Response to Brokkr

He's just spewing platitudes. Besides, you can't really say that the most desirable character is a sorcerer. The most desirable character is a subjective notion that varies from one player to the other, and I think it's very obvious that sorcerer is a priority only for a small minority. There was a time when this class was awesome but then they turned it into shit, so people don't even really think about sorcerers as some kind of unique holy grail of goals. It's now something you might try some day just to say you did it. The meat and potatoes of this game is mundane characters. It always was, but now moreso than ever because magic is a dead aspect of Armageddon.

And you know what sucks ass? Making a mundane character and seeing good, average, poor, above average. Who the flying fuck is supposed to feel good about putting six months into that, if combat is central to the concept? If it isn't, you can afford not to care. If it is, that character will never be impressive. It doesn't matter what the Lizzies say, no amount of praying to the gods of roleplay will allow some character with shit stats to be more than another run-of-the-mill dude who inevitably dies to some medium threat. There are things you can accomplish with shit stats, but those things were every bit as possible with great stats except the great stats allow you to be even more interesting.

When you've played this game for a number of years, you learn to recognize when other people give a shit about you. You figure out when your character is impressive to others. Some of the ways you can be impressive have nothing to do with the code, but some most certainly do. If you have ambitions of playing a deadly assassin or terrifying raider or inspiring commander, which are roles that very much have a place in the game and leave a gaping void when none are present, then you'll get nowhere when you embark on that journey with crap stats. If anything, stats have become all the more important now that so many of the new classes cap a variety of their skills at advanced where their previous counterparts got master. Brokkr himself calls enforcer the new assassin but saw fit to cap its stealth skills at low advanced. You try make use of that with above average agility.

Armageddon is, and always has been, plagued by this bizarre schism between the need for humblebragging in order to plead for karma, and the fact that stats are a huge factor in your coded faculties. It leads idiots to claim that you have no reason to care about your stats. It leads liars to claim that all their best characters were the ones with the worst stats, because look at me, staff, I care so little about stats that I'm surely deserving of more karma so that I can play more powerful characters. It's mired in bullshit. The fact of the matter is that unless your role is mostly social and disconnected from the code, stats absolutely will make or break your character.

With a stat system as awful and outdated as Armageddon's, I would prefer to suicide shit rolls and show staff the middle finger while I play out the characters that are worth putting a thousand hours into, over wasting my time on something that's forever hindered by a bad stat roll inflicted upon me purely by bad luck. If coded effectiveness is a concern - and let's not live in denial and pretend that most players don't care about that - then you're literally better off operating at 0 karma but with good stats on every character than with whatever amount of karma you can beg out of the staff and having every other character saddled with worthless stats while you spend months of your life trying to convince yourself that it's okay.

If the tradeoff for that is to languish below 3 karma, it's worth it. There's nothing you get from karma that's more useful than great stats. While you shouldn't suicide ten characters to get some kind of godlike roll, the thoughtless and dysfunctional nature of Armageddon's stat system justifies abandoning rolls that have no potential. If that means some blowhard admin doesn't think you deserve to play a sorcerer, so be it. Playing a sorcerer is a dead end in today's Armageddon, anyway. They're so scared of coded power that they neutered almost every venue of it; except, inexplicably, the fucking strength stat.

Staff could fix this in one fell swoop by implementing a stat system that isn't a total crapshoot, but they won't. Instead we have this garbage where a character's potential is decided at creation by a roll of the dice, and if you were unlucky, that character is forever handicapped. I was there back in the day when we didn't even have stat prioritization, and I was one of the people who campaigned for it. You wouldn't believe the amount of opposition from morons on the GDB, staff and players both, who thought it was best that stats were completely random so that your character described as muscular and hale could roll below average strength and poor endurance. They finally relented and granted us prioritization, but it was one fifth of what's necessary, and they have never acknowledged the issue of stats since then. Except to tell us that suiciding is bad, in a system that severely encourages doing so.

I would love to be able to create a character and not sit there waiting for approval with the only thing on my mind being my stat roll. That would be fantastic. But so many times I've poured heart and soul into a concept only to see a roll so lousy that I knew right away that this character would never let me do anything impressive. You get to a point where forging alliances and schemes is just part of every character you play, and having some goddamn coded prowess on top is a reasonable fucking expectation. This game survives on the people who stick around year after year, and there's nothing more demotivating than the prospect of the next half of a year being a dreary slog as you try to fake enthusiasm over some sub-par statroll.

I suppose there are suicides and there are 'suicides'. I've definitely made conscious efforts to let my characters die for one reason, or another. It's entirely different thing that if your stat roll sucks, you jump the first npc soldier you see in order to get yourself ganked. And once that's done, roll up another character, fail to get superior stats and do the same thing with the next one.

Although. Tbh, the chances of rolling poor stats these days are actually significantly lesser. As are the chances of rolling 2+ exceptionals. If you're suiciding multiple charas, chasing 2+ exceptions, then I would agree. You shouldnt have 3 karma. If you just dont want to play an average stat joe and let a black beetle eat you? Nobody genuinely minds.

