Rafu’s Grievous Wounds – the Pulp Fantasy Edition

This is for OSR-ists, or anybody who’s still playing OD&D or similar games. You’re interested in mitigating lethality (as in, burying fewer dead PCs), but you’re like me and dislike tracking negative hit-points?

Have a standard pack of playing cards (54, with jokers) somewhere on the table. When a PC drops to 0 HP, deal the player a random card from the deck, face down. They can’t look at their own card yet.

The idea is that the character is out of the fight for good, but not necessarily dead. They suffered a Grievous Wound. They can’t be revived on the spot, but should their companions carry them back to home camp, the injured & dying character might recover and survive, depending on the exact sort of Grievous Wound they have suffered.

When the party’s out of the dungeon and recovering, you’re finally allowed to reveal your Grievous Wound card…

Ace of Spades: meet the Angel of Death! You fail to recover from this grievous wound, and die. Or maybe you were actually killed on the spot and hauling your corpse back home was just a futile (if compassionate) effort.

Ace of Hearts: that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! After recovering from a near-death experience, you find that – besides suffering no lasting ill-effect – you are now tougher because of it: permanently increase your Constitution score by 1. But you can only benefit from this card once in a lifetime: otherwise, it’s the same as an Ace of Clubs/Diamonds.

Ace of Clubs or Diamonds: you got lucky! The wound wasn’t actually that bad, and in the end you recover fully, with no lasting consequences.

Suit of Spades, 2 through 10: you survive the wound, but have suffered lasting damage to your muscles or bones (lost a limb, perhaps). Permanently reduce your Strength score by half the card value (1-5). Should this reduce your Strength to zero, then you’re as good as dead: you’re forced to retire from adventuring, and might not be able to get back on your feet again.

Suit of Hearts, 2 through 10: you survive the wound, but will never recover fully. Permanently reduce your Constitution score by half the card value (1-5). Should this reduce your Constitution to zero, then your recovery was just apparent, but you’re going to get worse and die before you can adventure again, maybe because you caught an otherwise minor illness which proved fatal in such a weakened state.

Suit of Clubs, 2 through 10: you survive the wound, but have suffered lasting damage to your muscles or nerves, perhaps lost an eye or even a leg. Permanently reduce your Dexterity score by half the card value (1-5). Should this reduce your Dexterity to zero, then you’re as good as dead: you’re forced to retire from adventuring, and might not be able to get back on your feet again.

Suit of Diamonds, 2 through 10: your body heals the wound just fine, and you survive, but… Either it was a blow to the head, or the shock, fear and mental trauma was too much to bear: you’ll never be the same person again. Permanently reduce your Intelligence (if an even-numbered card) or Wisdom (if an odd-numbered card) by half the card value. This may result in forgetting things you used to know, such as languages, how to cast spells, how to read and write – as befits a survivor of severe trauma. Should either Ability score drop to zero, you can never function as a self-sufficient individual again.

Face cards, Black: you eventually recover from the injury, but it leaves gruesome, horrifying scars or a permanent deformity. Your disfigurement is impossible to conceal and repulsive to most intelligent beings: friendly humanoids are disgusted, while hostile monsters believe you weak and vulnerable, less of a threat. Permanently reduce your Charisma score by 1-3 points (for a J, Q and K respectively).

Face cards, Red: you recover from your injury fully, and it doesn’t hamper you anymore, but it left you with some visible, cosmetic scar. Such a scar makes you appear more rugged and experienced, charming and dangerous, more of a badass. Permanently increase your Charisma score by 1-3 points (for a J, Q and K respectively).

The Joker: what was it that near-killed you, exactly? Whatever it was, you now laugh in it’s face! If it was a failed Saving Throw which brought you to the brink of death, you gain a permanent +1 bonus to the appropriate category of Saving Throw, and develop immunity to the specific hazard which befell you this time: if it was a rattlesnake bite, for example, you’re now immune to rattlesnake poison and save at +1 vs. poison from any other source; if it was an Inflict Serious Wounds spell, you’re now immune to that spell and you save at +1 vs. all other spells; etc. If you suffered the Grievous Wound from a mere blade or claw, you instead permanently increase your maximum Hit Points by 1d3, having become inured to pain and more reckless.

