My weekend D&D group has a different way of rolling attributes for characters, and it's probability has been bothering me mathematically for a couple of weeks now. First, I should show how the regular rolls work for comparison.

Normally when you create a D&D character, you roll 3 six-sided dice (also known as 3d6) and add them up to get a total. You do this 6 times and apply each totaled value to one of six character attributes.

A higher character attribute is better. 10 is average, while 18 is the best you can roll. Anything below a 9 is below-average for a human, so a character with an intelligence of 6 isn't so great.

The numbers in each attribute are used to determine attribute bonuses. Attribute bonuses are used inthe game to affect certain skills. For example, a character with an Intelligence rating of 18 receives a bonus of +4 to all skills related to intelligence. A character with a Strength of 18 receives a bonus of +4 to all melee attacks and to damage. This factors into the game significantly.

For every two points in an attribute, the bonus changes by one. A single bonus point is an effective 5% bump in chance to succeed. So a character with a Strength of 18 has a 5% better chance of hitting a creature than a character with a Strength of 16, and the stronger character also does at least one more point of damage when he hits.

Ok, so now I will describe our in-house rolling system, and you can see how horribly broken it is.

The extra little bit that we've added is to re-roll 1s and 2s. So if you rolled 1-2-3-4, you would roll those two dice again until they were not a 1 or a 2. The possible range of the roll is now from 9 to 18, since you can't roll 1s or 2s to bring the total lower. See what's going on here?

Essentially, that reduces the number of possible roll combinations to 256. 7 in every 20 rolls will result in an attribute bonus of +3 or higher - that's 35% of all rolls, meaning two of your six attributes will have +3 or greater bonuses. 72% of all rolls will result in at least a +2 bonus. So with this rolling method, you've basically got a character that is usually at least 10% better at every skill than the baseline, and probably 15%-20% better at what he specializes in than an average character specializing in the same thing. Statistically it's extremely improbable (1 in 24 million rolls) that your character will have a +0 in all attributes - an average character.

Now when you factor in that all monsters challenge ratings are based on being fought by a party of average characters, you start to see real cracks in this rolling method. Mind that it's not even just one character having a 10% advantage, it's a whole party of superior characters.

The solution is certainly not to employ more difficult monsters or adjust challenge ratings. The solution is to use a normal method for rolling attributes that celebrates extraordinary character abilities. Alternatively, setting character attributes diretly based on a point system would also work. I would suggest starting all six character attributes at 8, and then letting players allocate 14 points to any attributes they choose.

I received an email today from someone who was interested in reviving the old RPGWire site for use with the original World of Darkness materials:

Hello,

I would like to start out by saying that the works you have
done on a lot of your projects have been remarkable. A good number of
the people I have talked to have to agree with this. RPGwire was a very
nice site, and made the creation of characters for the World of Darkness
very easy and efficient. It is a great unknown to many people to why
such a wonderful site just one day disappeared without any note. There
were many theories to why, but that's neither here nor there. What all
of this is about is that I and others would like to see this site once
more exist. Ever since the Old World of Darkness was ended, at the (in
many peoples' opinion) wrongfully ended and the new (Yet no where as
good as the original) New World of darkness came out, all good OWoD
sites have met the same fate.

In hopes to keep OWoD alive, and keep those still faithful to it, is to
revitalize as many of these sites as we can, which RPGwire being one of
the best. A number of people online and offline could really benefit to
its return. I and others who run a cross platform game of OWoD see
RPGwire to simplify and ease the character creation process. We have
people who are willing to do whatever it takes to work on what ever is
needed for the site. We would like to ask what the demise of RPGwire
was, and if anything remains, or what is needed on your (if it's not too
much of an inconvenience) part, or ours to bring it back. Whether it
means the need of us finding a domain and place to host, or whichever
depending on what we find out if you do reply. Hopefully you get this
and have time for a reply.

Thanks,
Samuel Benke.

Thanks for your interest in RPGWire.

The RPGWire site was originally intended as a news resource for fans of RPGs, not just White Wolf. I shopped around the idea of distributing articles from discrete sites, such as nocturnis.net, but was met mostly with resistance to the idea of even partial syndication, which is practically ubiquitous these days via RSS.

So I turned RPGWire into a character sheet generator for mostly my own purposes. Originally, this idea was to be coupled with a scenario-building tool that I never completed, in which the characters from RPGWire could be tapped as well-developed NPCs for use in new contributing author scenarios.

It was soon afterwards that a friend of mine and I were contracted by White Wolf to produce the infamous White Wolf Character Generator CD - A nightmare project that took over a year and was not completed by our group primarily due to inadequacies in White Wolf's ability to reproduce their issues with the software anywhere other than their office.

