OSR Idea: Random Backgrounds as Consolation Prizes

TL;DR: Have several tables of backgrounds; characters with low ability scores roll on better tables.

Rolling for stats

Sometimes it can feel like the OSR has a love-hate relationship with the 3d6 down-the-line method of generating ability scores. Lamentations of the Flame Princess allows swapping one pair of scores, which I think is great - sometimes you just want to play a fighter. It also lets you reroll everything if the sum of ability modifiers is negative. 41% of B/X characters have a negative total modifier. In other words, in LotFP, after you've rolled up scores, marked the modifiers, and added them all up, 4 out of 10 times you have to do it all again. (Well, you don't have to - it's entirely optional - but why wouldn't you?)

Stars Without Number, in lieu of swapping scores, allows you to replace one score with 14 (+2). That seems more reasonable - it ensures that whatever kind of character you want to play, there will be at least one thing you're not entirely terrible at. It's also self-limiting - if you already rolled kickass scores across the board, bumping one to 14 isn't going to make as much difference. (SWN also shrinks the modifier range from ±3 to ±2, which seems like a good idea.) There's also the option of taking an array (14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7) instead of rolling.

But somehow, these methods - particularly the "total do-over 41% of the time" one - seem a bit like admitting defeat. Why do we roll scores again?

Because we like the variation in characters - that jolt to the imagination that something completely human-planned cannot deliver. Also, because it's much faster than having everyone minmax which number to place where. This is a game about interacting with a world, not about deckbuilding. Roll roll roll, pick a class, go. Discover who your character is during play - don't agonize over it in the pre-game.

Maybe there's something we can hack up to keep the straightforwardness of rolling scores (no do-overs) while softening the blow of crappy ones?

Random backgrounds

Backgrounds can help give flavour to characters that can otherwise feel a bit like blank pawns, and act as a seed for roleplay. A background can be tied to a (pre-adventuring) profession, and have minor mechanical bonuses: some extra starting items, a skill increase, or perhaps a "mini-feat".

The problem with entirely random backgrounds is that the more backgrounds you write, the more difficult they are to make roughly equivalent in power. Vice versa, if you follow a restrictive formula such as "all backgrounds get +1 to one skill", you're both going to run out of suitable ideas, and will be unable to fit many setting-appropriate backgrounds to this mould.

And if you don't make them strictly equal? What if one background gets +1 to CON modifier while another can... tell when it's about to rain? It isn't game-breaking in itself, but can feel a bit unfair - even more so if the characters that rolled awesome scores also happen to land on the best backgrounds. Meanwhile, the poor sod with a -5 total modifier gets to be Background: Dirt Farmer. (Or a mudlark, which is a child that scavenges among the mud and gets pelted with coins and laughed at as they dive into the mud to catch them.)

Consolation Prizes

Here's an idea for a solution: tie background table rolls to ability scores, but give them an inverse relationship - the worse your scores, the better backgrounds you can roll, as way of a consolation prize. Now the designer no longer needs to balance backgrounds by making them all equally good - they're freed to deliberately design a power continuum, and it will be offset by ability scores. Now even players who rolled terribly can look forward to playing their new character.

(As a guideline to designing these backgrounds, they should never affect ability scores or ability modifiers. Those have already been rolled for, so a "Background: Strongman - +2 to Strength score" does not make sense; it's redundant. However, a mini-feat that affects a secondary stat is totally fine: for example, shepherds can get a +1 to attacks with slings.)

Tiers

To divide generated characters into tiers, we need a mathematical benchmark to estimate their intrinsic value. One possible (albeit naive) benchmark is to simply sum up all the character' ability modifiers. When six stats are generated by 3d6 each, their ability modifiers per B/X summed up have a normal distribution with the average at +0 total modifier:

The possible results can be divided into an arbitrary number of bins of manageable probability, such as:

Total Modifier	%
-4 or lower	5.8	Tier 5
-3 to -2	19.1	Tier 4
-1 to +0	34.1	Tier 3
+1 to +2	28.1	Tier 2
+3 or higher	12.9	Tier 1

We can give each bin a tier. The higher the ability score total, the "better" the character inherently is. (In actuality, not all abilities are of equal worth, and their worth does not scale identically with modifier or score. For example, in my game, each point of Strength score gives you an item slot and each point of Constitution score makes you less likely to lose consciousness, whereas with Intelligence only the modifier matters. The benchmark I'm using here ignores such considerations. You could also look at highest scores, lowest scores, or whatever. If your game is one of those weird roll-under-stat ones with no modifiers, maybe use sum-of-all-scores as the benchmark.)