Additionally, surviving such a close brush with death is quite the formative experience, and yields significant bonus XPs for the player character. When you survive a Grievous Wound…

• …for the 1st time, gain 400 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …for the 2nd time, gain 200 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …for the 3rd time, gain 100 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …for the 4th time, gain 50 × your current level bonus XPs.
• …every subsequent time, gain 25 × your current level bonus XPs.

Notes and variants

• These rules are better suited to those games where Hit Points are deemed to be an abstract measure of defensive ability, with HP loss not usually representing an actual, bleeding wound (but rather the defender tiring down, losing ground, damage to armor and weapons, pain and disturbance, annoying but nonthreatening scratches and bruises, morale drop, etc.). If you already described, say, a PC having their left arm numbed, or bleeding profusely from the abdomen, after being successfully hit for HP damage, then Grievous Wounds as presented here would be made redundant.
• Grievous Wound rules don’t apply to careful murder of the defenseless — i.e., a combatant taking special care to ensure that the fallen stay down. If they stop and slaughter you on the field while you’re helpless at 0 HP (a non-combat action to deliver a careful coup-de-grace), you’re just dead.
• Divination magic or the skills of a healer (here representing diagnosis) could be used to peek at the card in advance; for example, to assess whether a dying comrade is worth hauling back to safety at all or is beyond hope already.
• Specialized spells could be introduced that allow for changing one’s Grievous Wound card(s) — presumably after peeking at it.
• It’s on each DM to decide whether to also apply Grievous Wound rules when a character’s slain by poison, insta-death spells, etc., or only for actual HP damage. Personally I’d use it for very fast-acting, save-or-die-instantly poisons, but not for poisons that are slow enough to allow for treatment.
• If you want to penalize PCs for being defeated too frequently, rather than give out an XP bonus, you can inflict an XP penalty. Or the bonus could only apply to the first five Wounds in a character’s life, while for the 6th and subsequent you start giving out a penalty, reading the table in reverse (-25×level, then -50×level, and so on).
• As a variant, players could be allowed to gamble with Wound cards (at the meta-game level) in the hope of gaining one of the beneficial wounds. Here’s how I would do it:
  • You must be a 2nd level character or higher to gamble with Wounds.
  • If you choose to gamble (it’s never mandatory), draw additional Grievous Wounds cards equal to your character level.
  • When cards are revealed, choose one (and only one) to discard.
  • All of the remaining cards apply! They can represent separate injuries, or you can combine them into one, but all of their effects are applied separately (if, for example, you drew a Nine of Clubs and a Queen of Hearts, maybe it means you lost an eye but look very cool with an eye-patch).
  • Note that, under these rules, gambling is virtually an insurance against being killed by the Ace of Spades, but tends to erode Ability scores very fast (which can be just as deadly).
• Notice that out of 54 cards there are only 9 desiderable outcomes (a 1-in-6 chance), vis-a-vis 42 damaging ones and 1 insta-killer.

Commentary

My readers already know that I’m prone to occasional fits of dungeon-nostalgia, in various flavors. These rules came to my mind while musing about a setup for a low-level, high-stakes campaign of mostly randomly-generated dungeon crawling… which occurred to me soon after reading about the somewhat hilarious (mis-)adventures of the Fellowship of the Bling, brought to my attention by Paul T. via Story-Games.com. Most notably, they sprung from an off-hand comment by Eero Tuovinen in that very same thread, something about rolling to confirm death or survival of fallen combatants, campaign-wargame style ("down at 0, with 50% chance of dead") — and from my desire to elaborate profusely on that very simple but quite attractive rule.

Monthly Wrap-up: a report of July 2012 EtrusCon

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Last month, as my gaming staple most of the time, I kept playing two-players, long-form Remember Tomorrow in weird places, outdoors and while traveling. Then, on the last weekend of July, I went to EtrusCon. Sooner or later I’m going to write in detail about Remember Tomorrow and the pros and cons of playing it the way we’re playing it – this time, however, I’m going to concern myself with writing a convention report instead.

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I held very high expectations for this summer-edition EtrusCon, both because last year’s summer edition had been capital-A-awesome and because the winter edition was instead considerably underwhelming. What I got was in fact a mixed bag, partly because of a decline in attendance (compared to last summer).

