Scylla: Henry Justice Ford Monster Manual

Another contribution for Eric Nieudan's project. This classical creep is to me the best-imagined of all Henry Justice Ford's monsters. He wisely ignores the mildly ridiculous "dogs growing out of waist" description from Hyginus, and focuses on the grasping horror so vividly illustrated here in all stages of crew acquisition. There's no telling how many Victorian and Edwardian children were terrified witless by this "character-building" sight.

Text of this post is released under this license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

SCYLLA

Armour class: as chain
Hit dice: 15 (90 hp); daughters 12
Move: slow crawl, slow swim
Attacks: 6, grab and devour, 2d6 / d6
No. Appearing: 1
Morale: 6
Treasure: 10000, magic; daughters 5000, magic
Alignment: Chaotic

Scylla was a lovely nymph, caught up in the amours of Poseidon and cursed by his jealous wife to bear a monstrous form for all time. She dwells in a cave atop a sea-cliff, commanding the only safe passage through a narrow strait with a whirlpool. It is rumored that she has spawned parthenogenetic daughters, of like form, who have spread out to terrorize wet, dark, and desolate places in the world. 

Scylla's voice is low and harsh, speaking all the tongues of the folk who toil her sea; she barely remembers her sylvan native tongue. She smells like brine and slightly putrid slime, but her movement is sinuous and graceful, almost hypnotic.

The six ponderous heads have brutish women's faces bearded with the legs of the octopus, connected to the barrel-shaped invertebrate body and its vestigial legs by long, snaking necks. Each head attacks to pick up a human-sized foe, ignoring armor, without damage on a hit. The victim thereafter is held fast, breaking free on STR+d20 > 25, and is automatically chewed for 2d6 damage each round in her clutches. Escaping her mouth parts usually means a 10' fall onto the rocky sea below. Two heads can cooperate to pick up a horse-sized meal, if both hit. Enemies that cannot be picked up take d6 damage from her bites instead.

At each 30 points of damage taken she must check morale, and retreats into her cave if this fails. In the cave is treasure that her discerning tentacles have fished over centuries from the wrecks of emptied ships: coins, goods, and the possessions of the slain. She will only listen to parley involving revenge on the sea-god and his spouse, but her daughters may be more amenable to deal-making after a show of strength.

Interesting Buffs Are Visible Buffs

I've had enough experience now with the spell lists of D&D and with creating my own distillation and derivative to notice something. Prayer and Bless, spells that give mechanical bonuses to friends' die rolls, are boring. This is usually masked by the existence of more useful spells at their levels, so they are rarely memorized. But working them out for my own game,where B-list spells become useful due to the no-duplicate-spells rule ... yeah, there's still something tepid about mechanical bonuses.

Is it that spell-casters would rather strike with their own effects than throw buffs on friendly characters? Not really. Enlarge and Haste shimmer with awesomeness. In my own campaign, the lowly Shield spell conjures forth a short-range, moveable force shield that gives +5 AC,maximum 20, versus attacks from one direction. This has been most welcome.

No, the real problem is that bonus-giving spells are abstract, intangible, bloodless. They exist in the rules, not in the world that characters can see or interact with. Look at the difference between:

* A Bless spell that gives you +1 to die rolls for a given time .... and one that sets a guardian angel over you, who lets you re-roll one die affecting you at any time.

* A Strength spell that gives you +4 to the stat ...and a Strength spell that lets you bend iron like lead, lift half a ton overhead,  and wield a huge improvised weapon for d12+4 damage.

* A whammy that gives your sword a +2 enchantment ... or a mojo that makes it crackle with red fire for d6 extra damage, or glisten with arctic cold for+2 to hit and damage.

"Hey, but healing gives back abstract numbers - hit points -and it's highly desired!" That's true, but the exception proves the rule. Character types that do nothing but heal are derided as boring to play even if they're valuable to the party. Fortunately, the above examples give a formula to improve any boring effect:

Make it concrete. Make it material.

