D&D 5E Point Buy vs Rolling for Stats

[Tony Vargas]

The fact your group uses point-buy, doesn't mean there aren't other adventurers in the world with scores outside the 8-15 range. They just aren't in your group.

It could mean that, at 1st, before racial mods. If the DM were gunning for the same kind of consistency-as-realism feel as you might experience using 4d6 & arrange for PCs and, nominally, 3d6 & arrange for the broader population, that is. If standard point buy for heroic adventurers is the world-building touchstone in that way, then 8-15 /is/ the normal range for healthy, able, newly-minted adults. Higher scores come with determination & experience, lower from dissipation, privation, chronic disease, or any abnormal degree of disability. NPCs would thus be nominally built on varied, even negative, point totals (and limits), those totals present in whatever distribution the DM deems realistic - precisely matching whatever hypothetical bell curve he wants.

 

[Hriston]

That's a Strawman. I didn't say adventurers. I said PC adventurers.

My mistake. I guess I was thrown off by the metagame distinction of PC/NPC being talked about as if it was something discernable within the game-world. It brings up the question of why an NPC would want to become a PC. I very much doubt that's the sort of world [MENTION=6799649]Arial Black[/MENTION] is imagining at all! I think the point still stands, however. Just because your current party of PCs used point-buy for their abilities, doesn't mean there can't be another party of PCs in the same campaign that has scores outside the 8-15 range due to using other score generation methods, nor would it strain credulity for that to be the case.

 

[pemerton]

It's nonsensical to think that if you have even a single stat that falls outside of the range given in those arrays, you are somehow kept from ever being a PC. 65 magical PC stat ranges and the rest you the world is left out in the cold.

He's probably imaging a world where there isn't Inspector 12 measuring all of the people who want to be PC adventurers.

Inspector 12: "Sorry Bork, you have a 17 strength before racial bonuses. I have to stamp you an NPC. Next!"

There are doubtless multiple individuals with that combination of scores. However, it strains credulity that so many of them turn to adventuring as a profession where those individuals within the population who happen to have a 17 strength and a 7 dex (or the reverse) do not.

The inconsistency is that the PCs are thus drawn from (one assumes) a subset of the population rather than the entire population. The bell curve tells me there's going to be members of the population out there with Intelligence 18 and Wisdom 7 - why can't I play one of those - or at least have the chance to, should the dice be so kind?

Being a PC or a NPC is not a property of a character in the gameworld, so all of the above is pretty strange. (And really, [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] made this point upthread already. EDIT - including in a ninja post just above this one!)

Not to mention: if there is an NPC in play, and a player wants to take it over as a PC for whatever reason, presumably no rule prevents that if everyone at the table is amenable. (They may not be amenable if the stats are completely broken, but this would be a time for ad hoc rulings rather then applying the default PC-generation rules.)

And as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] points out, no PC can start the game as a wealthy person, or a poor person, or a king, or a shop-owner or farm-owner, etc; yet presumably the gameworld contains plenty of such people who are in-principle amenable to an adventuring life.

The rule that PCs must be built within certain mechanical parameters for stats is no different from the same rule vis-a-vis wealth, or race (why can't I play an adventuring hill giant?), or inherited magic items (why can't I play an adventurer whose grandma bequeathed me a vorpal sword?). It's a rule intended to achieve balance across participants in the game.

If the PCs are in fact your game world's only classed-and-levelled people then their generation method becomes moot - they just are what they are. But if they're not, and-or if your answer to question 2 is 'yes', then the distribution of stats among all the various level-gainers (including the PCs, who are obviously part of that level-gaining population) should reasonably mirror that of the population as a whole

Why?

I've never played a D&D game where (i) the GM has rolled up every inhabitant of the gameworld, then (ii) the players dice to see which one of those inhabitants they get to play.

But if I did, I can easily imagine the GM saying "Well, these ones are off-limts" (the kings, the merchant princes, the inheritors of vorpal swords, the super-strong heal giants and super-magical liches); "These ones aren't really viable" (the maimed, the very old, the very young, the dirt poor, etc); and so on - until we get a list of eligible characters for play who could be constructed using point buy.

Point buy just cuts out the needless busy-work for the GM!

(By the way, there is an excellent fantasy RPG in which a starting PC can be a prince of the royal blood; or a merchant prince; or maimed; or dirt poor (it also has rules that would support a king or a lich as a PC, though to actually start with such a character would require a deliberate departure from the default PC-build rules). That game is Burning Wheel; but it adopts a very different approach to "balance" across player characters from the D&D approach.)

 

[Hriston]

Taken in isolation, a character whose 6 stats were all either 3, 10 or 18 would be - though highly unlikely - just as plausible as any other.

