I don't need dice to build my character for me. We don't determine race randomly, or class, or name, or gender, or background. Why are stats the exception? Why can you choose to be a dwarf but you can't choose whether you're strong or not?
Would it surprise you to know that, in my current campaign, I limited class choice to a single class? And, I gave the players a rough background of each of their characters--a solid foundation for them to build upon. I even gave each character a name. We don't pick our own names in real life. Our parents do. And so it is with the PCs in my campaign.
It's up to the player to take what I've given them and make something great out of it.
Random dice throws do something similar. They give you a skeleton to be creative upon.
I find that, more often than not, point-buy characters are (forgive me, but the moniker seems to fit) "cardboard". They're 2D. They don't feel like real people.
With random roll, you get what you get, and then you start trying to figure why a character is like the way he is--and this usually leads to a lot of fantastic character development.
One of my favorite chargen schemes is to allow a player to roll 4D6, drop lowest, for each stat. You might get something like this:
STR 9
DEX 15
CON 16
INT 18
WIS 10
CHR 15
Then, I allow what I call "The Slide". A character can change his stats, but he must keep them in the same order. For example, if he wanted that 18 in his STR because he was going to run a fighter, his stats would look like this:
STR 18
DEX 10
CON 15
INT 9
WIS 15
CHR 16
If he wanted to run a thief, he might put that 18 into DEX, and his stats would look like this
STR 16
DEX 18
CON 10
INT 15
WIS 9
CHR 15
This gives players a decent amount of choice with creating their characters while still keeping randomness involved.
Plus, it avoids a "dump" stat, so that all your fighters don't always have low CHA or WIS scores.
That's how I look at it now. Lots of people love random stats, but there's an argument against them.
Absolutely there is. I can see the appeal of point buy. Point-buy just seems to blow my suspension of disbelief. People are different. They look different. They're different sizes. Some will be stronger than others.
If you give five people a point buy system and tell them to create a fighter, you end up with five very similiar fighters. If you have those same five people the task of creating a fighter from random roll--now we're talking about some diversity. We'll end up with five individual fighters.
That's why I'm not too keen on point buy. I don't want all the PCs to be grown from the same slate. I'd like to be 6' 1" and look like Brad Pitt, but I don't. I've learned to enhance what's special about me, socially. If life were a point-buy system, there'd be a lot more Brad Pitt's out there.
It is? Holy crow, I'm doing it wrong then!
Thumbs up!