Last night at dinner, I offhandedly mentioned it might be interesting to try a game of Dungeons and Dragons in which we rolled all of our stats by rolling 3d6 in order, then randomly generated our races as well. The idea is simply that people don’t choose their birth circumstances, and have to make the most of what they’re given. I wasn’t really that serious about it though. After all, D&D, and roleplaying games in general, is about doing all that stuff you can’t do in real life, and having fun with it.

However, the friends I was having dinner with latched onto it as an awesome idea we had to try, and someone else at the table basically picked up the game from there when we decided he should run it. He likes running low powered games anyway (my opposite in that regard) so we came back and rolled characters… the harsh way.

As an added bonus, our GM decided to randomly generate the adventure as well, rolling on the 100 random plot hooks table from the DMG. For us? Raining toads!

All of our characters had at least one major statistical weakness, and it made things interesting. I was a rogue, but I only had 4 hp due to a low constitution score. Our barbarian had 10 strength. And our sorcerer had 6 intelligence, but 10 hp!

I took up ranged weapons, and decided to stay out of dodge. One hit could easily have ended my characters life, and came close a couple of times. At the end of the boss encounter, every single one of us was staggered. It was quite intense, and a little bit insane. It was also a lot more fun than you might expect. Almost like if normal people went on an adventure in return for loads of money. (i.e. 2 gold pieces)

It’s not something I’d want to do as a long term campaign, though that could always change. However, I’m totally in for at least one more session, and possibly a few more.