Character Generation Wheel

This is the system I like for generating characters for my D&D-ish games.

It provides players with a reasonable degree of flexibility in choosing the class they want to play, providing decent characters without churning out a never-ending string of superheroes.

Here's the PDF file (21.3KB, opens in a new tab or window). It's laid out with two A5 pages on A4, and instructions are included.

Note that this is NOT a character sheet, though I guess you could use it as one. It's simply an aid to character generation.

Note also that this is just a no-frills version of a much fancier one I've presented before. This one just requires no assembly, is all.

Walked 25 miles through the snow, uphill both ways....

I was leafing through some really old AD&D character sheets and what-not from my university days, and recalled how liberal we thought our DM was being when he not only let us roll 4d6 (drop lowest) instead of 3d6 for our characteristics, but then even let us rearrange them a bit if we didn't have the minimum requirements to play the class we really, really wanted with the six scores we'd rolled in order.

It seems to me that we didn't usually end up with particularly shitty characters, and some of them lasted a very long time indeed (though with a certain amount of resurrection magic at hand, it has to be said). In point of fact, I think we were beating the statistical curve quite convincingly with our character generation rolls, since there seem to be few characters in the pile without at least one characteristic in the 17-18 range, though that's in part because the DM was pretty liberal with characteristic-enhancing magic items and wishes and such-like. Where the old characters differ, stat-wise, from more recent ones is that most of their characteristics were distinctly average, and some were truly bad.

In contrast, these days most people seem to deem a character pretty much unplayable unless they start with at least one 18, and having any stat under 13 is cause for great complaint and doom-saying. It irks me, somewhat.

I'm not entirely blameless, since I've allowed some pretty liberal stat-rolling methods in the past, and people have become used to being able to pick and choose from a vast pool of above-average potential characters. I need to tighten up on that a bit.

I still think that Ye Olde 3d6-In-Order is a bit savage, but I'm very tempted to go back to 3d6 rolls (instead of 4d6, drop lowest) for my Characteristic Wheel stat generation system.

The thing is, I'm not so much keen on making everyone play a raddled, crippled, hideous moron, as I am on making high characteristics a bit special. At the moment, they're not, and I think that's wrong, and a bit sad.

And now, behold the power...

...of this fully functioning character generation wheel!

I've fancied it up since I first made it, so it's now also available in glorious full colour (pdf is about 480 KB).

You will observe that I've cut out a disc of clear plastic to write the scores on in dry-erase marker, and pinned it to the card with one of those brass bendy-staple things that I don't know the name of so that it rotates freely.

This particular set of characteristics were generated with just 3d6, so they mostly suck, but the set I've selected actually aren't too bad... except for that DEX. This person is going to be kind of a klutz if something isn't done about that when choosing its species.

D&D5e Character Generation Wheel

This PDF (some assembly required), when printed on to card and a circle of acetate or clear plastic pinned to it (for writing on with dry-erase marker), creates a handy-dandy tool for initial characteristic generation for my D&D campaigns.

Basically, the way it works is this:

1. For each of the small circles, roll 4d6 and write the sum of THREE of them on the plastic over the circle. (I've used this system with 3d6 straight as well, and still got pretty decent characters.)
2. Repeat until all the circles are filled.
3. Rotate the plastic circle until you get a characteristic array you like matched with the characteristic name labels in the bottom quadrant of the array.
4. Once you've chosen a set, you can rearrange them, but at a cost:
    .....For the first pair, each score of the pair is reduced by -1.
   .....For a second pair, each is reduced by -2.
   .....For a third pair, each is reduced by -3.
   And so on, if you really want to play around with them.

Note that I have included the Strength reduction I use for the teensier races. If you hate that idea, just ignore it.

Multiple Characters for Players

One of the recently-released Old School RPG systems (I forget the name of it) makes use of the idea of the "sieve" for starting characters, in which, to begin with, each player begins with three or five or however many lowest-level characters. As they inevitably die off one by one, the player will end up with one, which (hopefully) has proven to be tough and lucky enough to have a better than even chance of extended survival, and which will become the player's only character for some time. Effectively, it's kind of like the video game concept of extra lives.

Giving each PC a posse can be an excellent opportunity for the GM to introduce some intra-party conflict and rivalry without actually going the PvP route; effectively the PCs would all be very minor gang leaders in cooperation with other gang leaders for a specific goal.

I'd draw up a fairly simple relationship chart for the various factions (and maybe some of the individuals) and let them go for it, treating the members of their posses as followers, their actions usually under the direct control of the player with the understanding that the GM may direct their actions as NPCs at any time for dramatic purposes.