By creating a visible thing, rather than just tweaking a stat, you make it interesting. Let's apply it to boring, by-the-numbers healing.

* A healer who spins silk casts and bandages from her fingers like a laid-back Spider-Woman.
* A healer who blesses food to have healing properties, with the catch that there must be a different kind of food or drink in the feast for every 2 hp healed.
* A healer who needs to wash you in water for light wounds, a bath for critical wounds, and full Baptist immersion for the strongest effects.

* This dude from 3rd edition. He's great at regenerating limbs. If you're injured but not maimed, he'll grow you a new limb which you can use until the old one gets better, at which point it falls off.

One thing you'll notice about all these is that their presence in the material world starts sparking off ideas for creative uses, advantages and disadvantages, just like the Force Shield beyond giving an armor bonus can also be used to stop a door or carry a load. If something only affects the rules level, there is only one use for it. A big part of the old-school philosophy is letting things exist and work in analog simulation space: descriptive problem solving instead of (or at least in addition to) skill rolls. Making buffs (and magic item and monster effects) visible works with that.

Low Stats as Disadvantages: Wisdom

Continuing the series.

If low Intelligence means a visual or cognitive impairment, low Wisdom means an auditory one, or ... well, I've remarked before on how wacky a stat Wisdom is. Sanity? Willpower? Sensitivity? Percaption? The disadvantage approach can handle that though. It likes a multifarious attribute, for sure.

I'm liking more and more, too, the idea that +1 Wisdom is the most bonus you can get at 13 up, but that 15, 16, 17 and 18 Wisdom give benefits. Seems this would be the perfect stat to hand out psionic abilities on. I think an Advantages series at this point is almost inevitable. Not for core 52 Pages, but maybe a supplement, or for the other, painfully inelegant and baroque d20 variant game I have in me.

Oh yeah. Courtney is tearing it up on Hack & Slash with two don't miss series: incredibly various and devious rumors about monster ecologies (so much better than "Science tells us that the roper lays a clucth of 2d6 eggs...") and OSR New Wave creator interviews. Check it out!

Low Stats As Disadvantages: Intelligence

Continuing the series.

One nice side benefit of treating low stats as specific disadvantages is that for the mental stats, you avoid the tired old controversy of "oh, I must now play my INT 4 character as a moron." Really low Intelligence here gets you a reroll and a visual disability. (Hint: Blind characters make good clerics. Get a guide dog or trusted henchman. Seek out medusas.)

Kind of low Intelligence gets you a minor cognitive disability. Either way, you can be as clever and puzzle-y as you want to be.

Come to think of it ... there may be something to really high scores not giving you super big bonuses, but just a +1 and a special advantage like photographic memory, magic resistance, etc. I have been thinking about stacking and high levels, and I'm not sure that allowing 10th level characters to get +15 to hit from levels, magic, and stats is really where my rules should go.

Low Stats As Disadvantages: Strength

Clovis Cithog, in a comment on an earlier post here, brought an idea up I thought deserved further development:

I PREFER to use low ability scores as a role playing opportunity … Low strength score does not have to imply that one is a weakling, but could reflect a prior shoulder or back injury.

with several more examples.

This struck a chord with me. After all, who is more likely to be an adventurer, this guy who rolled 3 strength:

Or this guy:

With this in mind, we can have really low scores, that normally would imply gross incompetence, instead mean some kind of disability that has a special effect. In Original D&D and derivatives, a reasonable range for the penalty scores is 3-6, to offset the exceptional 15+; in AD&D and derivatives it's much the same, except 4d6 keep 3 leaves little chance for these scores to emerge; in Basic and derivatives it's 3-8.

We can use the same table for all these systems if we split up the rolls of 5 and 6 in "6 or less" systems by what numbers make them up.

So when your starting character strolls into the Necessary Contrivance Inn and all the other characters say, "Wow, check out that missing left thumb, did you use some point-buy system and get some sick advantage like Ocelot Reflexes?" you can say "No, man. I rolled it up. Old School style."