However, once two or three or seventeen characters all show up with each of their stats all being either 3, 10 or 18 the BS detector starts chiming...

Well... maybe they've formed a support group?

There are doubtless multiple individuals with that combination of scores. However, it strains credulity that so many of them turn to adventuring as a profession where those individuals within the population who happen to have a 17 strength and a 7 dex (or the reverse) do not.

I don't think that's necessarily implied by using point-buy. It really only affects the individual characters that are created that way.

 

[Maxperson]

The range of stats is presumably that 1-30. The whole population including extremely disabled, adventurers of all levels and whatever else.
PCs are only representative of the elite/adventuring sub-set, and, whichever method the DM allows PCs, if he gives NPCs of comparable power comparable stats, is representative, by definition: a non-issue.

We're discussing the normal range of stats, since that's what PCs use at creation. PCs and NPCs can't go above or below the normal range of stats without something special and outside the norm happening to them, so 1-30 doesn't really change anything I'm arguing.

Where it gets relevant is the 'feel' of using, not the same method, but similar methods, when the stats of other, lesser or greater samples of the population come up. If PCs/adventurers are rolled on 4d6 & arrange, it's be consistent, if not realistic, for lesser NPCs to be generated on variations of 3d6 & arrange, for instance...
...but, only one instance.

Which is why, despite the game giving 4d6-L as the method of rolling, I still use 3d6 for most of my NPCs.

Chargen affects the whole campaign. ASIs serve to ameliorate the potential profound imbalance possible in random, and can eliminate the sameness of identical standard arrays and the upper limits on both array & point-buy.

Nobody is saying it doesn't affect the whole game. It is irrelevant in a discussion that is only about character generation, though.

We have been talking about implications of the population a great deal, and the population cannot possibly be all 1st-level if the PCs are going to retain any expression of it whatsoever.

We've been talking about the stat generation for the population. What happens after 1st level doesn't matter in this discussion.

 

[Hriston]

It could mean that, at 1st, before racial mods. If the DM were gunning for the same kind of consistency-as-realism feel as you might experience using 4d6 & arrange for PCs and, nominally, 3d6 & arrange for the broader population, that is. If standard point buy for heroic adventurers is the world-building touchstone in that way, then 8-15 /is/ the normal range for healthy, able, newly-minted adults. Higher scores come with determination & experience, lower from dissipation, privation, chronic disease, or any abnormal degree of disability. NPCs would thus be nominally built on varied, even negative, point totals (and limits), those totals present in whatever distribution the DM deems realistic - precisely matching whatever hypothetical bell curve he wants.

So if you want it to mean that, it does, and if you don't want it to mean that, it doesn't. I think that solves the problem that's been raised vis-a-vis using point-buy for PCs having implications for the population at large.

 

[Maxperson]

I think it's more accurate to say you're picking one of sixty-five arrays of numbers that are considered to be equal to each other. Point-buy doesn't involve setting your own power level in any meaningful way. Dice-rolling, on the other hand, can produce widely divergent levels of power. A point-buy analog of dice-rolling that replaces the randomness of the dice with player choice would allow you to choose the number of points you can use within some reasonable range, say from 13 up to 41 points.

What?!?!? Point buy is more meaningful in setting your power level, not less. You can literally point buy 3 15's in the exact stats you need for your class and concept. The odds of getting 3 15's or better when rolling is much lower than the 100% of point buy.

Also, you're shifting the goalposts. I was addressing the problem with immersion that arises from making decisions in director stance, not the problem with using point-buy and standard array for world building. These are two separate issues, and shifting from one to the other does nothing to move the debate forward. To address that issue, however, and assuming that by "everyone" you mean everyone in the party (rather than everyone in the world), we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and I think standard array (or point-buy) represents that just fine once the scores have been assigned to different abilities. It just depends on the level of abstraction with which you're comfortable. Adventurers are considered to be at a certain power-level as defined by 4d6 drop lowest. The standard array approximates that power-level by giving you the most likely result that isn't above average. As an alternative, point-buy lets you swap scores within the limits set by the standard array. It's all pretty much the same if you squint.

We've been talking about rolling, point buy and array with respect to world build(general population) for the entire time. So yes, when you moved the goalposts to stances, I moved them back.

Sure, if DMs want to use 4d6 drop lowest whenever they roll-up an NPC in their campaign, there's no rule that says they can't. That's a long way from your claim that when the DMG says you can roll that it's telling you to use only the method in the PHB.

There's no other method it could be referring to.

