D&D 5E (2014) Favorite method of generating ability scores

[Miladoon]

We had a pretty good discussion a little while ago about ways to generate abilities.

HERE is the link.

As far as favorite I would have to go with either High/Lo Pair or 6x6 Grid.

My least favorite is standard array.

 

[TheLoneRanger1979]

I begin to see all the sides of die/coin now. I can understand why standard arrays and point buys get so much proponents. My only gripe with them is their greatest strength.... balance. All PCs are equal, and thus in the long run all PCs are "samish". Especially in multiple campaigns. Unless with a heavily RP minded group, characters end up looking very similar number-wise. Even with good RPing, one can argue it's only the "fluff" that varies, the essence being the same. That and i am not a really great fan of balance, after all this is not a PvP based game (at least not for me).

With randomly generated characters thing feel more "natural". But of course there is the risk of ending up with a character you don't really want to play. What do you guys think of solving this problem by pregenerating a couple of dozen "adventurers"? Let's say in the FR, in the vicinity of Baldur's Gate, there are at the given point of the start of the adventure 20-30 adventurers. They are all generated using some sort of randomization and are all unique. When a party member dies, they can draw from this adventurer "population" to fill their numbers. I know..... it still doesn't guarantee every player will get to play their favorite archetype, and may cause conflict when choosing who gets to play what, but in my experience people usually know in advance what they are going to play anyways, so there shouldn't be much conflict over who gets to be the paladin.

 

[GM Lent]

I've been a 4d6-drop-the-lowest DM since 1995, and if you'd told me even a year ago that I would come to love and appreciate a "standard array" option, I'd have called you crazy. But in the last year (or so; since the 5e PHB came out) I've come to really appreciate and love it. I've never liked point buy. I'm not sure why. But the standard array forces the player to make some tough choices but guarantee ees that the character will be well-rounded. It also prevents mega-dumping a stat to get a boost in another - which come to think of it, is probably my issue with point buy.

 

[Li Shenron]

2. Standard array

As a DM I currently prefer the standard array, because it has a slightly better chance of making the players shut up and start playing straight away.

 

[Celtavian]

4d6 minus the lowest roll. Minimum one 16 or stat set not viable unless you choose to forego this minimum requirement if you roll a particularly well-rounded set of stats. Sometimes we roll two sets of stats per character. choose the best set.

Or

33 point point buy.

I like to run a lethal campaign, so I allow for higher stats to help the PCs survive.

 

[Diamabel]

I begin to see all the sides of die/coin now. I can understand why standard arrays and point buys get so much proponents. My only gripe with them is their greatest strength.... balance. All PCs are equal, and thus in the long run all PCs are "samish". Especially in multiple campaigns. Unless with a heavily RP minded group, characters end up looking very similar number-wise. Even with good RPing, one can argue it's only the "fluff" that varies, the essence being the same. That and i am not a really great fan of balance, after all this is not a PvP based game (at least not for me).

A group of point buy/standard array would be a group of peers- adventurers of similar ability.. everyone can contribute meaningfully. The only "samish" thing is power level.. you can of course control this campaign to campaign- average one time, superheroes the next, loveable screw ups another time.

A group of randomly rolled PCs can potentially end up as a group of superheroes and sidekicks.. everyone may or may not be able to contribute in a meaningful way. Perfectly ok if you have players who enjoy this, of course. Personally, I wouldn't be happy being stuck as comic relief/bait/resource sponge/pin cushion, simply for rolling poorly :/

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I like to run a lethal campaign, so I allow for higher stats to help the PCs survive.

Which is it? Those are directly conflicting statements.

What you are describing is not a campaign that is more lethal, but one that might appear more lethal on its surface because the numbers in use are larger: +7 to a d20 roll or an average 10 damage look larger than +5 to a d20 roll or an average 8 damage, but that is only actually true if the other side of the equation is unchanged - d20+7 vs. DC 15 is the same as d20+5 vs. DC 13, not higher, and 10 damage from 40 hit points is the same as 8 damage from 32 hit points.

If your goal is to actually make the game more lethal, leaving the players as-standard and then scaling up the threats they face is all that is needed. Scaling both equally just inflates the visible numbers without actually altering anything meaningful, and scaling both but doing it unequally is wasted effort over just scaling one side by a lesser degree.

Sorry if I come of as harsh about this, I've got a thing about DMs that do what you have described, developed from seeing so many of them in my own gaming life that would invent all this extra work for themselves of trying to add stuff to the PCs like bigger stats, better gear, and higher hit points just to entirely invalidate the purpose of those alterations by ramping up the challenges faced... and then the campaign falls apart because the difficulty of properly compensating for changes to one side by changing the other distracts the DM from other parts of running a game, or the players manage to not have fun in the campaign whether it is because they have these "uber characters" on paper that are being made to look like incompetent newbs and resulting in a feeling that no character could possibly actually succeed and do well in the DM's campaign, or because the DM has provided not the more lethal game desired, but a game where it seems the characters might as well officially be unbeatable immortals without a care in the world because the DM can't actually find a way to challenge them and then gets tired of trying.

 

[BoldItalic]

In some homebrew software that I wrote for generating bundles of semi-random NPC adventurers, I actually use a kind of randomized point-buy, scattering 27 points 'sensibly' between the abilities. It produces plausible NPCs that can hold their own but without overshadowing the PCs.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

A group of randomly rolled PCs can potentially end up as a group of superheroes and sidekicks.. everyone may or may not be able to contribute in a meaningful way.

One of my favorite things about 5th edition is that the range of characters that are absolutely able to contribute in a meaningful way is huge - in one of my campaigns there are characters with a couple of 18-20 scores or a trio of 16s, and this one character who is a melee-focused life cleric with a 13 strength and a 14 wisdom.

The difference is barely even noticeable in actual play because the cleric hits with most of his attacks, and the other characters hit with most of their attacks too.

It's not like in prior versions of D&D where you could end up with one character class having the equivalent of +22 to-hit while the next best character class tops out at the equivalent of +10 and both are aiming at roll totals of 26-30 in order to hit relevant challenges, or where the game math was aiming at providing "the best of the best" with barely better than coin-toss odds of success against relevant challenges, so every point behind felt like a huge hit to ability to contribute - we're looking at "succeed most of the time" vs. "succeed most of the time" rather than "succeed most of the time" vs. "fail most of the time" until we get to characters of extreme improbability that have nothing but negative ability modifiers.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

...I think point buy gives everyone a sense of agency and fair play in the long term.

We usually do point buy. Sometimes we'll do 4d6 drop the lowest, then to give everyone that sense of agency and fair play players choose from any of the rolled arrays.