It's possible — even likely — that one or more players might want to try a bit of backbiting, bribery and corruption amongst his or her fellow PC's entourages. This is not the sort of behaviour that any self-respecting GM should discourage. :)

And, of course, let the players know that their posse is their available pool of backup characters in case of their unfortunate but inevitable grisly demise. If a player starts using his posse as meat-shields to protect his or her own worthless skin, they may find themselves abandoned as their erstwhile followers transfer their loyalties (or simply run away) ....kind of a permanent loss of hit-points.

I suppose the players could choose whichever of their posse they want to inhabit as and when they die off and have to transfer characters, but to maintain the idea of the player being the gang leader, I'd suggest it would be better to rank them in order of Charisma, with the surviving follower with the highest CHA becoming the new leader (PC).

Most annoying ever...

The most annoying character I ever encountered was in a Champions game, built by my friend Mark purely to break the game (I suspect).

The character's name was Nexus. He had only two powers: Duplication (12 duplicates) and a Speed of 12 (out of a maximum of 12). This in a game where a SPD of 6 was pretty damn good.

What this meant, effectively, was that in any given combat Turn, once he'd spent his first action on splitting into his duplicates, Nexus (Mark) got 144 actions. The rest of us got 4 or 5 or 6 or 7. That meant that for 95% of the game, we were lying around twiddling our thumbs while Nexus scampered around doing EVERYTHING. It also meant that a Turn took a long, long time to resolve.

Then, due to everyone ignoring my inspired tactical genius, my blind acrobatic Daredevilesque character ended up fighting a ten-armed octopus villain and getting entangled, while Nexus took on the villain I should have been fighting, the one with the mega-flash attack which blinded all his duplicates at once.

Absolute fiasco.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

L is for Loser

The lamest D&D character I ever made was a half-elvish magic user called Boris, whose entire magical repertoire consisted of Read Magic and Friends. He had 2 hit-points and was eaten by a wolf.

Character generation — a dream within a dream

I've used at least one oodle, and probably many oodles of character generation methods across a multitude of roleplaying systems. I've even built a character for a game called Space Opera (I think) which had a character generation system so convoluted that by the time we'd finally finished, we were too exhausted to actually play the game.

What I want to concentrate on right now are some of the methods I've used to create characters for my various D&D campaigns, in no particular order.

1) 4d6, drop the lowest, in order

This is the system I was first introduced to when I started playing AD&D in 1981. As far as I could see, from the fairly tiny pool of D&D players in Palmerston North and Wellington in those days, it was pretty much the default method for everyone.

It's a pretty decent method that is reasonably good at not producing a string of crippled gimps, but exceptional characteristics (i.e. anything in the 16–18 range) were still rare enough to be special. We seldom discarded a stat-block as rolled, unless it was really, really bad.

To begin with, we just rolled the stats in order and built whatever character class would fit them. In a revolution in player-enablement, our DM actually started allowing us to swap two of the stats around so that we weren't necessarily forced into (or out of) any given class. Wow! The power!

It was under this system that was born a character whose every stat was either 10 or 11. Naturally, he had to be called Mean Norm the Average Ranger. (That's a statistics joke, folks. They're few and far between, so make the most of it).

2) The 6x6 3d6 matrix

This is a system I came up with all by myself, though the chance of me being the first person ever to have this particular blinding flash of inspiration is pretty small.

In this system, the player rolls 3d6 36 times, writing the results in a 6x6 grid like the one shown here. The order in which the stats are laid out is unimportant as long as they're the same horizontally and vertically.

The player can choose one statblock from any of the rows or columns, or, at a pinch, from either diagonal. The stats can't be rearranged, so if you want to play a specific class you may have to make some compromises — for example, in the set shown here, if the player wants to play a magic-user and get the 16 result into their INT slot, they're going to have to accept a CHA of 6.

This is a fairly decent system for pumping out characters that will perform pretty well. It gives the players a certain amount of freedom to choose which class they want to play, but being limited to 3d6, doesn't often produce terrifying Übermenschen.

3) The 12 x 3d6 decoder ring system

This is another system of my own invention. The player rolls 3d6 12 times and writes the results in a row. Then any contiguous set of six stats can be chosen, depending on which class the player wants to build

The stats wrap around, so if you fall off the right-hand side you complete your set of six from the left — as shown in the animation, the red set (fighter or thief) starts its statblock 5 places from the right, so its 6th stat is taken from the left-most. The statblock, once chosen, can't be rearranged.

Again, it's a system designed to allow for a degree of player freedom without tending towards mega-stat monsters.

4) 3d6 in order, and suck it up

I include this although I've hardly ever actually used it. I would only use it these days in a high-mortality one-off game in which character replacement is going to be very frequent. I know it has a certain masochistic appeal to some grognards, but in my experience most people prefer to play reasonably capable characters; the novelty of having to deal with a weak, clumsy, sickly, stupid, foolish, hideous character wears off pretty quickly for most.