Comparative Character Generation (2006-2010)

This sporadic series is one of the earliest things I put on this domain. I ported it to the new site, along with some other old stuff, mainly to own my mistakes and learn from them. To that end, I changed very little:

• broken and non-useful links
• Markdown that looked bad using hugo’s rendering engine.
• HTML (mostly tables) that looked bad using this site’s CSS.
• footnotes explaining old references or old versions of role-playing games, and what changed since I wrote these reports.

If I attempted anything like this again, now, I’d do things differently:

1. Each different system would be its own article, with a summary page that added the results of each evaluation. (I resisted several times the urge to split the first installment into smaller pieces.)

2. When I first designed this site, I wanted to separate blog posts and (hopefully) informative and usable role-playing game articles. This series is why.

3. At least half the installments (#2 - #4) are at least in part whining about my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with D&D and D&D-like systems. That’s definitely blog territory,

4. The last installment is almost painful, now. I talk about systems I’d like to play, then worlds I’d like to run at some point with those systems. As of 2020, none of these have come to pass.

So much has changed in the last 10-15 years, both in my life and in the tabletop role-playing game industry that I’m not sure how much of this work is still useful. Some of the systems I talked about are gone, not just out of print but not even available digitally. Others have been replaced, sometimes several times.

But it’s here, if anyone’s interested.

• Comparative Character Generation, Part 1: Generic, Lightweight Systems
• Comparative Character Generation, Part 2: An Overview of d20 Systems
• Comparative Character Generation, Part 3: Same Crap, Different Year
• Comparative Character Generation, Part 4: Let’s Make Some Characters, Already!
• Comparative Character Generation, Part 5: New Year, New Games
• Comparative Character Generation, Part 6: The Last Roundup
• HeroQuest Simple Contest Probabilities of Success
• hq-prob-table.rb