True, it only gives a system for rolling the scores of adventurers. The reason, as others have speculated, is probably because 5e is meant to be a flexible edition that allows you to play in the style you want. AD&D, 1e says to roll 3d{2,3,3,4,4,5} for general characters. 3e says to roll 3d6 if you want. 5e avoids settling disputes between editions and allows individual DMs to run the game the way they prefer and/or in the style of their favorite edition. The default is that rolling for NPC scores is completely optional, as is the method used, if any.

First, it's false to say that it only gives a system for rolling the scores of adventurers. The method in the PHB is not only for adventurers and that fact proves your statement false. Second, 5e is meant to be a flexible edition, but it cannot expect people to go to other editions to answer questions it creates. That's design of such incredible crappiness, that my 4 year old could do better. An edition has to be playable in and of itself or it's junk. For 5e to be playable in and of itself, it has to answer the question of what rolling means when the DMG talks about it in the NPC section. The ONLY answer 5e gives is 4d6-L in the PHB.

The reason the word adventurer is used in the citations I provided is because they're from a chapter that is a step-by-step guide for creating an adventurer! If you follow all the steps in that chapter, including generating your character's abilities by one of the methods provided in step 3, the resulting character will be an adventurer or its equivalent.

No. It's because the primary focus of the PHB is players who make adventurers, so the language speaks to them.

Commoners are not adventurers. Commoners do not generally venture into dungeons or the untamed wilderness. Therefore, the items described are not "of paramount importance" to them because their lives don't depend on said items. I think that's all quite clear from the context.

You're playing games here. The words "paramount importance" are irrelevant to my point and focusing on them is an evasion. You've been claiming that anything the PHB does that talks about adventurers, is for adventurers and not commoners. The equipment section, important or not, is for adventurers, so according to your argument, nothing in that section is for use by commoners.

Do you realize that assertion doesn't support your claim in the slightest? No one has said the DM can't use that rolling method. That isn't part of my argument.

So... no citation? I thought not.

You realize that you're arguing that the DM and all his NPCs(other than adventurers) and creatures have no access to anything in the PHB, right? There's no citation that says he can do that. Nevermind, the the monster manual is full of creatures using equipment that is adventurer only. Nevermind that monsters are using spells, despite PHB language saying that they are for classes.

It's abundantly clear from the way other books access everything in the PHB, that it's a fact that everything in the PHB is not just for players or adventurers. But by all means, keep harping on "citations".

 

[Maxperson]

My mistake. I guess I was thrown off by the metagame distinction of PC/NPC being talked about as if it was something discernable within the game-world. It brings up the question of why an NPC would want to become a PC. I very much doubt that's the sort of world @Arial Black is imagining at all! I think the point still stands, however. Just because your current party of PCs used point-buy for their abilities, doesn't mean there can't be another party of PCs in the same campaign that has scores outside the 8-15 range due to using other score generation methods, nor would it strain credulity for that to be the case.

There quite literally cannot be another set of PCs in the same campaign that has scores outside of the 8-17 range. The PCs you are running the campaign for are the only ones in it. By definition, every other being in the campaign you are running outside of the one party of PCs, is an NPC.

Now, I suppose you could mean campaign setting and not campaign, in which case you could be running the game for multiple groups of PCs, but even then the only way to have stats outside the 8-17 range would be to allow rolling for at least one of those groups.

 

[Tony Vargas]

We're discussing the normal range of stats, since that's what PCs use at creation

If the normal range of stats is what PCs use at creation, then, tautologically, whatever system the DM chooses to create PCs defines that range.

Rather, to consider realism, we have to take into account that everyone out there is not a young would-be adventurer, there's children, the elderly, the disabled, and there are presumably actual and experienced and retired adventurers, as well exceptional persons of other sorts.

If would-be adventurers able to scrape together training &starting gear of 1st level are modeled by stats from 3-18, then those younger and less able are modelled by the remaining 1 &2, and those of the greatest ability & accomplishment by 19 &20 (& 21-30).

Nobody is saying it doesn't affect the whole game. It is irrelevant in a discussion that is only about character generation, though.

It has also been a discussion of workd-building, player skill, population demographics, meanings of stats, and so forth.

What happens after 1st level doesn't matter in this discussion.

With that stricture in mind, I would have to concede that random generation is unplayably-broken and irredeemably imbalanced. But I am unwilling to take such a narrow view: and will instead stand by the observation that impact of random stat imbalances can be significantly lessened, particularly by ASIs over the course of the campaign.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So if you want it to mean that, it does, and if you don't want it to mean that, it doesn't.

If you're the 5e-Empowered DM, yes.

I think that solves the problem that's been raised vis-a-vis using point-buy for PCs having implications for the population at large.

Sure, it's the method that gives the players the most freedom in creating the characters they want to play, so its hardly surprising it can be flexible for yhe DM as well.