D&D 5E Point Buy vs Rolling for Stats

[Tony Vargas]

As far as the balance thing, I don't see how you could possibly "balance" the game perfectly.

You can't, there's no such thing as 'perfect balance.' There is, however, a vast spectrum of degrees of balance D&D has achieved over it's long history. That spectrum ranges from execrable through disgraceful, appalling, laughable, ineffectual, baroque, inadequate, perverse, etc, etc...consult your local Thesaurus... all the way up to bad, poor, indifferent, rough, and, arguably, even 'fair' for a minute or two there.

But 'perfect?' not ever even remotely on the table. ;P

I've been running a home campaign and a couple of people got swapped out (people moving to a different part of the country does that) and I had to redo my expectations. Similar characters, same rules, new people that are fun to play with but not very tactical. Suddenly my "difficulty multiplier" when from 1.5 to 1.0 or a little less.

There's no way you can have 1 guideline for everyone, any guidelines are a starting point that need to be adjusted, tweaked, twisted and modified to fit your style and group.

Nod. You could start with a system that works consistently for some baseline, but, say, lacks flexibility and is not at all robust, and simply adjust it from there. 5e encounter guidelines are not such a system: they don't work consistently, even for some hypothetical baseline. In theory, BA should render such guidelines relatively robust to variations in rolled stats, system mastery, etc - in practice, it doesn't seem to help much. Maybe it'd be even worse if had it been designed with a different philosophy? IDK, encounter guidelines haven't been this weak since we first got them in 3.0...

I don't see how people could reasonably expect any formula that could take into account DM style, player tactical acumen, feats/no feats, differing methods to get ability scores, etc. Unlike a video game there are just too many variables, and even then most games have several difficulty levels (or adjust difficulty on the fly).

However, I will say that if you go with 6-8 encounters and don't have a gonzo group the basic guidelines are a decent starting point in my experience.

The resource-pressure of 6-8 encounters can paper-over and average-out a lot of rough spots, yes. It's a good prescription to help make the game more balancable...

 

[smbakeresq]

Ive been DMing for many years now, and enjoy it very much. I just finished up Out of the Abyss, and it went great. However, it almost felt like we were "power gaming" by the end of the adventure path.

As I normally do with almost all my games, I allowed my players to roll their stats at the beginning of the game instead of using the point buy or standard array ability scores presented in the Players Handbook. However, during the course of the game, i often felt that i had to fluff monsters attacks, hit points, and damage just to keep up with the characters power surge.

Soon, i will be running the Tomb of Annihilation adventure path, and this time, i'm seriously thinking about mandating that players ONLY use the point buy or standard array methods of creating their characters ability scores.

I truly believe that rolling ability scores is more fun for players, and can create balanced characters with the "risk" of having a few bad stats...

...but, would you believe, that I've never seen a balanced character come to my table with rolled up ability scores? They all presented with above average stats for their characters with usually no bad stats, no negative anything, and at least an 18 score (or maybe two 18 scores) to start. Each and every player! This has even happened when the group is like at 5th level, and a character dies, and a player comes back with a new 5th level character with above average rolled up ability stats. You could say that this is "luck of the dice," but I'm thinking that's not the case...

You see, I want to trust my players. I don't want to accuse them of fudging/lying with their dice rolls, especially when it comes to ability stats. And i don't want to sit and watch them roll up their characters and police them. I'm not the kind of DM who micromanages players characters sheets. I generally trust that when they make their characters at home, they are rolling the dice honestly.

But no one has ever came with a character with like a rolled up ability score of an 8 or something like that. They've all presented with some pretty "lucky" dice rolls...each and every time with each and every character that they make.

One time, later in the game, my wizard wanted to poly-morph into a T-Rex but was disappointed because his strength score was too low. I had a druid who didn't like to shape shift because turning into a bear was sub-optimal compared to the other players with better stats!

So I'm just really thinking that this time, for the new campaign, to disallow rolling the stats.

Do you think this is too harsh?

Do you other DMs police your players?

How should this be handled?

We roll up PC right in front of everybody at game session #1 of the campaign, 4d6-L like old days. Had many PC with a single digit score, including a half orc Paladin with DEX of 6. That session is where we build the PCs, they meet each other in some fashion, and get level 1 and sometimes 2 done.

Starting one now where DM sent out rolls from hamate dice server. Not a problem, I got a couple of 15’s and the rest 12’s. One player out of us 4 got an 18, I guess we were not so lucky.

The early PC build session works great, everyone gets on same page and figures out what they will play


Sent from my iPhone using EN World mobile app

 

[Oofta]

I'm confused by those percentages. Shouldn't they add up to 100%?

Had a minute over lunch, if you just look at the odds of rolling any number from 3-18 with 4d6 drop lowest you get the following percentages, which do add up to 100%

3 0.08
4 0.31
5 0.78
6 1.62
7 2.93
8 4.78
9 7.01
10 9.40
11 11.44
12 12.90
13 13.26
14 12.36
15 10.11
16 7.24
17 4.17
18 1.62

 

[Satyrn]

Had a minute over lunch, if you just look at the odds of rolling any number from 3-18 with 4d6 drop lowest you get the following percentages, which do add up to 100%

3 0.08
4 0.31
5 0.78
6 1.62
7 2.93
8 4.78
9 7.01
10 9.40
11 11.44
12 12.90
13 13.26
14 12.36
15 10.11
16 7.24
17 4.17
18 1.62

Now I'm really confused.

