Family is often overlooked in fantasy RPGs. Many players want to play orphans or outcasts who have no family–perhaps a bit of metagaming to avoid having any ties the DM can use to create obligations. Don’t allow it. A fun way to make a player character with parents is for each player to first generate their character’s parents as NPCs, and then the character inherits their ability scores from them.

The Process

Use one of the less generous methods to create your character’s parents. Instead of rolling 4d6 and dropping the low die for every ability–or whatever other method you normally use–roll 3d6 seven times and drop the lowest roll. Assign these scores to the parents’ abilities and give the parents names.

Now select three scores from papa and three from mama for your character to inherit. If the resulting character doesn’t have any 15s or higher (very common in my tests), boost the second highest score to 15.

Since this is essentially best-6-of-14, it virtually guarantees no bad scores. But it would be quite unlikely to get a particularly overpowered character.

You could also roll 3d6 across the board and let the PC roll an extra 3d6 twice (as a genetic crapshoot, where you could be stronger or smarter than both your parents) and drop the lowest two scores. But that is actually essentially the same as the parents having 3d6 seven times and dropping the lowest before the PC’s “birth”; it just tends to give the parents worse scores.

Of course, you could let your parents have 4d6, drop the lowest die, but that’s as generous as most PCs get, so a best-6-of-14 done that way will tend to result in over-generous scores for the PC.

Example

Let’s say your first seven 3d6 rolls are 8, 13, 11, 13, 5, 8, and 11. You would drop the 5 and assign the remaining scores to your father’s abilities. Then you roll 6, 13, 11, 14, 11, 10, and 13. You drop the 6 and assign the remaining scores to your mother’s abilities.

Now you have two parent NPCs. You get to inherit the best three from each of them, or 14, 13, 13, 13, 11, and 11. Since none of these is at least 15, you raise a 13 to a 15 and assign these scores to your abilities: 15, 14, 13, 13, 11, and 11.