D&D General Having your players roll their stats

[Clint_L]

So 15% better to hit is the threshold?


Not a point I made or even alluded to, but... sure, I agree with you here other than the bit that it is imperative that "everyone starts from the exact same place" with regards to stats.


Agreed - I'm not looking for a reality simulator either. You must be including this to rebut someone else's point? Although I don't hear anyone saying they want a reality simulator so not sure what it has to do with anything.


Are you talking about comparative advantages or disadvantages? Like being 15% better at strength rolls compared to another PC in the party? I find this to truly be a matter of perspective. If my ally is 15% better than me at some things, I'm happy to have them on my team.


So... we're comparing a sociological experiment to the social contract of a game? And because of the very real-world results of that experiment we can't have variability in stats between characters in our fantasy world? This seems, at least on the surface, to contradict your earlier claims about not wanting a reality simulator.

Wow, you seem to be really wanting to create an argument. Have fun with that. I think you understood my points perfectly well.

Also...let's look at some actual math, taking the +1/hit and damage vs. +4 (i.e. 13 str. at lvl 1 vs. 18). Let's give our fighter a long sword, to make it simple, and put him up against a goblin - AC 15.

Fighter A (+1/+1) will hit 45% of the time doing 5.5 average damage, for an overall average of about 2.5 damage/round.

Fighter B (+4/+4) will hit 60% of the time doing 8.5 average damage, or about 5.1 DPR.

I think they will notice that one character gets to do more than twice as much damage as the other. Not that they didn't already understand that +4 is significantly better than +1, but you knew that.

 

[Clint_L]

Some of them.

And, sure, they all cheer or groan when they get roll high or low scores, and during chargen you can see that the ones who got lower scores aren't happy about it.

Then we actually start playing and it never comes up again.

There is also a different feel...it's hard to put my finger on it...about how they roleplay when they've rolled the stats. Maybe it's just that they're willing to lean on their deficiencies. I don't know; it's hard to describe. But they seem to be having more fun since we switched over.

I guess we've had different experiences.

 

[Oofta]

Do any of those arrays have scores outside the 8-15 range? If not, I'm not all that interested.

That's okay. I can't be the right DM for every player and vice versa.

 

[James Gasik]

Back when I was playing Pathfinder, I got into a debate on the topic of point buy vs. rolling. He insisted that point buy was the best method to generate characters, because it's "fair".

My position, which really hasn't changed much, is that this is only half the story. Classes aren't fair, in of themselves. Now 5e isn't as bad as Pathfinder, but you can still see a little of this in play.

Some classes have one ability score that does all the work, and everything else is just gravy. Classes that tend to be in melee will probably need more Constitution than others, since they are more likely to take damage. Some classes are designed to need multiple ability scores with decent numbers.

The 3e/PF1e Monk is the absolute extreme, where you could give a Monk player all 18's and they might still struggle a bit, but I mean, look at the Wizard vs. the Cleric.

The Cleric is designed to be a melee caster who swings a weapon (usually) when they're not casting spells, since a lot of their spells are reactive in nature; you don't need to heal til you take damage, there's no reason to remove conditions until those conditions are present.

Your offensive cantrips aren't very thrilling (especially in the PHB), so you're going to want some Strength to hit things with your hammer. More if you want to wear heavy armor and be forever chasing after the Fighter in combat.

If you don't wear heavy armor, you're going to want some Dexterity.

You definitely need Constitution, since you only have a d8 Hit Die, some enemies will home in on you like a damn missile, and you might have concentration to worry about.

Your spellcasting is all Wisdom.

Meanwhile, the Wizard isn't built by default to want or need melee weapons, has great attack cantrips to choose from, doesn't wear any armor, and can give themselves Leather Armor +1 with a spell slot. So they have less need for Strength, which frees up points that can be slotted into Dexterity or Constitution.

Point buy, by it's nature, produces imbalance between characters. Worse yet, it encourages dump stats more- I mean, with die rolls, there's always going to be a case that if you roll low, you know where to put that low score. But point buy can lead players to engineer their characters so that the low scores trend lower, to get a bigger "engine" for their character.

Given 5e's design, where a low score can mean constantly being ambushed, losing initiative, sitting quietly whenever it's time to negotiate with NPC's, and of course, dealing with the occasional "off" save which, by design, you might not even have a chance to succeed at, I'm not a fan of point buy.

I'm not saying rolling is better or worse, since high rolls for a guy who only needs a few great stats vs. low rolls for someone who had their heart set on a class that needs several great stats is equally problematic- just that neither system is absolutely superior to the other.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Back when I was playing Pathfinder, I got into a debate on the topic of point buy vs. rolling. He insisted that point buy was the best method to generate characters, because it's "fair".

My position, which really hasn't changed much, is that this is only half the story. Classes aren't fair, in of themselves. Now 5e isn't as bad as Pathfinder, but you can still see a little of this in play.

Yeah, this has always made me wish they would drop the pretense and instead give each class a standard array. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work due to multiclassing. Well, also because the Internet would completely flip out if they had their precious illusion of balance taken away from them. I mean, races and backgrounds aren't fair, either.