For 3, you had 45,698 out of ten million. How is that .08%

Am I just not getting what you're doing?

 

[Oofta]

Now I'm really confused.

For 3, you had 45,698 out of ten million. How is that .08%

Am I just not getting what you're doing?

Not sure where you got 45,698. A slightly more detailed log. So we rolled 7,670 3s out of 10,000,000 rolls, or .08%

4D6 drop lowest rolls 3 | 7,670/10,000,000 | 0.08%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 4 | 30,552/10,000,000 | 0.31%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 5 | 76,647/10,000,000 | 0.77%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 6 | 162,119/10,000,000 | 1.62%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 7 | 293,463/10,000,000 | 2.93%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 8 | 479,820/10,000,000 | 4.80%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 9 | 702,510/10,000,000 | 7.03%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 10 | 940,700/10,000,000 | 9.41%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 11 | 1,141,437/10,000,000 | 11.41%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 12 | 1,288,051/10,000,000 | 12.88%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 13 | 1,328,574/10,000,000 | 13.29%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 14 | 1,232,592/10,000,000 | 12.33%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 15 | 1,009,873/10,000,000 | 10.10%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 16 | 725,678/10,000,000 | 7.26%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 17 | 417,736/10,000,000 | 4.18%
4D6 drop lowest rolls 18 | 162,578/10,000,000 | 1.63%

 

[Satyrn]

From this:

The app rolled 4d6 drop lowest 6 times sorted the numbers lowest to highest and then added the number to the appropriate entry in an array. I ran it 10,000,000 times an then divided the totals by 10,000,000. It's possible the sorting/bucketing skewed the results somewhat but I'm not enough of a mathematician to tell you that answer.

Percentages
3: 45698 for 0.46%

 

[Lanefan]

The app rolled 4d6 drop lowest 6 times sorted the numbers lowest to highest and then added the number to the appropriate entry in an array. I ran it 10,000,000 times an then divided the totals by 10,000,000. It's possible the sorting/bucketing skewed the results somewhat but I'm not enough of a mathematician to tell you that answer.

Percentages
3: 45698 for 0.46%
4: 185435 for 1.85%
5: 463554 for 4.64%
6: 970876 for 9.71%
7: 1759450 for 17.59%
8: 2870240 for 28.7%
9: 4213181 for 42.13%
10: 5649762 for 56.5%
11: 6849121 for 68.49%
12: 7726461 for 77.26%
13: 7964239 for 79.64%
14: 7408369 for 74.08%
15: 6068077 for 60.68%
16: 4351651 for 43.52%
17: 2501156 for 25.01%
18: 972730 for 9.73%

overall average: 12.2450446333333

OK, your overall average is fine; which leaves me scratching my head a bit as to how your end-result average stat line comes about.

Now I'm really confused.

For 3, you had 45,698 out of ten million. How is that .08%

Am I just not getting what you're doing?

My guess...and it's only a guess, [MENTION=6801845]Oofta[/MENTION] can confirm or deny...is that one set of numbers is the % chance of seeing a given number anywhere in a set of 6 rolls, while the other lot is the raw chances of getting a given number on one roll. Remember that the ten million being referred to is ten million sets of six, so 60 million individual rolls...if I'm reading this right.

Oofta, another question: does your app give the final stat line (15-14-12-etc.) to any further decimal places than straight integers? I ask because if the 15 is actually, say, 15.64 that would explain a) the differences between your stat line and Maxperson's: you're truncating, he's rounding; and b) where the missing three points might have gone.

Lanefan

 

[Satyrn]

My guess...and it's only a guess, [MENTION=6801845]Oofta[/MENTION] can confirm or deny...is that one set of numbers is the % chance of seeing a given number anywhere in a set of 6 rolls, while the other lot is the raw chances of getting a given number on one roll. Remember that the ten million being referred to is ten million sets of six, so 60 million individual rolls...if I'm reading this right.

it seems like a good guess.

 

[Oofta]

From this:

Ahh, right. The post where I was bucketing together the ability scores per character and .46% of characters had at least 1 ability score of 3. Which makes sense because you have 6 chances of rolling that 3 for any given character. So .08 * 6 = .48. Throw in some rounding and voila.

I've double checked my results a few different ways, one was a mathematical analysis done that I linked to long ago. It's not a 100% accurate map because I'm not filtering out duplicates - if a character gets 2 rolls of 18 it just goes into the 18 bucket.

 

[Oofta]

OK, your overall average is fine; which leaves me scratching my head a bit as to how your end-result average stat line comes about.

My guess...and it's only a guess, [MENTION=6801845]Oofta[/MENTION] can confirm or deny...is that one set of numbers is the % chance of seeing a given number anywhere in a set of 6 rolls, while the other lot is the raw chances of getting a given number on one roll. Remember that the ten million being referred to is ten million sets of six, so 60 million individual rolls...if I'm reading this right.

Oofta, another question: does your app give the final stat line (15-14-12-etc.) to any further decimal places than straight integers? I ask because if the 15 is actually, say, 15.64 that would explain a) the differences between your stat line and Maxperson's: you're truncating, he's rounding; and b) where the missing three points might have gone.

Lanefan

You mean you don't always round down in D&D?

AKA, yes it looks like I was accidentally using integer math.
The real numbers:
15.6627465
14.1746176
12.9559838
11.76172
10.4118873
8.5048237