Old-School CharGen for 4E?

Old School CharGen for 4E

When 3E was introduced, one of the first things I noticed was the point-buy system for stats, instead of rolling 3d6 for them. The designers made this change for the sake of balance. The natural progression from point-buy stats is the standard array, which is what we wound up with in 4E. Every character is balanced against each other in this way right from the get-go (and nevermind the perfectly balanced races and classes as well). 

Yawn. 

One of the best things from my DragonQuest days was the character generation system. I'm pretty sure it was our DM's set of houserules, as I only ever saw it on sheets that were printed off a computer, but the gist of it was roll a percentile to determine how many points you get to distribute and what your maximum score could be, and roll percentiles for everything after that on several charts. Background and family, race (!), money, hair, height, weight, eye color. 

The best part, though, was the bogey chart. If you didn't qualify for any race besides human, at least you got four rolls on the bogey table, which were mostly helpful but sometimes not. Everything from bonuses to ability scores, to cheaper prices for ranks in certain skills, to access to psionics was an option. Sometimes, with the right rolls, you could get a pretty powerful character right from the get-go. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that with the right rolls, even the most powerful of characters could suffer a career-or-life-ending grevious injury. 

So it was all kind of balanced in that way. And a whole lot of fun. There were still plenty of options to sift through at chargen, but the randomness of the possibilities made for a whole lot of fun. 

So, in that vein, I'm thinking of writing up an old-school chargen guide for 4e, with some modifications to races, and a full-on bogey chart. Anybody out there interested? I think it might work really well in a FourthCore style setting. I'm thinking we ought to go back to rolling for attributes, and rebalance through different possible random bonuses. Sounds more fun than just paging through the books to optimize your character.

On a not-so-random note, critical hits in 4e should have at least the remote possibility of instant kill. Or at least causing a Save-or-Die situation. Any thoughts?

Death of FourthCore? Say it ain't so!

Over at SaveVersusDeath.com, Sersa has made the announcement that he is finished with his Dungeons and Dragons "Fourthcore" work. I don't know Sersa, but I have a mighty respect for the work he's done with Fourthcore, which is his design philosophy for adventures within the 4E D&D ruleset.. His announcement, pretty quickly, garnered numerous comments on the SaveVersusDeath blog, including one from yours truly. His work certainly caused a stir in the 4E community, but I only ever saw positive things (until today, over at the At-Will webchat, but that was just one jerk who really didn't get what Fourthcore is about) mentioned about it. In fact, this fall, Wizards of the Coast is implementing a new, weekly, organized play event that, for all intents and purposes, is clearly inspired by the Fourthcore material Sersa has written.

Now, my regular readers know that my gaming time is rare these days. I have not yet had a chance to run any Fourthcore material. I did review Revenge of the Iron Lich and I loved it. Fourthcore is for elite DMs and players, and definitely not for the squeamish. Everyone has to be on their toes and must bring their A-game. I wish like hell I could come up with some of this type of stuff. I'm going to try, dammit. There are numerous bloggers and others who are determined to keep producing Fourthcore material, because it's more than just one guy. He's influenced a lot of 4E game tables in a lot of ways. He certainly has opened my eyes to the possibilities inherent within the D&D 4E system.

I would like to see Fourthcore continue. I can't officially throw my hat in the Fourthcore arena until I produce some proper content that matches up with the Fourthcore design philosophy. It'll probably be about gnolls.