Technically, none - the first time I played D&D, my cousins (who had been playing for a year or so) brought pregenerated characters and we chose from a group of potential PCs. The thing is, their stats all pretty much sucked. Later, I found out they had generated the ability scores by having a computer randomly generate a number between 3 and 18, so the results weren't on a bell curve.
That Christmas, when my two brothers and I jointly received the three core rulebooks for AD&D 1st edition, we went to 4d6, drop lowest, arrange as desired.
And that's the method I've used up until today. Today is an outlier: I've been asked to teach D&D to a family of six (the mom is my boss at work) and given the occasional arguing among the kids, I opted to create their initial PCs myself after they chose what they wanted to run from the 7 races and 11 classes. I used the elite array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) for each PC, and made sure that even with racial bonuses nobody ended up with a score higher than 15. Hopefully that will put them all on an even keel out the gate so they can spend more time learning about the game than arguing about whose stats are better.
Johnathan
That Christmas, when my two brothers and I jointly received the three core rulebooks for AD&D 1st edition, we went to 4d6, drop lowest, arrange as desired.
And that's the method I've used up until today. Today is an outlier: I've been asked to teach D&D to a family of six (the mom is my boss at work) and given the occasional arguing among the kids, I opted to create their initial PCs myself after they chose what they wanted to run from the 7 races and 11 classes. I used the elite array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) for each PC, and made sure that even with racial bonuses nobody ended up with a score higher than 15. Hopefully that will put them all on an even keel out the gate so they can spend more time learning about the game than arguing about whose stats are better.
Johnathan