Rust Monster

There’s lots of ways to roll up your characters - including not rolling at all. Rolling up characters has changed over the years as the game itself has changed and the values being generated changed in their significance.

With the advent of 3E the focus has definitely shifted away from actual ability scores. It’s not the score that matters so much as the adjustment derived from it. The next full revision of D&D may even drop ability scores as unnecessary. In any case, there is less difference now between a score of 16 and 17 than there used to be since they both give a bonus of +3. Previous versions were suffering from stat inflation. That is, in order to get bonuses out of stats at ALL your scores had to be quite high - generally 15 or better. In those earlier versions it became the be-all/end-all to come up with a method of character generation that gave more high scores so that you wouldn’t wind up with lots of characters with scores between 8 and 14 who would be functionally identical. In 3E any score above 11 will get you a bonus instead of needing scores of at least 15, and of course the lower end of the scale has been brought upward so that less than 10 is a penalty.

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This is a classic story I found from Richard Aronson. I laugh every time I read it. So here you go…

Let us cast our minds back to the early days of fantasy role-playing… In the early ’70s, Ed Whitechurch ran “his game,” and one of the participants was Eric Sorenson, a veritable giant of a man. This story is essentially true: I knew both Ed and Eric, and neither denies it (although Eric, for reasons that will become apparent, never repeats it).

The gist of it is that Eric… well, you need a bit more about Eric. Eric comes quite close to being a computer. When he games, he methodically considers each possibility before choosing his preferred option. If given time, he will invariably pick the optimum solution. It has been known to take weeks. He is otherwise in all respects a superior gamer, and I’ve spent many happy hours competing with and against him, as long as he is given enough time.

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