Of Mice and Men and Rolling Up Stats

I've always thought that Point Buy methods of character creation - whatever the system, be it GURPS, Cyberpunk 2020, D&D or Rolemaster - are a bad lot. Not because of the usual complaint of munchkinism. Nor because it isn't very reflective of real life for everybody to be on a precisely equal playing field. No, it's just because I like rolling Stats so damn much. You can't tell me that totting up point scores and painstakingly working out exactly the character you want has anything like the mystery, the romance, the sheer joy of having 3d6 in your hand, rolling, and waiting to see what comes up.

There was an interesting post at Malevolent and Benign yesterday in which Max gave a kind of potted history of his life with D&D. I was amused to learn that I wasn't the only one who had an inordinate amount of fun as a teenager, by myself, just rolling up characters, drawing maps, writing up adventures that would never be played, and poring over obscure rule books. I suppose I could have got up to much worse by myself shut up in my bedroom. And that's as far as we'll go with that train of thought...

These days I don't have much time to do any of those things, and I don't think I've actually rolled up a character in years; these days, when I play, I almost always DM, and I never roll up NPCs (I just make their Stats up). Well, that's no good at all. I'm going to roll up a character right now, the way it used to be done. I have about a million d6 next to me right now, and I'm going to pick three of them at random and get rolling. Let's see what comes out:

STR: 8
INT: 8
WIS: 8 (!)
DEX: 9
CON: 10
CHR: 14

Okay, so that's why people don't like rolling up Stats. He/she is officially the most boring character in the world. Already we are into dealing-with-mediocre-Stats territory. But hey, at least he/she has a nice smile.

So who is this character going to be? Well, I still love the idea of Tony DiTerlizzi's AD&D Mouse Thief:


So here's one of my own.

Tobias Toptail, Gentlemouse Adventurer
Class: Thief Alignment: Neutral Good

STR: 8
INT: 8
WIS: 8
DEX: 9
CON: 10
CHR: 14

Tobias is an adventurer from a long line of adventurers - the Toptail family, famous from the Old Churchyard to the Weir by the Watermill and everywhere in between. The Toptails have raided farmhouses, organised anti-cat posses, climbed trees and swam streams for generations, and the stories of their adventures have been told to local mouse children for years. Tobias is desperate to live up to his family name, but has a clear problem: he is a mouse of very mediocre talents -as his quicker, cleverer, stronger and tougher brothers and sisters have been keen on telling him ever since he was old enough to want to join them on adventures. About all that he has on his side is general good natured amiability, a winning smile, and twinkling eyes, and he has had to rely on that more than once in order to survive.

That was a rainy Saturday afternoon when I was 13 or 14, that was. I would then put Tobias through his paces on an adventure through a randomly generated dungeon, perhaps with a couple of other rolled-up characters for company, and see what he came out with. What can I say? I was a geek, although chances are, if you're reading this, you were too.