[RPG] Effects of stats rolled with 3d6 in order

character-creationhouse-rulespathfinder-1e

How does Pathfinder gameplay change when stats are rolled 3d6 in order after selecting race?

Style of play

  • Sandbox setting, estimating risk and reward is up to players.
  • New characters start at first level. Experience from treasure.
  • Character stable: Single player can have several characters, though typically only one and sometimes two are in active play at once.
  • Character death is expected part of play.
  • GM acts as a neutral referee, in the sense that they will not adjust the contents of the game world or fudge dice rolls, or otherwise play to benefit or harm the chances of success of the player characters.

House rules, more detail

To create a character:

  1. Select race (core races, maybe kobolds, goblins and orcs, or maybe only a subset of core races available).
  2. Roll stats, 3d6 in order.
  3. Continue character generation as usual. All Paizo-created Pathfinder material is, as a default assumption, okay. For controversial rules interpretations, consult the GM.
  4. Ability score requirements of feats are reduced by 2. For example, power attack requires strength 11+, not 13+.
  5. 0th level spells have limited uses per day.

How will this affect play?

The obvious consequences are:

  • Humans are a more desirable character species, as they get to place their stat bonus after rolling their stats. This is intended.
  • CR and such estimates don't work as designed. This is of no consequence, considering the sandbox style of play and the role of referee.

What else?

As usual, please answer based on personal experience or published play reports.

Best Answer

I had experience with this kind of playstyle back in DnD 3.5. In our case the main problem was that in the first few levels, we went through an incredibly high amount of characters (one of the players had 5 in one session :) ) and this created some monsters in the end (one character had 18,17,16,16 and two stats above 12 in the end) and when you end up with something good, you will start to become increasingly wary and paranoid.

Being wary is not necessary a bad thing, though, and I enjoyed playing in a group where all of our battles were carefully planed out involving crazy traps, potions, and other limited use magic items (which we barely use in more recent systems).

Things that you should be very careful of include:

A bit later in the adventure we started to create characters with very boring and stereotypical backgrounds (as they will die soon anyway). So if you want REAL characters you might want to ask them for example to make up one interesting fact about their character and work that thing out later in the game (one character might be the son of a pirate and later in the game you can introduce some NPCs that support this statement, pirate hunters looking for his dad, other pirates looking for his treasure etc.) This is what we used eventually with limited success.

You should also keep in mind that the players of really bad characters may deliberately try to kill their character so they can roll a better one (maybe even going so far as to get themselves killed 5 times in one session). You can circumvent that with a rule that lets you reroll a character if it is COMPLETELY terrible or one that punishes character death somehow (but I would avoid things like that without the full consent of the players).

How this will affect the game and your players otherwise

  • In our game, we almost exclusively played humans because of the random nature of the style and the flexibility of the race. And always picked tier one spell casters if we had the stats to support them (we were relatively lucky because the insanely statted character I mentioned earlier was a dwarf cleric, so healing and tanking was mostly covered just by him; it was also if I remember correctly only his 3rd character).
  • We played until 5-6 level so I can’t say too much about higher level play, but extrapolating, I see a very optimized party that blasts through encounters with ease, but is still afraid to attack two goblins without a plan, which really slows down the game (it was one of the reasons why we stopped playing).
  • This style can also put pressure at your players because if the party is already at a decent level and nicely statted, mistakes that risk a TPK will meet with harsh anger even from mild tempered players (the other reason why we stopped).

With my experience I would not recommend this playstyle to anyone, but if your players are all into it, it can be fun for a time.

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