Since EtrusCon is a classic hotel-convention with a very hands-off organization paradigm (what the one organizer, Simone, actually does is just to negotiate a discount hotel rate and reserve rooms for attendees, and that’s it), the obvious upside to it is a no-time-wasted, play-all-the-time attitude, the implied downside being that you need to set yourself up for it beforehand, though, because there is little support provided for organizing tables on the fly (no “front desk”, no call-to-arms, not even a local, off-line master copy of the schedule). I was only half-successful with organizing myself in advance, though, part because of untimeliness and/or risk-taking on my part (reserving a less-than-ideal timeslot for a given game in order to be able to play with a given person, say, plus experimenting with multiple shorter games per time-slot, being late in the morning as is usual for me, etc.) and part because of some players being delayed by traffic, or tired early in the evening, etc. – this resulting in some waste of time re-organizing tables and, ultimately, a high percentage of aborted games. It’s good to hear that this was just my own subjective blight, though (contrary to the last winter edition, when exceedingly low attendance made this the general norm), while the general ratio of finished games people had at the convention was high.

An additional drawback of a hotel-convention is, in the event of lower-than-ideal attendance (i.e. the hotel being not sold-out), having to share spaces with other random people. And, well, the EtrusCon hotel, as it happens, is large enough that it would take 100+ stay-in attendees to sell it out, making this a near-impossible proposition for the time being: AFAIK, the largest attendancies to hotel-based role-playing conventions in Italy were recorded by last year’s summer EtrusCon and some editions of InterNosCon, and barely exceeded 50 people.

But enough with the organizer-oriented gibberish! Let’s talk about the games I played, instead. Asterisks mark games I scheduled and ran/facilitated myself. I was also supposed to run a game of MegueyBaker’s Psi*Run, but we had to cancel it because of half the interested players not making it to the hotel in time.

Fables of Camelot* — this is a little, surprisingly well-crafted game by Sami Koponen with Eero Tuovinen, whose existence I discovered by sheer happenstance as Eero ran it for me and a random bunch of Solmukohta-goers in Helsinki, a few months ago. It’s touted as an introductory role-playing game, good for a convention environment and also suitable for children – and it’s exactly because I plan on using it with children that I decided to train myself in running it. Thus I took it to EtrusCon as a perennial, persistent and weekend-spanning, multi-installment off-slot filler game that multiple groups of players could dip into for a round or more.

While I didn’t get to play all the way to the fall of Camelot (the system-mandated ending), it was good enough to play three full quests, with parties ranging in size from six down to three knights. I think I learned a lot about Fables of Camelot in the process. Fully confirmed were all of its immediately apparent pros: explaining the rules is indeed effortless and takes very little time, heraldic animals are a greatly effective characterization device, drawing one’s own coat of arms is great fun, consequential decisions with no predetermined good or bad choice (think Dogs in the Vineyard) are both an absolute focus of the game and a transparent process (in that you don’t usually have to point them out, out-of-character), dice-rolls are both infrequent and tense (and they take very little time to execute, while channeling a great deal of attention). I think I learned how to plan “adventures” and frame scenes appropriately, and I’m pretty sure by now that should one have access to the full text, with its long lists of example quests and travel-scenes to pick from, then running the game would be truly effortless – unfortunately, the book’s only available in Finnish.

What I didn’t expect, though, was that the game could grow to such a quiet solemnity as we experienced in the Grail quest: I’m deeply impressed. Sure, should I look for a shortcoming to point out, this is not a game of very nuanced and complex characters – but is its reference literature? It’s all about broad strokes and large-picture plots, and emerging commentary which satisfies from a metaplay vantage point, not about the psychological finesse of fictional characters in the resulting fiction. Now I’m thinking I’ll reserve a full time-slot for Fables of Camelot at some upcoming convention, possibly GnoccoCon, to play all the way to the endgame: it should be feasible enough a feat.

SeaDracula — it’s really odd how I’ve been having the handbook for this game in my possession since it still sported a (1$) price-tag, but had never tried it out before! I remember thinking, at the time, that something about the text didn’t “click” for me and I’d rather look up somebody who could teach me how to play by example. Well, how changed I am since then, for now the text speaks so clearly to me! Know that the game was great fun, ran shorter than I expected it to (which is a plus!) and is totally appropriate for parties – almost a party-game, yeah, though maybe a tad too complex in the setup for a “casual gamer” audience. I’m gonna play this again, soon and often. ♥

