{"id":380,"date":"2006-05-19T18:08:27","date_gmt":"2006-05-19T23:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=380"},"modified":"2008-01-13T23:49:33","modified_gmt":"2008-01-14T04:49:33","slug":"one-hundred-million-characters-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=380","title":{"rendered":"One Hundred Million Characters, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Based on the comments in the previous post<\/a>, it seems like many players generate their characters using the following method:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Roll 4d6\n<\/li>\n
  2. Discard the lowest number\n<\/li>\n
  3. Add the remaining three together\n<\/li>\n
  4. Wait until the DM isn’t looking<\/li>\n
  5. Write down whatever numbers you want.\n<\/li>\n
  6. Make sure one of them is a 9, just to keep yourself “honest”.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If you could graph these numbers, I bet they would form a very nice curve that peaks around 15.5. People are very predictable when generating “random” numbers. <\/p>\n

    But let’s look at a few more graphs of character score distributions. Just because. First, the standard character distribution. Roll 4d6 and discard the lowest. It produces the now-familiar curve.<\/p>\n

    \"D&D<\/center><\/p>\n

    We’ve seen that. Now, what would it look like if we just roll only three dice<\/em> and just add them up?<\/p>\n

    \"D&D<\/center><\/p>\n

    That really brings the averages down quite a bit. The process of rolling an extra die and discarding the lowest moves scores upwards by about two full points. What if we went the other way, and rolled two<\/em> extra dice, keeping only the three highest?<\/p>\n

    \"D&D<\/center><\/p>\n

    Adding an extra die moves scores up by a point. Now, try rolling twelve six-sided die, and then divide the result by four. This is basically like doing the three dice method above, except we are doing it four times and averaging the results.<\/p>\n

    \"D&D<\/center><\/p>\n

    It produces characters pretty much the same as the three-dice method, but the curve is much steeper. The odds against getting a weak or strong character are astronomical. Everyone is going to be more or less the same this way. I know there isn’t a nine-sided die, but what if there was? Let’s roll up our characters using 2d9.<\/p>\n

    \"D&D<\/center><\/p>\n

    That produces a very broad curve. In contrast to the one before it, this would give us tremendous variety in character scores. We could have even more variety by rolling a single 18-sided die for each of our stats. <\/p>\n

    \"D&D<\/center><\/p>\n

    This produces the broadest distribution so far, which is probably pretty realistic. It also means the average is right around 9, which is “below average” for a human being. We could correct this by rolling 2d18 and discarding the lower, but I think you get the idea by now.<\/p>\n

    Ok, I’m done with this for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Based on the comments in the previous post, it seems like many players generate their characters using the following method: Roll 4d6 Discard the lowest number Add the remaining three together Wait until the DM isn’t looking Write down whatever numbers you want. Make sure one of them is a 9, just to keep yourself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}