A few weeks ago redditor hornbook1776 posted an alternate method of character creation for D&D 5E, hosted on The Arcana Times. Hornbook's Life Path Method is based, mainly, around three random tables which are used to determine starting ability scores. There is a table for randomly determining race and a table for class assignment and level advancement, but I am not going to analyze those as the first does not add an mechanical differences to character generation, and the second is both optional and more complex than it first appears.
Before going any further, I have two confessions to make. First, when it comes to my analysis skills, sometimes it is amateur hour in my house, but I eventually get it right. Second, I did not realize how deep the rabbit-hole goes when it comes to lifepath character generation systems.
After briefly reading through the PDF, I decided a quick and easy way to see how it Hornbook's Life Path Method works out would be to bulk generate a few dozen stat arrays. Ten minutes later I had a few dozen arrays and two results; there bias towards the Academic Path and all tables tended to generate results lower than the standard array option from the Player's Handbook.
Going back to see if anyone else had noticed the bias, I come upon Overpwred's post that had a much more rigorous analysis using a nifty little Python script that he whipped up. Fortunately my results were very similar, although my small sample size showed an even larger divergence from the standard array.
With the assistance of redditor /u/Overpwred I was able to analyze tables that I modified so that they all produce the same expected values, but with each table having the ability scores that are favoured. For the Academic table this is Intelligence & Wisdom, followed by Dexterity & Charisma, and lastly Strength & Constitution, [11.42, 12.06, 11.32, 12.95, 13.08, 12.03] being the result I got when when 1,000,000 results were generated for the Academic table.
This modified table does not necessarily give the same range of values found on the standard array, but it does give an expected value somewhere between the standard array and 4d6D1. There are still 5 results that either give no net ability score increase, or result in a penalty. These are not fun results, which got me thinking about how Backgrounds could be integrated into the tables.
I hope to get ahold of hornbook1776 to see if we can collaborate on releasing a revised version of his table on Arcana Times. While I work on that, my next post will look at life-path character creation in other systems, which were more numerous and diverse than I expected.