More of these to come.

High Numbers Should Mean Something

From the halcyon days of 2008, and the workshop of 4th Edition, comes this testimonial to the Ever-Rising Statistical Treadmill as design principle:

For example, we strongly disliked the inability of 3rd Edition D&D’s negative-hit-point model to deal with combat at higher levels—once the monsters are reliably dealing 15 or 20 points of damage with each attack, the chance of a character going straight from “alive and kicking” to “time to go through his pockets for loose change” was exceedingly high; effectively, the -1 to -9 “dying” range was meaningless. 

Okay. You've already survived two or three blows that would have pasted a lesser character. You are still on your feet and alive. And you are irked that the next blow certainly would kill you dead. You feel entitled to more, somehow, as a hero.

Think of it this way instead:

• When, as a low level fighter, you are one wimpy blow away from permanent death - you are at -5 hit points or something, unable to move or do anything else.

• When, as a high level fighter, you are one mighty blow away from permanent death - you are on your feet, able to flee, distract, negotiate.

yawn

This is known as a qualitative difference between low and high level play. It's what makes a giant's tree-limb club truly scary, rather than being just a force-multiplied kobold shillelagh.  Or to be (urk) simulationist about it - if negative hit points represent the wracking of your body instead of the wearing away of your heroism, how the hell does your twelfth-level body attain the durability of titanium, as in 4th Edition with its negative hit point threshold based on half the positive total?

Let's take another failure of imagination:

Ask any high-level fighter whether he’d prefer the second-to-last attack from a monster to leave him at 1 hp or -1 hp; I’d put odds on unconsciousness, and how lame is that?

Hold on. This preference has to be based on monsters who you know will rationally leave alone the fallen heroes to go after the living. In the world of Wizards D&D, are no creatures sadistic, hungry, bent on kidnapping, or mindlessly corrosive? Shouldn't you be just as worried about ending up on the floor in a dungeon fight as in a bar fight?  Don't some monsters save their second-to-last attack to see what your head looks like when it pops like a coconut?

What's more, we are also imagining heroes who at 1 hp, or even 10 hp when fighting an average 20 damage dealer, irrationally fight on, instead of realizing they are near death and they need to go home NOW. If being unconscious is so great? Then fall down and fake it after the blow that turns you into a 1 hp fighter. The monster will go on to the next guy automatically and you probably won't even have to make a Bluff check.
Whatever system you're in, as I've mentioned before, approaching combat like a Rock'em Sock'em Robots toe-to-toe battle game is to blame for these absurdities. Fighting should be deadly, cruel, guileful - and it should not feel the same when you're battling orcs at level 1 as when you're battling giants at level 8.

Analog, Digital, Procedural

I haven't posted that much about my Tomb of the Iron God campaign - though I did share one memorable mini-game event. I have been reluctant because a) I'm not sure people want to read play reports, honestly and b) it's so tied into the Tomb that I really wanted to wait to the end to do a report.

That report is coming, but it will be more a review of the module and description of how I altered the Tomb for my playing style, than what the players did therein. And to get into that I need to talk about the three things I find useful in an adventure key, without the cliched and restricting terms "crunch" and "fluff".

Analog details: Descriptions in real-world language of the physical environment, serving three purposes: to set an atmosphere of immersion and discovery; to give hooks for player creativity as they interact with the surroundings, and to provide grounds for old-school rulings of the kind famously described in Finch's Primer. This can also extend to psychological descriptions of NPCs and their motivations.

"This room is a small domed natural cavern 10' high at its apex. Its walls are moist and caked with formations of off-white and beige limestone, while a layer of fine sand covers the floor. A crude gate of half-rotted oak logs lashed together with rope stands at the north exit, held closed by a twine latch on the inside. A patrol of 6 kobolds armed with clubs and throwing stones is resting here and telling stories. The troops are wary but led by a hothead, Kzitch."

