Trainz said:
It's not supposed to be flexible. Don't you guys remember the table from 1st Ed Unearthed Arcana ? It's the same thing !
This is a generation system for someone who wants to play a typical single classed individual of any given class. If you want a PC with high stats in non-typical places, you must pick a different system (4d6, 5d6 or point-buy).
Ichabod: my die rolls go from 8d6 to 3d6. Your table goes from 9d6 to 4d6.
I am very interested about what your table represents, but I am statistically impaired, so please spell it out for me.
Ah, sorry, I thought the old UA was 4-9, so I just went with that without looking to closely. For 3d6, mean and median are 10.5, Q3 is 13 and Q1 is 8.
The mean is the average of all of the possible rolls, and that is for the sum of the three highest dice out of however many were rolled. The median is a prefered measure of the center, it is the number that half of the rolls are below, and half of the rolls are above. For example, if you have 1, 2, and 6, their mean is (1+2+6)/3 = 3, but their median is 2 (the middle number).
The quartiles are an extension of the median. The first quartile is the highest number that no more than 25% of the rolls are less than or equal to. The third quartile is the highest number that no more than 75% of the rolls are less than or equal to. These numbers are just typical numbers that statisticians use to describe distributions of numbers.
I'd go with at least 5d6 for the alternative to this system, maybe even 6d6. I haven't analyzed the ordinal probabilities for the type of system you're proposing, but the straight medians come out to slightly better than the ordinal medians for 5d6, which suggests the ordinal medians for 3-8d6 are actually significantly better than those for 5d6.