So 5.8% of randomly generated characters will have very bad scores, putting them into Tier 5, and so on. Now, we can write a different table of backgrounds for each tier of character, with intrinsically "worse" characters rolling on cooler, weirder, and more powerful background tables.

Tier 1:

These characters have great scores - they don't need an impactful background. They are the unskilled professions as well as those skilled professions whose craft has little to no impact on the game: porters, farmers (dirt or otherwise), bakers, coopers, chandlers, calculators, mudlarks... even for their bonus starting items, the best these people can hope for is a single tool (with no immediately obvious use in the dungeon) and a bag of turnips.

Tier 2:

The professions that have a small game impact, mostly during downtime. For example, blacksmiths could make their own armour for half price. These are unlikely to come up very often, but are not utterly useless, either. They could be skills that any character can learn in your game, given enough investment. You could also put backgrounds that have no skills but very good starting items into this tier. Some may have dungeon-applicable tools.

• Noble: No skills or mini-feats. Starts with 200 gp and a bottle of fine wine.
• Blacksmith: During downtime, can craft armour, melee weapons, and other metal items. Material cost is half of the item's listed price. Work takes one week per 10 gp of listed price. Starts with a hammer and a bar of iron. Anvil sold separately.
• Bowyer: As Blacksmith, but can craft bows, crossbows and ammunition.
• Miner: Count as two people for excavations (three if you're a Dwarf). Starts with a pickaxe and a lodestone.
• Masons: +1 Architecture. Starts with a sledgehammer.
• Scribe: +1 Languages. Starts with  parchments, quills, and ink.

Tier 3:

These are professions whose skills have a clear impact on the game - for example, anything that boosts lockpicking/Tinker, Bushcraft or Search. Situationally useful (not just during downtime) mini-feats may also be placed into this tier. Often, these are combined with useful tools.

• Actor: +1 to reaction rolls with humanoids. Starts with a mask and makeup.
• Officer: +1 to follower morale. Starts with ceremonial rapier.
• Falconer: Has a trained falcon that follows commands. Starts with a falcon and a mail glove.
• Barber-surgeon: +1 Medicine. Starts with razor and leather strap.
• Brawler: Improvised weapons count as regular weapons.
• Bounty hunter: +1 Bushcraft. Starts with a hound and rope.
• Bear-leader: +1 to reaction rolls with beasts. Starts with rope and animal feed.

Tier 4:

Backgrounds with mini-feats that give a boost to combat capability or survivability. Rare and expensive tools may be given as starting items. For example:

• Shepherd: +1 to hit with slings. Starts with a cane and a bag of wool.
• Poisonmaker: +1 to saves vs. Poison. Starts with 4 vials of poison.
• Diviner: Can cast detect magic once per day. Starts with crystal ball and deck of cards.
• Occultist: Can cast summon once per day (as Caster Level 0). Starts with curved dagger and black candles.
• Lumberjack: +1 to hit with axes. Guess what starting equipment.
• Acrobat: Fall damage is reduced by 20'.

Tier 5:

Go wild here. These characters have crap scores, so give them something surprising. Something that makes a big impact on the way the character plays. Got a class that's a bit more gonzo than the others (like the Skeleton Adventurer or Half-Troll) that you're not sure is entirely balanced and don't want players to be able to pick freely? Stick it here. "You're a skeleton in a hooded cloak, that's your background."

You can populate this tier with backgrounds that are plot hooks in themselves, or unique things that can only be rolled once.. Hell, put some superpowers here. "Dragonsoul: once per day, you can use a breath weapon that deals [Lvl]d6 damage." The stuff that a WotC game would let anyone pick willy-nilly, spoiling the mystique: those descended from the lines of elementals or gods! The insect-folk from two towns over! Soulless people who are invisible to the undead! Werewolves! Wielders of a runesword that grows stronger with every soul it eats! Weird mutants! Their low stats will mean they might not survive that long anyway. And hey, awesomely powerful individuals being physically weak is very swords & sorcery.

Making the case for limited ability modifiers in OSR

D&D B/X is, I would wager, the most popular basis for OSR games. Therefore, B/X style ability modifiers are the most common. In case you didn't know, ability modifiers in B/X range from -3 to +3 and are determined like this:

Score	Mod
3	-3
4-5	-2
6-8	-1
9-12	+0
13-15	+1
16-17	+2
18	+3

Nice, unified and symmetric. Except of course when it's not - only positive modifiers affect languages known, and reaction adjustments from Charisma only go from -2 to +2, and ditto for initiative adjustments from Dexterity. But we'll get back to that.

