D&D 5E Point buy or Dice?

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Knowledge cleric. Also, that's just how the player wanted to play him.

Cool, just curious!

 

[billd91]

I think what it comes down to is your players.

If you even have one "power gamer" in your group you will almost certainly need to use point buy. The reason? Encounter difficulty. Designing encounters when one of the party members is more powerful than the other three combined and has three times the amount of durability gets old very fast. The encounters need to be one of the following: too easy for the party, too hard for the party, or so complicated that it makes random encounters nearly impossible. None of those options really appeal to me as a DM so I generally use point buy.

Now I would love to have no power gamers in my group and be able to have dice rolled stats, but since all of my D&D is online there seems to be nothing but power gamers. I do make them roll the hit dice in chat however.

My experience is generally the opposite, actually. Dice rolling works better than point buy when dealing with disparities in play skill and optimization focus. With point buy, that optimizer (or player with better rules knowledge) will buy the dominating stat whatever his PC is and dump everything he can to do so. The random element of dice has a tendency to blunt his dominant stat and keeps him from pumping it higher through the dumping of other stats. The characters are generally less one-tricky and less brittle as a result - which is good for the players on the less optimized/less rule knowledge side.

 

[billd91]

Rolling is more fun, but I'm soured on it because of 5E's ability caps (which I like). It sorta bugs me that the party's fighter, a mountain dwarf who rolled a 17 Strength, has no use for Gauntlets of Ogre Power, because he's already as strong as an ogre; the cleric (who avoids melee) ended up using them, because the rogue and wizard had even less use for them. This convinced me of the reason behind that cap of 15 on point-buy base scores in 5E; a 1st-level fighter with a 15 can still have a 17 Strength AFTER a racial bonus.

For me, this is perfect. This keeps the party spreading the power around rather than concentrating it like they tended to do in 3e because "he has the higher stat and can make better use of it". Now, like in 1e/2e, it is best used by a PC who doesn't have a high stat and rather than an already powerful PC getting a marginal improvement, the whole party benefits from a weaker PC getting a bigger boost in power.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

My experience is generally the opposite, actually. Dice rolling works better than point buy when dealing with disparities in play skill and optimization focus. With point buy, that optimizer (or player with better rules knowledge) will buy the dominating stat whatever his PC is and dump everything he can to do so. The random element of dice has a tendency to blunt his dominant stat and keeps him from pumping it higher through the dumping of other stats. The characters are generally less one-tricky and less brittle as a result - which is good for the players on the less optimized/less rule knowledge side.

IME skilled players who want to focus are going to win that rat race regardless of your stat generation method. The place the less minmax inclined players can compete easily is in breadth. That seems like a natural strength for point buy, where you can get a good spread with a small sacrifice in your specialty.

"The random element of dice has a tendency to blunt his dominant stat" is true except when the exact opposite happens. The odds say that randomness making this kind of problem much much worse cannot be rare.

 

[Pvt. Winslow]

My experience is generally the opposite, actually. Dice rolling works better than point buy when dealing with disparities in play skill and optimization focus. With point buy, that optimizer (or player with better rules knowledge) will buy the dominating stat whatever his PC is and dump everything he can to do so. The random element of dice has a tendency to blunt his dominant stat and keeps him from pumping it higher through the dumping of other stats. The characters are generally less one-tricky and less brittle as a result - which is good for the players on the less optimized/less rule knowledge side.

I can see this working in the event that the optimizer gets lower rolled stats than the other players, but this will only be the case sometimes, and potentially not at all. Though now that I think about it, I assume your style of rolling requires you to either assign as you go, or roll in order? Otherwise there would be no difference from point buy, in that the optimizer would definitely put his highest stat in whatever stat is most important to his character.

Have you had games you DMed or played in where optimizers were a league above the less rules knowledgeable players due to point buy, or is this more of a hypothetical? I ask, because I'm curious if you think those same games would have still been skewed towards the optimizer if he had been the one to roll the best stats. I think it comes down more to system mastery and rules knowledge than stat array when you start talking about one character outshining the others.

 

[Bolares]

I love rolling dices, as a player and DM, but as I'm going to allow feats in my next campaign the only way to make the stat or feat choise hard for the players is per point buy. I think that's the option because when rolling dices a player's main stat will probably be 16 or higher in most cases. And that makes the choice between stats or feats reeeealy easy. Chosse a feat(where most still get a +1 stat) or get an already high stat a little higher.

 

[Herr der Qual]

With concern to the feats, what we did was included them as such: You can only acquire a feat by forgoing your ability point upgrade. The only time this isn't true is as a human with a starter feat, but no one in the games I play in, ever chooses a human. In fact, the only game I've ever played a human character in was Rifts because we were using only the core book for that campaign and there were no alternate races. In fact, I'd rather play a pygmy kobold with a fetish for poop sniffing than play a human.

 

[abirdcall]

With concern to the feats, what we did was included them as such: You can only acquire a feat by forgoing your ability point upgrade. The only time this isn't true is as a human with a starter feat, but no one in the games I play in, ever chooses a human. In fact, the only game I've ever played a human character in was Rifts because we were using only the core book for that campaign and there were no alternate races. In fact, I'd rather play a pygmy kobold with a fetish for poop sniffing than play a human.

How is this different than standard rules for feats?

Your play experience is vastly different than most I would think. Most characters in the games I play are human regardless of edition.

 

[Herr der Qual]

By doing the standard rule on feats, we have not had any issues with feats making high attributes unmanageable. I have no idea if my play experience is similar or different, myself and the group I play with have very little interest in playing humans for mostly the same reasons. We all have fairly adventurous lifestyles and we play D&D to let our minds romp freely into the things we wish were possible, We know what it's like to be human, so we don't want to include that into our fantasy realm, I'm actually shocked that more people don't avoid the human characters the way we do. In nearly a decade I've played 1 human, and that's because there was no alternative.

Also, that was how I interpreted the feats rule as working, but I kept hearing people talk about feats from the hop and everything, and I know a variant human rule allows for a feat to start (I think, I glazed over humans) so I wasn't sure if my group had somehow missed a feats rule somewhere that allowed for a starter feat, I heard one person mention additional feats for high attributes, so yea.

 

[Pvt. Winslow]

How is this different than standard rules for feats?

Your play experience is vastly different than most I would think. Most characters in the games I play are human regardless of edition.

I think if you play with feats in 5E, that human becomes an extremely strong contender for most popular race, as they get a free feat at 1st level that doesn't require them to make a choice between an ability score increase or said feat. If you play without feats in 5E, I imagine human might end up being one of the least popular races, as they get so little in benefits compared to the other races.

It's a huge variance, just by allowing feats in your campaign or not.