I have this player reroll or not?". At the time of writing the post originally, I was more focused on what some players would have liked, and forgot to put that I would have had every player reroll.
Also to the almost 100 people who have seen this and to any other new DM's (this is my third time as a DM in a game that I have only played for less than a year) I hope you are learning something
Interested to hear the responses of more experienced DMs on this one.
My instinct is that you'll lose some credibility if you just force a reroll. If they did everything by your rules, but you're invalidating them anyway, how can they trust what you are doing behind the screen?
I think the only option you have is to explain that you done screwed up. You thought your character rolling method would result in balanced characters, but you've discovered it doesn't. Then you have to change the methodology accordingly. Explain that their character is unbalanced and would impact the fun for everyone else (seriously, back in the day I played Werewolf: The Apocalypse with someone who powergamed their way to a character that made the rest of us redundant and it sucked). Be very, very clear that this was your fault, not theirs (they followed your rules). Then reroll the character. How they react will likely give you good insight on what it's going to be like to have that player at your table.
Part of point of the 4d6drop method is that none of the results can ever exceed 18, so with a racial bonus the max they could possibly ever have is one 20, one 19, and nothing above an 18, and that would include an incredibly luck roll of three 18s.
On a d20, the statistical probability of rolling a natural 20 is the exact same as the probability of rolling any other number, 5%.
On 3d6 the statistical probability of rolling a natural 18 is approximately 0.46%, whereas the probability of rolling a natural 10 or an 11 is approximately 12.5% for either result. (That means 25% of the time they will roll 10-11.)
That means they are around 1,100.00% more likely to roll a 20 on 1d20 than they are to roll an 18 on 3d6. And they are about 500% more likely to roll “average” on 3d6 than they are on a d20.
In other words, there are reasons to not roll a d20 for starting abilities, and you just found one of them.
Good luck.
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I'd say you're stuck. Saying "I presented a system. I didn't like the results in one instance so you, particularly player who benefitted from a system I presented, have to do it over to my satisfaction" is just uncool and will set a shaky dynamic for you and the rest of the table, i.e. a DM that won't own their own rulings, or at best is fickle about them. As 'Sposta points out, there is _math_ behind the standard generation methods. You gave them the opportunity to be "high rollers" and these are the consequences of your ruling, someone is a big outlier to the rest of the party. Next game, maybe opt for the conventional character generation method. Or scrap it, and everyone rerolls under a stable method; but players are already invested in characters you said were legit, so....
Why did you make this system if not for the wildness you're now facing?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
An inexperienced DM, coupled with not having a good grasp of statistics, could easily find themselves in this position. D20s look like a convenient short cut to stats, rather than what looks over complicated if you don't know the reasons for it.
If (s)he's a new DM, and especially if the party are new players, wouldn't it be better to do mea culpe's and have everyone reroll rather than doggedly stick to a campaign that could put everyone off the game for good? Sure, the DM made the bed, but all the players have to lie in it. It took me 20 years to return to RPGs after the game that was ruined by a power-gamed player character.
Thank to everyone who responded. The purpose of this post originally was to just get a second opinion, cause I knew initially this could end up shooting myself in the foot. I do understand that the chance of rolling a 20 with this method increases to ~7% chance (due to rerolls for anything 5 or lower removing 5 numbers thus increasing their odds). This was just a "hey I'm on the fence and need advice cause I don't want this to be something bigger than it is" post, and while I never intended to make the player reroll, I wanted to present this as a good teaching moment as well as the advice of others.
That's why I suggested scrap and everyone rerolls, presuming the table hasn't built up significant investment. If people were happy, you're not doing so much a session zero but introducing a session -1 which shakes the DM/GM's sense of offering a stable game. These aren't irreparable self-injuries, but things that have to be overcome that don't have to be there.
The one thing that shouldn't be done is a decision exclusively regarding the single character that "won" character generation.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah I would just come to your players and say “Sorry guys, the d20 thing was a mistake.” Have the players who opted for that one re-roll with the 4d6 method.
There’s no reason to make everyone re-roll. The players who already did 4d6 are fine.
Are they friends of yours?? If friends just talk to them about it. If not, roll with it and let him enjoy Thor or Superman. To roll to 20's in 6 rolls is pretty cool and I would be excited. Maybe even get the rest of the party up there some and make encounters a lot tougher. Point of the game is to have fun, and he will have a story he will tell 20 years from now about when he rolled this character up.
And I agree with this. My mindset at the time of writing was focused on what some of my players would have possibly preferred over what should have been fair and accepting what happened.