We terminated our project when my daughter was born, and I have been involved in few other things with White Wolf since, having grown a distaste for the material after having lived in it for so long.

RPGWire continued to live on, though. People were still adding characters and managing their sheets online. I would still get sporadic requests to add some feature or another, which I had no intention of doing.

Sometime around 2003, I suppose, I decided that paying for maintenance on the site wasn't worth it. After all, I was paying for hosting for software on a system that I didn't even play any more; software that had been outdated by the release of new game books - not the NEW World of Darkness, but the 3rd Edition books.

I offered the domain and its software for sale via the RPGWire forum at any reasonable offer, but there were no takers. And so the RPGWire.com domain has been bought up by one of those domain squatters, who is now happily hosting advertising for video games via Google's AdSense program. More power to them, I say.

I believe that the code and database for the site are still around here somewhere, perhaps archived on a CD or something. I'm not really interested in offering them for sale again, and I'm certainly not interested in putting up the site again on my own. I'm currently deeply involved in WordPress development, and have many, many other projects that I would rather be working on (and paying for) than something that isn't going to serve my gaming needs, which are now limited mostly to irregular once-weekly sessions of 3.5E D&D.

So that's the status of things. I'm not sure it's what you wanted to hear, but that's where things stand.

A few of you have signed up for Legend of the Green Dragon, but nobody has even made it off the Isle of Wen yet. What gives? How am I supposed to rack up affiliate points if you guys don't slay a dragon or two?

I'm level 10 and I've joined a clan, and I think I've been pk'ed about 10 times. Dang distractions while I'm playing the game make my session time-out, and if you don't stay in an inn when you're logged out, you're fair game for PvP death.

I think I've lost about 1500 gold dieing in this way. Dang it!

I've got a nice lightning lizard as a mount, and have purchased a potion that gives me "giant blood", which essentially has me throwing a boulder every combat round in addition to my normal attack. I've got a weapon and armor three levels above my character level, so I'm reasonably well-outfitted. And yet I've still died and been resurrected more times than I care to admit.

Malhavoc Press is releasing a new variant Players Handbook for D&D, and had to change the name from "Iron Lore" to "Iron Heroes":

The new rulebook’s title became an issue when, one month ago, software developer Iron Lore Entertainment demanded that Malhavoc Press and its publishing partner, White Wolf Publishing, cease using the name “Iron Lore.” While the software company did not hold a trademark on “Iron Lore,” it had applied for ownership of the trademark “Iron Lore Entertainment.” In a letter from its legal representatives, the software company claimed that Malhavoc’s use of the title would confuse consumers.

“While I don’t agree with these assertions, I’m not willing to engage in a prolonged legal battle over the title,” Monte said. “Fans have been waiting months for this new book. A lawsuit would only mean many more months of waiting.”

We have been waiting for this? News to me.

Does anyone buy anything from White Wolf or its (superior) subsidiary companies anymore?

Before you go thinking this is a case of TMI (Too Much Information), consider that I'm not talking about me, but about a D&D spell that has been accredited to me in a net book.

Yes, there is a book on the web called the AD&D Book of Sex, and in it there is a spell called Impotence. If you look at the "Thanks" section at the bottom of the page, you'll find someone named "Owen Winkler" is thanked for his help on the Impotence spell. The thing is, I don't remember having anything to do with it.

Worse is, as you might be next to point out, there is an email address associated with this person with my name. Surely, I am not this person if that is not my email address. But the thing is, that is my email address from when I was in college.

There's my claim to fame among my firends. It has nothing to do with computers, really, or even WordPress, which seems to be how more people onlin know me these days. It has nothing to do with the thousands of people that use the software I've written for work. Nope - it's all about the Impotence spell. What can I do to get out from under this stigma?

All things considered, this is not the worst tease among my friends. We consistently tease Bob about the time he forgot the word "Mouth" (I kid you not) and instead stammered and spat and eventually came up with "Speaking Tube". Funny stuff. Also, "Is that food?" is a popular saying before engorging one's self with whatever food someone else has brought to the game. I digress.

Strangely, I was poking through some things from the basement for the garage sale, and I found a cover page from a printout at the school computer lab. These covers have the student's user id in huge letters on it. When I found this page, I was elated because it was different than the email address printed in the D&D net book. Finally, I could rid myself of this poor renown.

Unfortunately, I was mistaken in thinking that the email address in the book was ODWST2, when it is actually ODWST, and my printout has a giant ODWST on it. So I guess I'm screwed. Or not, depending on how you look at it.

I really don't remember writing anything like this in college. Really, I don't.