Digital stats: Numbers and classifications in game terms, on which game procedures and rules can be based.

"The north door can be easily opened from the south side, but takes a door opening roll at -1 from the north side. There are 6 kobolds - a leader with 4 hp and five with 3,3,2,1 and 1 hp. Kobold: AC 13, +0 to hit, damage = club 1d6 or thrown rock 1d3 with 30' range, move 9, morale +2 if leader alive and present, -2 otherwise."

Procedural instructions:Directions for running the adventure in an if-then format.

"In this room are 6 kobolds including a leader. If they detect the party first, the leader will take 1 combat round to rally his wary troops, and then charge headlong. If surprised by the party, they will rush behind the gate and attempt to hold it against the party. If the gate is pushed by those on one side it will start to topple forward to crush those on the other side, possibly creating a shoving contest."

So, at one end of the descriptiveness scale is the minimalist kind of description found in the Stonehell or Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeons. Statblocks are often dispensed with, you are lucky if you get hit points for the creatures, and the DM is usually left to provide details about the physical surroundings and play out the logic of the encounter.

At the other end is the maximal style of, say, Ruins of Undermountain, where everything and every contingency is described along all three dimensions in great detail, you get to know every hobgoblin's government name (I'm hardly exaggerating) and one room description takes up half a page to two pages.

I actually find all three of these elements useful, in the appropriate doses. It's good not to have to flip through a rulebook to find an armor class, and good to have some idea of the monster strategy. But there has to be some compromise, because I want the written material to be manageable and not stretch over multiple pages. Of these three, the one I can most easily come up with myself on the fly is the procedural, and the one thing I would most like to see is the analog.

You see, in Old School play ... fluff is crunch. The sandy floor, moist walls made of soft stone, composition of the gate, and disposition of the kobolds all can feed into the players' improvised plans and the DM's improvised rulings. Critics of "fluff" in adventure writing, already prejudiced by that term, call it unnecessary. Indeed, the prose need not be purple. But basic material facts about the structure of things are something I'd rather not have to improvise, even though I have done so many times running both Tomb of the Iron God and Castle of the Mad Archmage.

Beaked Dogs

I don't know why it is that of all the random bits-and-pieces monsters you could make (rabbit-headed giraffes ...rhinos with butterfly wings ...) there seems to be something natural, almost inevitable, about the dog with a beak.

This no doubt comes from the unholy mental stew of Dwarf Fortress (where the "beak dog" is a thing) and Moorcock's hunting dogs of the Dharzi, as immortalized in the first edition of Deities and Demigods. 

A third, weird influence: the Montauk monster, often described as a beaked dog but in all likelihood a bloated, rotten raccoon with the face eaten away. How boring. Doesn't the government have a high-security research facility on Long Island? Haven't they been experimenting with ways to summon the Eternal Champion? Or at least communing with the Mad Archmage Xagyg?

Anyway, the inevitable part is this: the two animals most often domesticated by humans for hunting are the dog and the hawk. Put together the bloodhound's nose and the eagle's eye and you have a near infallible tracker. So then ... the beaked dog. Sorry, Fiend Folio, I do believe you can take your devil dogs back to the Drake's Cakes factory, and tell your death dogs, "Hey, more heads is not better."

Using the Old One-Armed Man protocol, we'll start them as a wolf, add a hit die for mutation and presto... Not quite as tough as the Dharzi dogs were statted up to be but then again, those had to be some kind of match for Elric.

BEAKED DOG
Armor Class: 7 [12]
Hit Dice: 3
Attacks: Bite, 1d6+1
Move: 15
Special: Tracking, No surprise

The beaked dog is a long-ago creation of the same mad wizard who cobbled together the much less useful owlbear. The race is now kept and bred for hunting by creatures of unusual tastes and appetites, as well as roaming wild across weird and trackless plains in packs of 2-12. Its keen hearing, smell and sight make it a near-faultless tracker (only 5% chance per mile of missing a scent or visual trail) and impossible to take by surprise. Because of the creature's rarity, beaked dog eggs, laid in clutches of 3-7, are worth up to 1000$ each.

