Rolling for Ability Scores or Point Buy

[Tequila Sunrise]

I strongly prefer point buy,

for me reminds me of classic D&D. D&D to me, is supposed to be high-lethality. You are not supposed to be guaranteed to win, or survive, or any of that nonsense (IMO).

...but rolling can be fun too if you know how to deal with low stat rolls.

 

[drothgery]

Part of the competitiveness of D&D is trying to survive with an average or sub-average character. That's a bragging right you can't get with point buy.

... but I've never seen this in actual play. I've seen keeping a single sub-average stat in a set that is otherwise quite good, but a character that's below the average point buy value of 4d6 drop lowest? Nope. Doesn't happen; the table rules for character creation without fail make that all but impossible. I'd be less militiant on insisting that point buy or an array be the default (and rolling dice burried in a sidebar or a DM's optional rule at best) if stats didn't mean so much (ala 2e, where most stats had little mechanical difference between 8-14), but given 'flatter math' and 'bounded accuracy' the marginal +1s and -1s from two stat point changes are even more important in 5e than they were in 3e and 4e.

 

[Transformer]

Short adventure -> don't care, rolling is just fine

Long campaign -> want PC/PC balance in effectiveness, and point buy

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.

 

[P1NBACK]

... but I've never seen this in actual play. I've seen keeping a single sub-average stat in a set that is otherwise quite good, but a character that's below the average point buy value of 4d6 drop lowest? Nope. Doesn't happen; the table rules for character creation without fail make that all but impossible. I'd be less militiant on insisting that point buy or an array be the default (and rolling dice burried in a sidebar or a DM's optional rule at best) if stats didn't mean so much (ala 2e, where most stats had little mechanical difference between 8-14), but given 'flatter math' and 'bounded accuracy' the marginal +1s and -1s from two stat point changes are even more important in 5e than they were in 3e and 4e.

Hey bud, it may "never happen" in your games, but please don't generalize about everyone. If you want to see this legendary style of play that "never happens", give me a holler the next time you're in my neck of the woods. We play bi-weekly and have been going strong for 80+ sessions rolling characters exactly this way.

 

[P1NBACK]

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.

This is a really great condescending post. Gotta love EN World!

Yeah, I have a core of about 20 players right now involved in a sandbox game with 2 DMs and I guess we're all lunatics!

And, for the record, "liking it" is the only real defense of any rule.

 

[Transformer]

P1NBACK--

When I said lunacy I didn't mean rolling for stats in general, but rather the various ingenious ways that many stat-rolling D&Ders (maybe not you and your group!) find to avoid playing characters with bad stats.

I also genuinely didn't mean "lunacy" as an insult. That probably sounds ridiculous, but I'm serious. I think the DCC RPG's system is brilliant and sounds like a ton of fun, and I'd love to try it some time for a one-shot. When I said "lunacy" I was thinking of the manic enjoyment of a particularly gonzo game of D&D, in which you sit down with your buddies and some beers and roll up some characters, and maybe you use some ridiculous system, and maybe you get terrible scores and try to cajole the DM into a reroll, and maybe when he laughs at you and refuses you roll up a crazy suicidal religious fanatic paladin and charge at the first dragon you see. Or you just play the DCC RPG, and watch the hilarious bloodbath of four of the five 0-level characters you rolled up get killed by kobolds, and then smile in relief as your favorite mook lives to make it to level 1.

So that's all I meant by the "lunacy" of trying to get out of rolling bad scores and of the DCC RPG system; something very positive in my mind. Now, I'm not saying all games with rolled stats are beer-and-pretzels games either; they're obviously not, and I'm sure there are people out there who roll stats because they genuinely want the randomness and who seriously try to play a terribly-statted character if they get one.

All I (and a few other posters) were saying was that it seems like an awful lot of stat rollers have a lot of clever ways to get out of playing weak characters. And even that isn't a bad thing; as I described above, it can undoubtedly be a ton of fun.

As for "I like it" being the only argument for any mechanic, well, I don't think I'm the one who needs to be told that; I think your fellow stat-rolling advocate Gorgoroth back on page 2 was the person claiming that preferring point buy is somehow an inferior preference that necessarily involved a desire never to fail or be weak.

 

[Hussar]

I think it's pretty telling if you start canvassing the characters at your table, created with die roll, and then calculate the actual point buy value of those characters.

IME, it's very, very rare for any of those PC's to be less than the standard 25 point buy value in 3e. But, that's just been my experience. IME, it's far more likely that die rolled PC's are somewhere in the early to mid-30's for point buy value.

 

[slobo777]

I think it's pretty telling if you start canvassing the characters at your table, created with die roll, and then calculate the actual point buy value of those characters.

IME, it's very, very rare for any of those PC's to be less than the standard 25 point buy value in 3e. But, that's just been my experience. IME, it's far more likely that die rolled PC's are somewhere in the early to mid-30's for point buy value.

That would be the result if you looked back in time at the tables I was at.

I can see that other posters here who prefer rolling are more careful about that - either rolling more strictly than my experience, or with balancing mechanisms sort things out - it doesn't matter hugely if the average character power level is higher or lower than the book if the DM is happy to put in adjustments (or simply has grown used to it and handles the rolled character power level intuitively)

 

[Lanefan]

Roll, roll, roll the dice
Gently down the board...

... but I've never seen this in actual play. I've seen keeping a single sub-average stat in a set that is otherwise quite good, but a character that's below the average point buy value of 4d6 drop lowest? Nope. Doesn't happen; the table rules for character creation without fail make that all but impossible.

I don't know point buy values from football scores but these were my initial rolled stats for one:

15-12-11-11-10-7 (not in order)

This was a 3e character. She had a net total bonus of +2 thus squeaked past the 3e "hopeless" cutoff...and so I geared her up and sent her out into the field, not expecting much.

6 years, 14 adventures, 11 levels*, and a bunch of player-voted awards later she finally met her demise; by which point she had become senior character in the party both in terms of level and tenure.

* - on insistence of all involved including the DM the level-advance dial in that game was set to 'extremely slow'.

So don't tell me it can't be done, or that it doesn't happen; because I won't believe you.

Lan-"in fact, as an Illusionist isn't it my job to make you believe me?"-efan

 

[drothgery]

Roll, roll, roll the dice
Gently down the board...

I don't know point buy values from football scores but these were my initial rolled stats for one:

15-12-11-11-10-7 (not in order)

...

So don't tell me it can't be done, or that it doesn't happen; because I won't believe you.

Okay, I'll just tell you I've never seen it happen, and I don't think very many people would actually be happy with the results of fair rolling, so I believe it's extremely rare in actual play. Not with the people I played 2e with in college (in an established group and in random one-shots). Not with the people I play 3.5 (and occasionally other games) with now. Not with random people in PBEM/PBP games (before point buy became standard in such settings).