While this is probably the smoothest system in any official edition - more unified than Original and Advanced D&D's jumble of adjustments, and less game-deciding than WotC D&D's gigantic -5 to +5 range, they're not the best choice for everything.

Negative modifiers can be problematic when you want to modify numbers that are naturally quite small. Rulesets will often include things like “you can hold your breath for a number of minutes equal to 1+CON”, which will then require special stipulations and minimums for negative modifiers.

Also, I have witnessed applying modifiers to dice rolls cause headaches to OSR hackers creating their own games using B/X as a starting point (often via Lamentations of the Flame Princess). ‘Esoteric Enterprises’ and other games by Emmy Allen use X-in-6 skills like LotFP, except ability modifiers are applied to skills - though they can never go below 0-in-6 (rolled as a 1-in-36 chance). Since skills start at 1-in-6, this means that a modifier of -3 or -2 is the same as -1, not to mention that a +3 is pretty massive. The WIP post-apoc game Ruinations by Brent Ault has gone through several iterations with its skill system, likewise attempting to include ability modifiers into skills, but trying to dampen their effect. At one iteration of the ruleset, skills were moved up to the d12, starting at 2-in-12, plus ability mods. Once again, anything below a -1 is not accounted for. The skill system was changed in a later version to a d100 where start skills at 20%, and have each point of modifier count for 5%, so a -3 modifier would give a 5% success rate. Which, you'll notice, is mathematically the same as a d20 roll with the modifiers applying in their usual way.

Basically, the d6 skill system is liked (by me and many others) for its chunkiness - adding a pip to a d6 feels much better than adding a handful of points to a d20 - but big modifiers and big chunks don't mix.

I'm going to suggest something to all hackers, tinkerers and homebrewers right now:

Ditch the negative ability modifiers from your game. Completely.

It's okay. Just because you're using B/X as your engine doesn't mean you NEED to have the same ability modifiers. It doesn't break compatibility. You still have the same scores, in the same range of 3-18, for when you take ability damage or whatever. You can still run Keep on the Borderlands even if there isn't some unlucky geezer running around with a -2 DEX. You still have HP, and XP, and AC. You can still use all the great TSR and OSR content out there exactly the same.

Then, squish down the modifier ceiling to one that you think won't break your maths too much.

Yes, it may be somewhat more fun for players to have wide variation in characters' abilities, and amusing to laugh at the one chump with a big negative modifier. But reducing modifiers to a range of, say, +0 to +2, opens up a lot more design space for a homebrewer. Never again will you have to worry about special stipulations when applying modifiers to a base number of 1.

(Btw, this pairs quite well with the static Health/Wounds mechanic I talked about in an earlier post - I'll just have CON modifier increase your starting Health at level 1, but more on that in a later post.)

As for precedents, there are already places where B/X et al. restrict adjustments from abilities to -2 to +2, like reactions, initiative, and XP adjustments - because a +3 would be far too large a modifier on a 2d6 roll, for example. Why not expand these limits to everything, thus truly unifying ability adjustments? A smaller range of ability modifiers that excludes negatives means doing less maths, a larger design space, and fewer special cases.

I propose the following modifiers, and will use them in my next game:

Score	Mod
3-12	+0
13-15	+1
16-18	+2

Essentially, it's the B/X range but with negatives completely removed, and +3 squished into +2. You still have some characters (21.3%) who are very good at a given thing, and a few (4.6%) who are exceptional at it. The rest (74.1%) are just average. And that's okay. Now, your base Bushcraft (or whatever) chance will be either 1-in-6, 2-in-6, or 3-in-6. No special stipulations.

By the way: in the oft-referenced late Gygaxian houserules for OD&D, abilities modify things by +1 or not at all. And they modify very few select things. Constitution of 15 or more gives +1 HP per HD, and so on. In discussions of these rules it is often pointed out that they were made for convention games, and therefore do not represent how Gygax ran the game at home. It is true that many of the changes there improve PC survivability - which makes sense when running a quick convention game. However, the streamlining and restricting the effect of abilities does not necessarily improve PC capability - and in fact set a lower ceiling for it than those in B/X and AD&D. I'm not going to say "if it's good enough for Gygax...", I'm just including it for completeness and to show that it's okay to do things differently to B/X - as long as compatibility is preserved. Compatibility must always be preserved.