I’m starting a 13th Age campaign with my group (which includes a few Dorkadia folks) and I couldn’t be more excited. We just finished a group character creation session this past Thursday and it inspired me to revisit an idea that I’ve written about before: generating attributes for Dungeons & Dragons games. It also doesn’t hurt to recycle content when I’ve been busy with New Year merry-making and planning for the new campaign.

13th Age’s character creation system knows what it’s doing; it will create a D&D character that is both loaded with interesting stories/conflicts and ready to slay monsters in dungeons. This is why I’m confused that it introduces a classic die rolling system to generate the 13th Age character attributes before it offers up a point buy system. There only warning in the book about the possibility that players may roll poorly and not like it. But that’s not actually the problem that d6s cause when generating D&D stats in modern iterations of the game. I wrote about rolling-vs-point-buy generation when I started a Pathfinder game last year. The random generation of stats using a bell curve creates bland characters that undermine the mechanical niche protection so crucial to modern editions of D&D, 13th Age included. It’s bad for you, your character, and your game. Continue reading