A Better System-Neutral

Frank Mentzer & co. at Eldritch Ent have been drawing some flak for the "system-neutral" descriptions in their products. Apparently, to avoid being beholden to the Open Game License, they have decided to express key stats in terms of percentages so a 6 HD monster has 30% "Power" and so on.

Ever wonder why Esperanto never caught on? No matter how illogical its grammar or spelling, a universal language will only work if there are already lots of people who speak it. Now, a plurality and maybe even a strict majority of roleplayers run some kind of D&D. From that, conversion to a system without levels, armor class and hit points is going to be laborious and inexact anyway. So if you want to be free of the OGL, why not just go with D&D standard and make up your own names for the usual stats? As Flavor Flav would say, y'all can't copyright a number ...

Ghoul
Power: 2
(is there really a reason to list hit points in an adventure? Most times I just roll them up in the dicebox with my bucketload of d8's)
Defense: 4 (add to 11/subtract from 10 for AC; you can even break this down into physical, active and magical defense)
Attack: 3/3/6 (die maximums will do, you can figure out whether it's 2d6 or d12)
Speed: 3 (x30' for D&D movement)
SA: Paralyzation (give duration in minutes, maybe just let the DM work out the save or use synonyms for Fort/Ref/Will)
SD: undead blar blar

My previous thoughts on old school statblocks.

High-Level Combat: Designing Feats

In the Wizards editions of D&D, much is made of the tactical depth that the plethora of feats and skills gives to combat. This is part of a conscious decision to make fighter-types as interesting to play as classes that must make tactical and strategic choices among spells and skills.

I say "Bah to that!" and "Yay to dumb fighters!" Well, not exactly dumb; even when doing little more than tracking positioning in a fight, knowing how to use that can mean the difference between life and death. But in my view of the class archetypes, fighters are intentionally the straightforward ones. They don't have to make as many hard choices that are tied in with their class powers, and that is a good thing that serves the diverse needs of players.

Of course, this doesn't mean that playing a fighter has to be boring. In my house rules, awesome and interesting things happen to fighters without any choice. I use Arneson's "chop till you drop" rule to grant extra attacks when an enemy falls, as well as compensating low damage rolls  by having them inflict a critical effect on the enemy with some weapons (feats of force) and a fumble on the enemy with others (feats of finesse; I now reward low damage for both types of weapons, unlike the linked rule). Over some 8 sessions of play, these rules have proved to be fun and empowering without slowing down play.

It's the rogue - not just thieves in my view, but all kinds of light fighter - that I envision as using optional feats more effectively. But even for this goal, math-crunching can really take away from immersion in the game. An all-out attack where you get +2 to hit and -2 to armor class, for instance, can be wildly more effective depending on the relative to-hit ability and armor class of yourself and your opponent. Against someone you're hitting only on a 19, that doubles your effective damage. But if you're hitting on an 11 and your opponent hits only on a 19, that gives you only 20% increase in potential damage while doubling your opponent's. I want you to use your Piercing Stab not because you have calculated it increases your Actuarial Expected Damage Coefficient (AEDC) by 24%, but because you observe that the plates of the dragon are thick and scaly.


Which feats to take should mainly be a strategic, character-level rather than tactical choice. It should be back-loaded onto higher levels, so it doesn't encumber character creation. Also, the mathy figgering-out should be done by the rules designer rather than the player, trying to keep things as balanced as possible. For instance, do you want each feat on average to give the equivalent of +2 to hit (MATH CORRECTED)? This means, assuming a 50% chance to hit the typical opponent, the feat improves the chance by 20% (50% / 50%); 20% of the average damage per round, 2.5, is a half point of damage per round. It also means that an extra chance to hit (including gaining initiative or opponents being incapacitated from a critical hit effect) is worth 2.5 damage, so to be balanced it should happen about 1/5 (20%) of the time. This is roughly in line with the 1/6 to 1/4 chance of a crit/fumble my "feats of force and finesse" rule gives.

