Yeah, this is pretty close to me. The thrill of rolling is fun. Even playing a suboptimal character can be fun, as long as it's for one night only.
But point-buy is really what I'd rather have.
As a few people've already said, it really is astonishing how often even staunch advocates of rolling go out of their way to mitigate the inherent risk of low scores. Heck a page or two back when we finally got someone calling point buy partisans neanderthals who just can't handle the prospect of playing a weak character,
even he said one sentence later that if your character is too weak just as your DM for a re-roll! How often do you see a group rolling for stats without doing one of the following:
- Some ridiculous system like 5d4 7 times, drop the 2 lowest each roll, and then keep the best 6 rolls.
- Rerolling weak characters (and by weak I don't mean 7 7 8 9 10 11, I mean two or three points below the average in modifiers)
- Intentionally making a reckless character/getting yourself killed to gain a reroll.
- Overlook a little fudging and cheating and "come on man, four 1's is ridiculous, just let me reroll this one time!"
I've heard of a few super hard core people who do 3d6 assign down the list, but I think even many of them indulge in some of bullet point 3 above.
Doesn't the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG have some hilarious system that intentionally feeds into this lunacy, where each player rolls up four or five level 0 characters all with 3d6 assign-down-the-list stats, and then you make sure the character you want to keep is the only one who doesn't die?
Anyway, the only real defense of rolling is "I like it." If you genuinely like the randomness, the thrill, the feeling of meeting rather than making your character, the challenge of the weak character, the metagame of "get my crappy character killed in a glorious sacrifice and roll again," the rush of victory when you finally roll three 18s in a row, more power to you. But don't feed me some BS about optimization being evil or point buy advocates not being able to handle the unfairness inherent in life.