Tactical Ops (playtest) — having left one time-slot open in my schedule, I found myself with a random party of six people (my old friend Alfredo being in the mix), among them my friend Patrick who rather enthusiastically pitched a playtest session of Tactical Ops, a design-in-progress by Alessandro “Hasimir” Piroddi (who wasn’t there). While I wasn’t particularly grabbed by the premise of the game, some were, and being a curious fellow I tagged along. Small-squad tactics for dangerous missions is, if we read it to mean military/commando operations, the single most overdone thing in the history of role-playing games (I’m of course conflating most flavors of D&D into this) – but, on the other hand, I thought the description could also apply to caper/heist movies (a vague itch I still have to scratch). In fact, the playtest document Patrick had with him came (as far and I can tell) with absolutely no example situation, mission or backdrop included besides the core premise. We soon enough agreed on a twenty-minutes-into-the-future prison break scenario, then proceeded to create our characters: a much lengthier process than was immediately apparent by glancing at the character sheets. I didn’t keep track of the time, really, but I figure we spent a minimum of two hours doing pre-play setup.

So, here’s my shout out to Alessandro, the designer: while not a faulty design choice per se (one can sure invest a much longer time preparing for a multi-session campaign), such a long setup process is unacceptable in a convention environment! If you want to have your game playtested at public events (or, well, out-of-house playtested at all, I might add), may I suggest you release a fast-play package, consisting of one or more example missions with pre-made characters? If I were you, I’d make it my first priority at the moment.

During the prep phase, our motley group seemed to easily agree on things – everybody generally cheered at ideas being thrown around, making the brainstorming/pitch a breeze. But! I think the character creation process – with its attributes and skill groups and skills and specialties to rate, plus advantages and motivational links to “buy” – looked deceptively familiar to all of us, which either got us to pay attention to the wrong things or to not pay attention at all. We should have been paying attention to what each other player was picking out of the available choices! In hindsight, that’s pretty obvious, but in the heat of the moment we just self-tagged with role-definitions (“hacker”, “doctor”, “gearhead”, “muscles”, “face”, “infiltrator”) and hurried up to each fill up one’s own character sheet, in isolation. Had I payed attention, I would have noticed that the “infiltrator” was duplicating part of the “face”-guy’s and (IIRC) “muscles”-guy’s skillsets, not maxing up the athletics/movement skills I incorrectly assumed he were (a skillset nobody focused on at all); that while I was hyper-specializing my hacker guy to be exactly that, some others were spreading their skillpoints wider, for example to be ready for violence in case of a major shit-up; that the “gearhead” was a specialist in jury-rigging veichles which no character was good at operating anyway, and so on. It is thus my humble opinion that as a “team” we were already fucked, whatever the mission. Not that we were going to find out, anyway…

Having gone through all of the preparations, and of course some more necessary rules-briefing as well, we went then into the first actual scene of the game knowing we weren’t going to play the mission to its end anyway, because of our real-life time constraints. This being not what we had been assuming initially (before prep) I daresay we were now in maybe the worst possible collective mood for role-playing: the noncommittal, half-assed one. And that’s when our group’s collective ability to agree on things – this basic foundation of role-playing – began to falter. Having framed a first scene, we started dabbling in the game’s central authority/credibility system of stating “facts”, but I don’t believe we had fully understood it, let alone grasped its subtleties, as we launched into a conflict. Of the conflict, we played a single round at most, struggling with the fact that – in our lack of experience with the system – we had not properly set the parameters of it to match the developing fiction, nor had we picked mechanical categories for our actions that significantly reflected our combinations of fictional intents while giving us a chance to hit the difficulty treshold, no. Very quickly, our game devolved into a debriefing session of the sort which consists in micro-analyzing small bits of the game without having seen the full picture – which was absolutely pointless, the designer not being there and nobody being apparently committed to write a playtest report.

To those who asked my opinion on Tactical Ops as a design, the only honest anwer I could give was: I’ve seen too little of it to form any opinion whatsoever, sorry.

The City of Fire and Coin (Swords Without Master)* — here’s another game which went quite poorly, but not for any defect of design. I had assembled a team of people I love and I know are in love with the (pulp/fantasy) genre – Ariele, Lapo & Tazio – and they took to the game with all of the glee I expected; still, everybody was apparently exhausted by the too much play they’d already had (or maybe with too much food and drink?) and soon my friends’ focus waned. Thus to my great displeasure we had to call it quits, having only played out the first Perilous Phase.

