2dF down the line

I was a small child when D&D was "roll 3d6 down the line" for your stats.

Technically that was my first experience with character creation, but the practicality of it was a little different.  By the time my friends and I were playing the games properly, it was a 4d6 drop one, or arrange to suit your taste.  Homebrew (and later official) point-allocation systems quickly became the norm with the groups I played with.

These things evolved for a reason.  The real experience with that "3d6 down the line" business was that we just kept rolling until we got something good.  Computer RPGs emulated this same behaviour, and let you keep re-rolling for stats until you got what you wanted.  There is a good reason that the majority of games went to some form of point-buy mechanism by the 90s.

I remember the first time I actually played first edition WFRP.  I had always seen it on shelves, knew some people that had it and had played it, but I never actually tried it myself until around 2000 or so.  My friend told me to "roll straight down the line" for my stats.  My eyes opened wide.

But it was refreshing, and it fit the theme of that game perfectly.  The system was designed to emulate the early renaissance, specifically the introduction class mobility and the need to take whatever fortune the world dumped you into, and to claw up out of it into something better.  It was awesome, and it was my own personal little OSR revelation.

If you're still with me, this is where I tie this anecdote back to OMGAM and my January 2019 game which I first wrote about here.

In the first draft of OSRdF, I had a couple of short sentences explaining a simple point-buy system for attributes.  About the third time I looked at those sentences I had written, a grin spread across my face.  I replaced them with "roll 2dF down the line".

I paraphrase a bit, but that is the essence of it and you can still see it there.  This choice of game mechanism isn't better tailored to the genre my game emulates, or anything profoundly intentional like that.  Mostly it just has a shorter word-count.  But I hope that it does encourage the reader to bring their own ideas to the table.

It is an idea from an era that has evolved to the point of wrapping back around on its self, and hopefully it is a glaring invitation to make your own changes and customizations.  Part of the intention behind leaving a minimal set of instructions is to suggest that that section just isn't overly important, or that players should feel free to bring their own.  Apocalypse World did this famously when they left out any mention of an initiative mechanism.

I couldn't quite leave out stat point allocation entirely, but I could make it so minimal and devil-may-care that it should be trivial to augment with a mechanism of the players' own preference.

I have a ton of expansions drafted for this silly little game -- they trace my own little parody of RPG evolution.  One of these is a point buy system, but I might not publish it:  I like the idea of leaving the egg out so that anyone who gets inspired by this game might hack in their own subsystems.