Stat Generation: Random but fair

Generating stats has always been problematic. Rolling 3d6 often leads to under-powered characters, but although many solutions attempt to fix that (e.g. 4d6 discard the lowest), you still end up with some characters much better than others. "Point buy" systems are fair, but lose that random element.

After several iterations I came up with the following random method for Explore, though the method can be easily altered for any other system.

For Explore it generates three sets of pairs, each with a bonus +3 to -3, where the sum of the bonuses is 0, and each pair cannot differ by more than 2.

Method

To generate your stats roll on the table below.

Roll 2d%. Write down one followed by the other to give you a result 1-10000.

This gives you a row on the table.

This gives you three pairs, allocate these pairs to STR/CON, AG/REF, IN/MEM. You decide the order in each pair.

You can swap the order of the two d% to give you an alternative row on the table.

You may also choose to have the inverse of your stats (swap all + and – signs). For the rows where this is different, this is given as an extra column.

Example

For example if you roll 32 and 73 you can have 3273 or 7332. For 3273 that give you [2,0],[0,0],[-1,-1] or[ 1,1],[0,0],[0,-2]. For 7332 it only gives you [2,2],[1,-1],[-2,-2], since the inverse of this is the same. You can choose any of these three sets of stats, and allocate them as you see fit. For example

  STR 0, CON 2, AG -1, REF -1, IN 0, MEM 0

or

  STR 2, CON 0, AG 0, REF 0, IN -1, MEM -1

but not

  STR 2, CON -1, AG 0, REF 0, IN 0, MEM -1

(as you have to keep them in pairs).

The distribution of stats is almost exactly the same as rolling 3d3-3:

Note this system gives you 1575 different sets of stats (given the different ways you can assign them), which is a reasonable amount - 1.3% of the possible sets you could get by rolling 3d6.