This was to be considered a playtest, not of the game-design, but of the technique of exposition (the way of “teaching” the game) embodied in The City of Fire and Coin, a learn-while-you-play tutorial written in a hybrid rulebook/gamebook style somewhat comparable to the “red box” Basic D&D set of the Eighties. While appearing well-devised on first sight, such tutorial proved way too verbose to read – and translate to Italian on the fly – while playing: sitting through the long passages of read-aloud instructions encouraged Rogue players, as a reaction, to hog the spotlight longer and go for longer talking times in the first Perilous Phase, which proved to be an interest-killer in the end, as the scene (as framed by a read-aloud box in the text itself) consisted of a street brawl with little context or emotional attachment to it. I suspect, despite an apparent interest the players showed in depicting action stunts, that had they made short work of that first Storm instead we would therefore have retained interest in the game well into the following phases.

All things considered, I walked away with a strong commitment to try again as soon as possible – which in fact happened already as of the time I’m writing this report! I won’t discuss my second game here, though, as it will become material for a follow-up post.

Ganakagok* — I’ve been in love with Ganakagok at least since the one full game of it I had a couple years ago. I’m well aware of the polemics surrounding the game’s subject-matter (Bill White was exeedingly naïve in his exotical treatment of elements from living cultures, and consequent blatant misuse of the word “Inuit”, which is something he himself later acknowledged) and my own ambivalence about the affair means I’ve had to develop my own language for explaining the game’s world as fantasy and only referencing real-world cultures in what I’m convinced (as a culture historian) to be a completely respectful way – but that’s part and parcel of dealing with fantasy fiction as a genre, anyway, and come on: instances of fantasy fiction which break out of too oft-repeated, paradigmatic, stupid molds are as needed and welcome as they can be (in gaming especially)! My love of Ganakagok, anyway, is first and foremost a love of its mechanics: suggestive card-reading coupled with some moderately complex resource management (and resource-tracking, which makes actions full of consequences, some of them unintended): it is by far the one title which had greater influence on my own design-in-progress, I reietti di Eden.

The game I ran at EtrusCon wasn’t stellar, maybe, but I felt it was good enough. We couldn’t play it to a proper ending, sadly, but we were so close. I was, in fact, disappointed to learn that what had been a half-full glass to me was instead a half-empty one to my fellow players (my dear Barbara and Daniele Lostia of Piombo fame). I’m not sure, of course, whether it is at all possible, or recommended, to play a game of Ganakagok with only two non-GM players present: maybe we had set ourselves up for a failure since the very onset?

One critique from Daniele which I think is especially poignant is that we had prepped so many elements in the immediate pre-game setup (world/village creation) which didn’t actually get reincorporated. In the moment I couldn’t but agree, but now, with a clearer head, I see the glass as half-full again: sure, we had more prepped elements available than we actually needed to use, as a side-effect of prep being a very organic process, but we did use some of those elements, and built and expanded on the ones we picked (also an organic process, as we focused on the ones we most needed in the moment), which obviously constrained and strongly directed our play – while on the other hand all those unused elements, while never incorporated in the actual scenes, still existed as a backdrop which informed play, and we never forgot nor invalidated them. Prep, in other words, always informs play, even when pieces of prepped content don’t actively come out during it.

On an unrelated note: next time I play Ganakagok, I’m considering dropping the Body/Face/Mind/Soul section of the character sheets entirely, using instead a fixed value of “3” in lieu of those scores for all purposes. Besides scores of “2” being a bit too punishing to be fun, my point is that your average player-character is only expected to be in the spotlight once or twice. Having four different “arenas of conflict” with different (and hugely important) ratings attached, then, needlessly punishes a player for open-mindedness, as the obvious optimal strategy would be to set one of your arenas at “4” and maneveur so that your own spotlight scene(s) focus on that: a boring exercise in predictability, rather than in storytelling. Gifts and Burdens should fully suffice to make characters distinct in competence, instead, especially as character Identity is also a trait with mechanical usefulness attached.

Overall, EtrusCon was an extremely diversity-rich environment, with happy and satisfied people enthusiastically playing things as diverse as OD&D/Lamentations of the Flame Princess and abstract board-games, Joe Mcdaldno’s Monsterhearts (which is an Apocalypse World-based rpg about the coming of age of metaphorically-monstrous teenagers) and Paolo Guccione’s homebrew game of tabletop battles between Go Nagai’s giant robots which is an adaptation of old Chaosium Basic Role-Playing (!). Tazio Bettin, Iacopo Frigerio, Davide Losito, Matteo Turini, Marco Valtriani all ran playtest sessions of their own designs besides the numerous foreign games played.

