PC Creation: Pointbuy or Roll?

[Nonlethal Force]

I like point buy, specifically of the 32 point variety.

I used to use a system that intentionally ignored weighting higher scores. It was basically a sum totaly of your ability scores. Somethng along the lines of "add up all your ability scores and they should equal 80 (before racial mods are applied)" The players really seemed to enjoy that system as well. Till someone always tried to intentionally break it, come up with a player with CHA 3 so the rest of the scores would be uber, and I'd get tired of finding creative ways of making his character useless in combat anyway by ability score reduction ... so I added rule that all scores must be at least 8. But at that rate I just figured that it was easier to do point-buy. So that's what I do all the time now.

 

[nobodez]

I first ran into point buy when I played Living Greyhawk. I didn't like it then, not sure why, I guess i resented the loss of "power". Then, after my first gameday, when I wanted to think of a new character, I began to like point buy, since it allowed me to quickly work with character concepts without a whole lot of rolls.

Five years later, I prefer point-buy. Between my three campaigns it's just so much easier to gauge a group's power level by taking into account just their classes and equipment. I don't have to worry about favoring the substandard PC, or limiting the guy who's so lucky he got an 18, three 16s, and two 14s.

 

[Scarbonac]

Dice Dice, Baby.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

I don't care for point-buy because it gets bland and repetitive.
Rolling gives you a wide variety of scores, but usually very high powered.
Array is interesting, but very repetitive, and gives you no high scores to start with.

So for my recent campaign I did this:
1) Roll 4d6, drop the lowest, 1 set - in front of the DM. If your rolls were bad...
2) Either a 25 point-buy or...
3) A modified array of 8,10,12,14,15,15 then add 1 to any of them.

It allows you a good number of choices while still giving you a chance at a dice roll.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

I prefer to have my players roll 4d6 x6 as normal and arrange them how they like. However, I also allow them to ditch their HIGHEST roll for an 18. If they get a bad score then fine, I want them to have a believable character that has a flaw or two but I also want them to be really good at whatever their chosen profession is to be.

I prefer not to go with the point buy system. Generally the first thing everyone does is buy their stats up to 10 because nobody wants to take penalties to anything except charisma because it is generally seen as the dump stat. I've found this creates "vanilla" characters. I like the PCs in my games to have flaws to help make them more "real".

When starting a game I'll have my players go to the Irony Games dice server and have it e-mail me their starting stats.

 

[Nifft]

I like rolling, but that's only fun if you haven't picked what you want to play. If you could play anything -- and you could have fun playing anything -- rolling is far better, IMHO.

Most of my players have specific concepts in mind before character generation, so point buy is the only fair way to go.

As a player, it depends: I like the fairness of point buy for long-term campaigns, where everyone is expected to fill a specific role, but rolling is more fun -- 4d6, drop lowest, stats in order -- if you know your PC is disposable in the case where he sucks.

-- N

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Roll for stats, 4d6 and drop lowest, and six ability scores cannot excede a certain cap (80 points total, for example).

I don't use things like skills often, and award for role-play.

I like the randomness, and creating characters based on those random scores, and so do my players.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

Start with 8 in all scores. Roll 8d6 recording the result of each die roll. Add the die rolls to the scores as you see fit using each die only once. Max of 18 in any score.

This is for a standard 'high power' game. Lower the number of dice rolled to decrease the power level of the PCs.

 

[Crothian]

Choose your own stats. It allows one to make up the character they want to play exactly.

 

[MonkeyDragon]

Rolling all the way. Being lucky is fun, and being unlucky can still lead to good characters. I once rolled a set that I thought would mean just being careless and then rolling up a new character, but Ohg the fighter turned out to be one of my most fun characters ever.

We roll thusly: 4d6 drop lowest seven times, drop lowest. Roll two legal sets, pick the better of the two. So there's plenty of room for bad luck and still coming up with a darn good set of stats.