Hello,

I'm soon going to be running a Dark Heresy game and I've run into a problem with characteristic generation. While I like the random system they give, I think it's a little too random. People who have a strong character idea are usually unhappy with it because they don't get high stats where they want them and anyone who ends up with bellow average stats might be unhappy with their character as a whole.

My first attempt to change the system was to allow a flat point-buy system. It would allow players to add between 2 and 20 to the base stats from character origin. I originally handed out a point pool of 120 (I know this is a bit higher than the average dice rolls). Unfortunately, this encouraged really hard-core min-maxing (the first character had 3 '40s' and 2 '25s' and a 22).

My next thought is to tell people that they must have a minimum of 5 points in each score and each point past 15 in any stat counts double out of the pool. Before I implement it, I wanted to ask what you thought or what characteristic generation systems you use and why.

Thanks

Me, I just hand them a laptop opened to THIS page, tell them to click on the career they want, click on the random name that comes up, and go to the "background" section to change any drop-down menu item and then click on the re-roll button for the stats until they have stats they can live with. It keeps the old-school feel of the random system while allowing them to get stats close to what they'd like or can live with in under five minutes.

I keep myself and my players with the random generation system, because IMHO it adds interesting little quirks to a character ("I didn't know you had Int 37, not average 30, or minmaxed 22-or-40 on the dot, but thirty seven") but I'm pretty liberal with rerolls and occasionally outright characteristic switches if something's gone especially badly for them.

My players usually know what sort of character they're going to be playing before the dice even get touched, so if someone rolls their first three dice and gets nothing over 10, for example, I'm gonna tell them to scrap the character if they want to actually play that assassin they were gunning for, to add an example.

Anything past base characteristics though? They're on their own and that's up to them to deal with strange divinations or quirks, or Fate Points.

The way we did it was you roll nine total stats, and then place them as you think it would fit the character idea best.

If you want to keep the random element (which I personally really like, as it can give characters some depth) I can recommend our way of doing things:

1) Roll stats as normal (9 rolls, one re-reroll).

2) Everyone totals their stats, and GM gives the lowest a few extra points scattered throughout stats to bring them closer to the highest rollers.

3) Swap one stat with any other stat (if you want to).

This keeps the distribution of stats random, but helps ease the pain of rolling a string of 8s when your friend is rolling 18s, and with the stat swap, you can make sure your highest stat is the one you want to be the best. For example, if you want to be a psyker, you can put your highest roll into Willpower.

Works for us...

Point buy systems do tend to lead to many players choosing to be excellent a certain things and poor at others. This isn't always a bad thing. It's acceptable for heroic characters to be excellent a some things but flawed in others. It's only a problem when the things they are "excellent" at are the only things they are called up to use. Having a S 40, T 40 and Fel 22 can be great... until you're called upon to make an Inquiry test to track down the cultist or a Deceive test to bluff your way past the guards.

Still, if you're strongly concerned about it, you could go the "standard array" route. Instead of saying "you have 120 points to by characteristics" say "you have the following characteristics which you can assign as you see fit: 40, 40, 35, 35, 35, 30, 30, 30, 25. That way you control the distribution of points (most average, two maxed, one low) but the players get to decide what to be good at and where to be flawed.

A method that is still random but makes everyone more or less equal is to roll one row of stats and let everyone in the gaming group put those stats in whichever order they prefer. Works like a charm. People can make the characters they want and people who like rolling up characters have had their wish. Everybody is happy and praises the Emperor for such a wise GM

Sister Callidia said:

That is a great method; consider it stolen.

When we first started my DH campaign I had my players do the usual roll 2D10 nine times with the possibility of one reroll and add them to their origin base stats. Since IMO there are really no "sink" stats in DH (unlike, say D&D) and I wanted my players to be able to play the characters they invisioned, I allowed them to arrange their rolls in the way they saw fit. I really did not want to recreate the early days of D&D: "Hey guys, my character is going to be a big strong close combat specialist.... Oh crap! Just rolled a 24 Strength... So...uh... Yeah, about my Adept character..." I had them all roll at the game (First session was character building) but what they didn't know at the time was I was calculating the average roll of each player (which turned out in the ballpark of 13ish) and those that rolled substantially below average were allowed to scrap their rolls and start over.

Since Rogue Trader came out and included a points buy option I now offer players the choice of the random roll system mentioned above or a 110 point buy, but they have to choose before rolling.

Have not had any complaints about this system so far.

As for why the rolls (if random is chosen) are done at the game.... One of my players has this "special" ability to "average" his rolls around 19 on 2D10 whenever someone is not watching. Not cool! He of course gets outperformed by the others' characters anyways since he tries to mimic anything cool they do regardless of if HIS character is any good at the task.