Yeah. Knowing this guy or that guy is going to betray you or gank you and doing nothing about it ... just letting it happen? That's not really a suicide thing. That's just playing your story.

But to be honest, the criteria for which you will or won't be awarded karma is so fucking murky these days, as well as subject to the arbitrary whims of the staff who either like or dislike you for their own reasons, I have given up on doing anything to pursue some future karma.

I play for me now, and the way I want to have fun. If staff likes it ... fine. If they don't, I've ceased caring. A new player starting today, from the ground up, I can't even IMAGINE how shitty their game experience would have to be before they get to the level where they've "earned" enough karma to play something powerful. Better to just enjoy yourself the way you want to play and let staff go dangle their carrots in front of people who still care.

No.

D&D rules also don't turn you into a godlike being if you roll all 18's. You'll be good, tough, and smart ... but not a godlike being.

One thing that helps some with the meh stat rolls in Arm is spice. Individuals grains in Red Storm are like 5 sid each and can give you a nice long boost to strength and agility when it matters. It can turn bad into meh, or meh into good, or good into awesome for a little while.

It helps when I have an awesome concept that came out of chargen with some meh RNG.

The big difference here is that Armageddon is an online competitive game that you play with/against players who frequently have a vested interest in your failure. Also, characters tend to be pigeonholed into a single main thing they do, or a few related things: combat, archery, stealth, stealing, travel, etc. You aren't going on carefully curated adventures where much of your success stems from actions that have nothing to do with your attributes, you live and die by the dice every time there's any danger whatsoever. In D&D, you might tell the DM that you want to collapse the tunnel so the orcs can't catch you. On Armageddon, you better be able to win the fight or that's the end of your character. You don't get to use ingenuity to compensate for weak attributes, and there's no lenient DM who wants the adventure to reach its conclusion.

If you rolled crap stats, you have a crap character that's not only destined to lose at some point but also less likely to be included in some of the more exclusive venues of roleplay, e.g. murder plots and things like that. While everyone eventually loses in one way or another, and losing isn't something that should be thought of as unacceptable in this game, Armageddon's culture also places an insane amount of emphasis on character longevity. It's pretty much the number one metric of your worth as a player. If you don't play long-lived characters, it's very unlikely that anyone'll ever give the slightest of shits about you. There are certainly roles that you can play indefinitely with no concern about stats, but there are others where a bad roll is effectively a hard limit to what you can accomplish. This is not the case in D&D where all manner of spells, magic items and inventive ideas can compensate. Armageddon has no Gauntlets of Ogre Power.

We've all played this silly game for years. We've all spent months at a time playing random nobodies whose potential extended no further than adequacy because they had one stat at very good and the rest somewhere around average. Once you've done that ten or twenty times, it gets really fucking tedious. Eventually you want to play a character that makes people go "hey, that guy is really good at x, he's the one I want to draw into this plot." That doesn't happen in D&D. You don't get told to go home because you rolled 13 strength on your fighter. In D&D, you don't have a sneak skill that caps at a point that requires at least exceptional agility to be reliable. A bad constitution roll doesn't leave you perpetually at risk of getting one-shotted. You level up and gradually grow out of the stage where stats make or break your character, but on Armageddon, this stage lasts forever. No amount of skill in piercing weapons will make you a force to be reckoned with if you dared to prioritize something besides strength and got above average. You'll be the guy who needs to hit a scrab fifteen times to kill it, even when you've reached the point where there's nothing you can do to get better. That doesn't happen in D&D.

The best stat system is the one used on Shadows of Isildur, Atonement, I think Harshlands uses it too. Every character gets roughly the same amount of total stat points and then they're distributed, with some degree of randomness, according to your chosen priority. You can't be unusually strong, tough, smart and quick all at the same time, and you can't be weak, dumb and slow. Every character has something that you can be pleased with. If your favored stat didn't quite hit the top range, it means some other stat is higher to compensate. On Armageddon, you can make two characters of the same age, class and race where one's stat total is 50% more than the other. This is not okay. Raw RNG should not grant one guy a character with 19/18/17/13 while that guy over there has to live with 15/12/9/7. That guy will feel a strong urge to wade into the silt.

You should be able to just make a character and not face the possibility that it's forever handicapped by something you had no influence on. Or, for that matter, supremely gifted. I've had a character with extremely good in all four stats, and while that was exciting, it was also insanely unfair to everyone else. It's a game. It's a game where we constantly tell eachother how important it is to kill eachother's characters, or live until you're so well-known that everyone throws plots at you. Why should these things be so affected by character creation RNG? We don't randomly roll our skillcaps with a 50% degree of variance. Why stats, then? How is that different? Imagine if you create a scout and then it turns out that your archery skill caps at 70 while that guy's scout gets 90. That would have every bit as much of an impact on those characters as the current stat system does, and is every bit as realistic, stupid, unfair and unfun. This kind of shit does not belong in games, and all other forms of gaming got rid of this nonsense in the late 90s.

Shakes...you pretty much describe why a lot of people stopped playing and why the game consistently hovers ~30 players.