D&D 3E/3.5 About Rolling for Exceptionally High Stats...

[Ukko the Scribe]

In rolling for stats, I get all my players to roll 4d6, while rerolling 1s (Only once!), and then keeping the highest 3. Of course, this is kind of irrelevant to my question. As, I thought there was also a ruling where if your player rolls 3, sixes, do they then roll another 1d6 or 1d4 to add to that roll or no?

BTW, this is only concerning the 3.5 rules (D20) for Dungeons & Dragons...

 

[Corinnguard]

If a player were lucky enough to get 3 sixes after rolling 4d6 and discarding the lowest dice, they don't get to roll another d6 or d4. 18 is the highest attribute score they can get before they add any racial modifiers to that score.

 

[Ukko the Scribe]

I thought so, I guess I was so used to doing this in Palladium Rifts, I got a little muddled...

 

[aco175]

We had a 'deadly' game back in the day and the DM had us roll 3d6+1d8 instead of 4d6 to make a slightly better PC. One guy rolled a 20 but the DM said that the max was 18. It became the default way of rolling for a while in our games.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

Part of the 'fun' of Old School D&D was playing the ability score lottery. Which is why 3.5e pushed point buy so hard; the Rebellion Against the Old School didn't find that lottery to be fun. Now I'm good with point-buy systems in general, but I took an immediate dislike to the 3.5e version. So of course I created my own system for the games I DM.

It's a roll-and-point-buy hybrid.
1. Roll 3d6 six times, and record the scores in order for STR, DEX, etc.
2. Increase any or all of the scores, up to a max of 18, until the sum of the scores equals a campaign-specific value.
3. Apply racial adjustments.

The "campaign-specific" value is usually pretty high (75 to 85), giving average scores ranging from 12 and a fraction to 14 and a fraction, depending on the campaign. I don't mind high starting ability scores, and a player who wants an 18 in a particular ability score can almost always get it.

It also allows dump scores sometimes (if the player gets "lucky" with the dice), but it does not require that a player take one. I dislike "every character will have a dump score," as something required by the rules or even strongly pushed as a practical requirement by the Gawd of Character Optimization.

It also produces what might be called "anti-dump scores," again not always but sometimes. If the player wants a barbarian character and the dice give him an INT of 17, then he can play a barbarian with an INT of 17.