I think that the biggest risk here is your other players feeling like their PCs are completely overshadowed by +7 to attacks at level one. Therefore, if you don't want to punish that player that simply rolled well (and I don't think you should!) I think it is better to say to the whole table, "This created a major imbalance, so I have an idea to make the rest of your characters feel balanced compared to Superman over here".
And then I would offer a number of feats/ASIs to those other players to help maintain balance. Not sure exactly how many (I'll touch on that in a second), but then at least everyone gets to feel kinda cool at the table, rather than just the one PC. I think that's a fair trade-off, and it still allows for encounter balance ... you'll just have to treat your PCs as a few levels higher than they are listed at.
By my count, the PC in question has a total of +25 in their six ability scores (+5, +5, +5, +4, +4, +2) ... standard array with racial ASI gives +7 (+3, +3, +1, +1, 0, -1) ... 4d6d1 averages out to only about +6 or +7 at the end of the day too. That's a HUGE difference.
Personally, I'd offer one feat for every +5 that a PC needs to make up to catch up to +25 to help allow those other players feel cool. (If they all, smartly, took your d20 offer, then hopefully none are getting 4 feats at player generation.) And then just plan like your game is starting at level 4, at least.
ETA: Keep in mind, a single feat is usually equivalent to only +1 in ability score modifiers. So those other players are STILL gonna be way behind, competitively speaking. But pushing monsters with Telekinetic or stopping foes in their tracks with Sentinel can often feel a lot better than simply hitting on 10% more of your attacks.
My plan (unrelated to this thread) was to allow every player to have 1 free feat at level 1, as this is a homebrew game and most of their characters were humans in another life. I completely agree with not punishing the player in question (as I addressed in my edit). This is actually great, so thank you!
All good! I think you're on the right track. The biggest hurdles now are balancing. If you throw normal level one monsters at them just because they're level one, that Super-PC is gonna wreck stuff while the others are balanced. If you throw stronger monsters, that Super-PC will be fine and slightly more balanced, but then you risk the other PCs being worthless or, worse, cannon fodder.
You need to bring the rest of the party up, then scale up challenges, I think. Just be cautious! No reason this needs to break anything.
Another idea: Send lots of high INT and/or high WIS creatures at them in combat. Those creatures are going to go STRAIGHT at the Super-PC once they see they are more powerful, with good reason. Then you don't have to risk strong monsters killing weak PCs in order to balance encounters.
The problem is that the stats of one character far outshine the other characters. In addition, due to the die rolling method chosen, a little bit of luck results in ridiculous stats due to the flat probability distribution. The odds of rolling 3 20's when rolling d20's (reroll 5-) is far higher than rolling 3 18's rolling 4d6 drop one.
However, the real issue is that one of your players followed your dice rolling conventions in good faith and has a character that is far beyond the norm for level 1. Trying to compensate other characters by offering them free feats to help them bridge the gap to the character with ridiculous stats isn't fair to the character that rolled well.
The imbalances caused by rolled stats are one of the primary reasons I stopped using rolled stats and switched to point buy a long time ago. Point buy generates fun, usable, good characters that are fundamentally even for all the players.
There are several ways to address this depending on how well you know the folks involved. If everyone is friends and they are cool with it you could just let the player run the character with ridiculous stats. A team player and good role player will be able to play the character without overshadowing everyone else as long as they don't optimize the character too much. It also lets them play characters that would normally be very MAD like a monk/warlock or others - or create a wizard with a high strength and constitution.
However, the full set of numbers is almost as high and racial bonuses haven't been added.
For a mature group of folks, a DM mea culpa might be best. Saying that you have realized that rolling d20's for stats is just a bad idea because of results like this one or the equally probable set of 7,8,9,10 stats that would not be fun to play at all. In which case, have the character reroll using 4d6 drop one but allow them to substitute one 18 for one of the rolled stats to compensate them for the loss of the character with 3 20s. Not ideal but better than the current situation.
Alternatively, if the game hasn't started yet, you could ask everyone to rebuild using point buy and if you want stronger characters then increase the points available (from 27) and possibly allow for the highest assigned stat to be 16 or 17 so that starting with an 18 is possible.
Good luck! :)
P.S. Even rolling 4d6 drop one, you can get some ridiculous stats. I rolled a character in 1e, with witnesses, that had 3 18s and rolled 97 for exceptional strength. The odds were miniscule but events like that do happen. However, campaigns where there are large discrepancies between player capability often don't seem to last as long in my experience.