Some games, of course, struck me as more interesting than others; some I heartfeltly avoided, and when invited to play I declined. In the light of which, I can’t help but turn and look back over my own shoulder, realizing that an 18-years-old me – for example – would have merrily sat down at the BRP Mecha table (calling dibs on Getter Robot, probably) while not even paying a thought to the Lamentations table which these days, instead, I was very much tempted to join. And the reasons I didn’t choose to play LotFP in the end, those are the complete opposite of why I wouldn’t have joined an OD&D table if you asked me when I was, say, 25. All of the above is part due to how changed the landscape of role-playing is since previous times, sure, and part because of how changed I am myself.

Thus, the single most important thing I got from EtrusCon is not merely an appreciation of diversity within a small but fluid scene: it’s an enhanced understanding of my own tastes concerning role-playing games – of what I like and dislike and what I really look for and what I’m actually in it for – and of how mutable those preferences are.

Ability scores: roll #d6, some of them in order

That which follows is a method of Ability scores determination for use – during character creation – with any role-playing game employing six Abilities with scores in the 3-18 range. This includes all iterations of D&D I know about, retro-clones or other immediate derivatives of them, as well as Dungeon World and some others. The method can also be altered for a different number of Abilities or scores in a different range, of course.

My aim with this is to marry the “organic” feel of the roll-3d6-in-order method with some of the most desirable qualities of roll-and-arrange and fixed-set methods (namely, the ability to play the class you desire, to always have a character you can make sense of in your mind’s eye, and less power-disparity within the party).

Rafu’s matrix method

First you need to draw a grid of three columns by six rows. Outside the grid scribble the Abilities used in your game, one per row. It looks like this:

Str:
Int:
Wis:
Con:
Dex:
Cha:

STEP 1: roll 6d6. Write the results in the first column, arranging them as you wish.

STEP 2: in the second column, write the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, arranged as you wish.

STEP 3: for the third column, roll 1d6 per row and write down the results in order.

Finally, total up each row to get your Ability scores.

Example: I'm playing OD&D. I roll underwhelming dice in Step #1 (4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1), but I decide I'm gonna try and make this character a Cleric — a hardy and survivable, no-nonsense knight-templar type. Dice are kinder to me in Step #3.

Str:	3	4	5	=12
Int:	2	1	2	= 5
Wis:	4	6	4	=14
Con:	4	5	4	=13
Dex:	1	2	3	= 6
Cha:	2	3	6	=11

Variants

• If you like to use formal rules for “unplayable” characters, to establish when a player’s allowed to reroll, try devising some based on Step #1 (only): this saves everybody’s time. Something like: “if you got two or more 1s and/or your best die is a 4, you’re allowed to reroll”.
• If you want a more uniform power-level, and/or to make any one point of difference very meaningful (a flatter distribution):
  • for Step #1, roll 8d6 then drop highest and lowest die (or even 10d6 drop 2 highest and 2 lowest, etc.);
  • for Step #3, roll 3d6 and keep the median value (drop high and low) instead of 1d6.
• For a different number of Abilities (five scores, seven scores, etc.) you need to both:
  • roll nd6 in Step #1 where n is the number of Abilities;
  • alter the array of numbers in Step #2 by removing or adding (duplicating) values starting from the middle ones (3s and 4s): thus an array for an 8-Abilites game could be “1,2,3,3,4,4,5,6”, one for a 4-Abilities game is “1,2,5,6”.
• To generate Ability scores in a 2-12 range (Epées & Sorcellerie, World of Dungeons):
  • skip Step #1;
  • for Step #3, either:
    • use the 3d6-keep-median roll, or
    • repeat Step #3 twice, writing down both sets of results, then choose one (a whole set, not row-by-row).

Notes

I originally devised this method back in my 3E days, out of a desire to introduce some controlled randomness, but never got to put it to any real use. I wouldn’t use it for a 4E game, because it doesn’t fit with the small-squad tactics optimization those rules finally canonized as the “official” style of play, IMO. But in the present era of Old-School Renaissance, widely available OD&D retro-clones and free-licensed, D&D-themed Apocalypse World hacks… I believe there is now room and even demand for little house-rules like this to be circulated.