Defensive bonuses are harder to balance out, depending as they do on the relative hit probabilities and hit point totals involved. Anyway, I'm ruling these out as feats because a straight AC bonus prolongs fights, and this is anathema to our goal of making them more fun. Any defense will come as a side-effect of feats such as being able to disengage from combat without penalty, or maneuver into a position where fewer foes can hit. I'm also not ruling out hit point recovery mechanisms mirroring the bonus damage amount (about 1 hp every other combat round), making the most of the concept of hit points as player confidence and morale.

Next: OK, OK, some actual feats.

Original Standard in Action: Monster stats

Statting a monster, Original Standard style, is fairly simple. Let's take the giant troll in Egg of the Gazolba. The original can be found in the Fiend Folio and these stats will suffice:

Hit Dice: 8
This is fairly straighforward to apply to all editions except 4th, for which a very inexact conversion factor seems to be "monster level = old-style hit dice x 1.5". Hit Dice also determines monster hit point, attack, xp for killing, and saves in various ways.

Armor Class: 4[15] - fairly simple, as with NPCs.
Move: 12" - As mentioned previously, this scales to  a move/speed of 6 5-foot squares (edited) for 3rd and 4th edition.
Damage: 2d8 - Give multiple dice-codes if multiple attacks exist.

Damage from any source presents problems for OD&D and the like where the base hit die and damage is d6 rather than d8. Attack damage dice seem to be to a similar scale in 3rd and 4th edition, just with more bonuses from abilities and powers, which will be calculated anyway in further detailing the monster. I would scale damage to Swords & Wizardry basic damage simply by bumping the die down one size and cutting bonuses by 75%, so 2d8+4 becomes 2d6+3 and so on. There's also a tendency in Basic and OD&D to eschew the multiple attacks in other editions, but that is hard to model in a regular way, and probably best handled by the individual referee.

Special: Regenerate 2 hp/round.
In particular, this regeneration number will need conversion upwards in 3rd and 4th edition where monster hit points double if not quadruple. Remember, OS is an attempt to find out what's common to the more complex editions, not to give them an easy time. "When in doubt, and you really need a number, scale to AD&D First."

In general, monster special abilities are a mixed bunch. If they affect Original Standard stats directly they can be described in those terms (like regeneration, slowing, or extra damage). But some things, like paralyzation, level drain, or poison are best described in words, with a time course for their duration and whether or not you get a save. More on this in the next post where I go into more detail on specials, traps, and effects. And yes, I'll get to spells shortly after that.

That's really my conception of an OS monster stats block. Useful, but not essential, is an additional descriptive portion I'll call the MRI. Like a brain scan, it gives details of the monster's morale, reaction and intellect in a sentence or two, without resorting to stats. For the giant troll I would say:

The giant troll is cowardly when faced with superior power (which isn't often). It is surly but will bargain to its advantage. While stupid, it knows it is stupid, so will be suspicious of overly complicated explanations.

From here on in the hard part starts: trick/trap/skill mechanics and (ulp) spells and magic items.

Constitution vs. Fortitude/Fortune

In social science, when a number of variables characterize a single entity - say, six stats that define a character - one mode of analysis looks to see whether given pairs and groups of variables tend to cluster together in the observed world, or are orthogonal, having little to do with each other.

One of the original appeals of The Fantasy Trip's three stat system (ST, DX, IQ) is that these three stats are pretty near orthogonal. You can see combinations of high and low in each of them as being about equally credible.

Intuitively, the six stats of D&D are a harder sell.

Wisdom, like Intelligence, tends to be a slippery subject. I really tend to define those more as "intuition" and "learning" to avoid the confusion between character and player abilities. They are filters through which the player receives information in character, rather than fetters placed on the player's common sense and problem solving ability. As such, it is easy to think of a weaker link between the two, making for dotty professors with low WIS and high INT or canny urchins with low INT and high WIS.

