Dragonlance Shadow of the Dragon Queen AMA

[humble minion]

I think this is a later version.

Raistilin only had 8 HP in the original DL1. (His stats where also buffed from the version of the original campaign where a 3 was rolled for Con)

This is from a later module, certainly. PCs wouldn't be level 7-9 for DL1. And was Raistlin ever published with Con 3, or was that just how he happened to be in the original home campaign that Dragonlance was based on?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

This is from a later module, certainly. PCs wouldn't be level 7-9 for DL1. And was Raistlin ever published with Con 3, or was that just how he happened to be in the original home campaign that Dragonlance was based on?

Never published that way, was just that way in the Home Campaign.

 

[humble minion]

Never published that way, was just that way in the Home Campaign.

The weird thing is that, due to the way that stat tables and bonuses worked back then, they could have given Raistlin Con 7 and the only impact it would have had is his resurrection survival rolls. When it came to hit points, there was no difference between Con 7 and Con 14. But they gave the most legendarily sickly and feeble character in D&D a 10 anyway.

 

[Demetrios1453]

And how many characters constructed on D&D Beyond are actually going to be used in a game, and how many are people trying out the software or messing around with character builds etc?

I know it's just anecdotal, but the two campaigns I currently have set up in D&D Beyond have 22 characters that were actually played, with just 4 I played around with for theorycrafting.

 

[ECMO3]

In 3e and before rolling was THE default method\

It wasn't just the default method, before 3e it was the only method, anything else was homebrew. It is the default method in 5E.

Having played a lot of both in the last couple years- SA/PB tends to be more strategic and rolling tends to make for a more dynamic and interesting character. Rolling tends to be a more fun game IME.

 

[pukunui]

Rolling tends to be a more fun game IME.

Not in my personal experience, because there's always someone who rolls really well and someone else (usually me) who rolls poorly overall. I never really enjoyed it, which is why I started exclusively using point buy or standard array for my games from 3.5e onwards. They might not be as interesting but they are fair.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Rolling tends to be a more fun game IME.

Yeah, I've had the exact opposite experience. Rolling just unbalances the game and gives a big opportunity at the beginning of the campaign for someone to cheat. Standard Array/Point Buy don't have either of those flaws.

 

[humble minion]

Not in my personal experience, because there's always someone who rolls really well and someone else (usually me) who rolls poorly overall. I never really enjoyed it, which is why I started exclusively using point buy or standard array from 3.5e onwards. They might not be as interesting but they are fair.

Yeah, this.

My very first campaign as a fresh-faced excited newbie, we did 4d6 drop lowest for stats.

One guy rolled a 17 and two 16s. I rolled 11, 10, 7, 7, 6, 4. The GM was kind enough to let me reroll, but playing a game with such wild power disparities (and being on the wrong end of them) would be an enormously deflating buzz-kill of an experience for a new player.

The advantage of rolling is the element of unpredictability, and the slightly lessened scope for brutally scientific min-maxing. But of course as soon as you introduce a random element into stat generation, you accept the possibility of wild outliers, good or bad. When my group has done stat generation by dice we've tended towards slanted methods with a buffer, or a bit of insurance against just getting a set of completely tanked stats. But the more of this probabilistic smoothing you do, increasingly you wonder why you're not just doing points buy of some sort in the first place.

 

[pukunui]

Rolling for stats is a gamble. I won’t deny there’s a certain thrill to it. But at the end of the day, I would prefer fair and consistent over the wildly variable gamble that is rolling.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not in my personal experience, because there's always someone who rolls really well and someone else (usually me) who rolls poorly overall. I never really enjoyed it, which is why I started exclusively using point buy or standard array for my games from 3.5e onwards. They might not be as interesting but they are fair.

When I last ran, one person rolled, and everyone used their numbers, arranged to taste. I guess that kinda like an array.