Charisma, probably can exist with any level of mental or physical aptitude, and the charismatic moron makes for good comedy if nothing else. (I suppose by now you can tell why I hate Comeliness, quite apart from its tendency to lead games down the path of the drool-soaked adolescent hornfest.)

But what about STR and CON? Uh yeah, the guy with high CON and low STR is a big barrel-chester ... with little T-Rex arms. Or, the guy with high STR and low CON has huge muscles ... and a debilitating condition, maybe tuberculosis, that reduces his fitness.

I'm sure we've all resorted to these explanations but they just seem kind of forced. STR and CON, as defined, don't really seem orthogonal.

But let's take a look at what CON does. In almost every case, it increases the survivability of the character from immediate threat. Its role in hit points, saving throws, and system shock rolls over various editions speak to this. So why not make it a metaphysical rather than physical trait?

Fortitude, or Fortune. Someone high in this ability possesses a strong will to live, almost a sense of invulnerability at high scores. They are fortunate - not in the sense that they can lift up their shoe and find a gold piece stuck to the sole, or roll random encounters with wish-giving unicorns. No, they are fortunate where it counts, at the thin edge between life and death.

Snails: Low Fortune from minute 1

Someone low in this ability may be big and strong, but they have a weak will to live, or at the very least have some doom or fate upon them from sources unknown. Not particularly sickly looking, but certainly ill-starred  compared to their fellows. For folks watching the movie at home, there are tell-tale clues - the nickname "Lucky"; this adventure being their "one last score" before they settle down; a desire to see the world and do great things, touchingly expressed; being comic relief; the party's one example of an ethnic minority; a red upper garment.

Fortitude/Fortune then takes its place as Charisma's sibling - two physical, two mental, and two metaphysical stats. All more or less orthogonal. All I have to do now is settle on a name .. Fortune ... Fortitude ... maybe something starting with Con that calls back more readily to the original stat ...?

Misfit Typing

Now let me make clear that I have no desire to use an analytic tool used by highly intelligent people in a somewhat inappropriate or dare I say "obsessive" way, characteristic of those who lack social eptitude, to enable me to categorize real people into social stereotypes.

However. I do want to do that for the D&D character I just rolled up.

Intelligence >12: Check "Intelligence"
Wisdom < 9: Check "Obsession"
Charisma < 9: Check "Social Ineptitude"

It's official, this dwarf is a Nerd!

Not me though.

Stats: 3d6

Thinking about character stats and methods, using this chart of cumulative probabilities on 3d6 for the high end. The chance of rolling a ...

18   = 0.5%

17+ = 1.9%

16+ = 4.6%

15+ = 9.3%

14+ = 16.2%

13+ = 25.9%

12+ = 37.5%

11+ = 50.0%

For straight 3d6, and 6 stat rolls per character, having a character with at least one score at:

18 = 2.7%; 

17+ = 10.6 %; 

15+ = 44.2%; 

13+ = 83.5%.

These numbers explain why I like the bonus system:

13-15 = +1

16-17 = +2

18 = +3

I feel this makes the best compromise between players' needs to play a distinct character, ease of use, and focus on player rather than character skills.

It justifies using 3d6, giving a special bonus to the truly rare rolls. (With a flat bonus at 13, you may as well roll d4 for the stat, giving the bonus on a 4 and penalty on a 1)

It makes sure a large majority of characters will have some bonus from stats, which goes a long way toward making players feel special. This is true even if +1 is just a token bonus to a d20 roll, overshadowed by the +2 or more that can be handed out based on player-skill choices. (With bonuses starting at 15, most characters will be unexceptional.)

What makes players obsess about stats is stuff like extra spells at low levels for high stats. A high stat should make a character 15-25% more effective at what he or she does best, not 100% more effective...