 

[Hex08]

I don't know the exact ability scores of my player's PCs. I assume the wizard probably has intelligence as their best score. Sorcerers charisma, rogues dex. Except on that last one you would have been wrong on my first 5E PC who had a higher strength than dex because they were a mountain dwarf. Which was a really stupid combo to begin with but neither here nor there.

If you can rearrange numbers to suit the patterns will likely the same. Just some numbers will be higher or lower depending on luck.

Obviously, we have different definition of cookie cutter, and I think yours is also different than the poster you originally responded to about this. If there are two wizards in my campaign and one has a 16 intelligence and the other an 18 intelligence then assuming each is the character's highest score is a fair generalization based on how the versions of D&D and its spin offs that I have played are designed but that hardly makes the two characters attribute scores the same (or similar enough to not matter). Rolling will lead to less sameness (less cookie cutter) than point buy and even less than standard array (as I understand it since I have never used an array). As for your 5E example, I can't speak to that since I stopped playing D&D with 3.5 and moved onto to other games like Pathfinder and, more recently, Castles & Crusades.

 

[Oofta]

Obviously, we have different definition of cookie cutter, and I think yours is also different than the poster you originally responded to about this. If there are two wizards in my campaign and one has a 16 intelligence and the other an 18 intelligence then assuming each is the character's highest score is a fair generalization based on how the versions of D&D and its spin offs that I have played are designed but that hardly makes the two characters attribute scores the same (or similar enough to not matter). Rolling will lead to less sameness (less cookie cutter) than point buy and even less than standard array (as I understand it since I have never used an array). As for your 5E example, I can't speak to that since I stopped playing D&D with 3.5 and moved onto to other games like Pathfinder and, more recently, Castles & Crusades.

A cookie is still a chocolate chip cookie whether it has 4 chocolate chips or 8. A gingerbread man is still recognizable as a gingerbread man even if one has more frosting than the other.

Practically every wizard will have their highest ability score in intelligence. The attribute scores are not the same, the relative values of where people put the ability scores are. If you roll for ability scores randomly one PC will likely be a significantly better wizard than the other. At the same time, no two PCs of the same class will be played exactly the same because different players are running them even if the ability scores are identical.

In our game yesterday, we had a player not make it at the last minute. Because of where we were, we had my wife run the PC temporarily. How my wife ran the PC, what spells they cast and abilities they used, were significantly different with exactly the same character. I don't believe in cookie cutter PCs because I've never seen them.

And ... now I want a cookie.

 

[Clint_L]

Rolling stats is fun. Using standard array or point buy isn't. I think that's the main argument for using random rolls. The other arguments I'm seeing for rolling stats all seem very thin to me - it is obvious that the results are structurally unfair (or inequitable, I don't think there's any difference in the end result, so whatever word makes you more comfortable). This is particularly emphasized by the design of 5e, where your attribute scores factor into almost every roll that you make.

The last time we did random rolls, I was invited to play in a "Lost Mines of Phandelver" campaign with mostly new players, and two of us rolled significantly better than the others. I was playing a paladin tank and found myself intentionally making non-optimal choices because it was embarrassing how much better my character was (18 strength and con, no stat under 13). I loved making the rolls and getting super lucky, but I did not enjoy playing with a built in advantage (okay, I was also playing a paladin, but in my defence I was asked to so that I could tank and add some healing as needed).

 

[Hex08]

A cookie is still a chocolate chip cookie whether it has 4 chocolate chips or 8. A gingerbread man is still recognizable as a gingerbread man even if one has more frosting than the other.

Practically every wizard will have their highest ability score in intelligence. The attribute scores are not the same, the relative values of where people put the ability scores are. If you roll for ability scores randomly one PC will likely be a significantly better wizard than the other. At the same time, no two PCs of the same class will be played exactly the same because different players are running them even if the ability scores are identical.

In our game yesterday, we had a player not make it at the last minute. Because of where we were, we had my wife run the PC temporarily. How my wife ran the PC, what spells they cast and abilities they used, were significantly different with exactly the same character. I don't believe in cookie cutter PCs because I've never seen them.

And ... now I want a cookie.

Luckily, I have Oreos and I believe I shall have some soon. As I said in my prior post, we obviously are defining our terms differently and since that's the case this will just become a circular discussion (well, already has). I'll bow out instead of continuing, and if you get your hands on that cookie I hope it is delicious.

 

[Orius]

Given 5e's design, where a low score can mean constantly being ambushed, losing initiative, sitting quietly whenever it's time to negotiate with NPC's, and of course, dealing with the occasional "off" save which, by design, you might not even have a chance to succeed at, I'm not a fan of point buy.

And these are more differences between older and newer.

Ambushes. In 5e I believe that is Stealth vs. Perception, right? That's similar in 3e which has Listen and Spot vs. Move Silently and Hide. So you use someone like a rogue or a ranger to scout and warn the rest of the party of danger. Before 3e, it's surprise rolls or listen/detect noise checks and they're not always based on stats, and mostly don't improve with level. I'm not going to go digging around here, but Classic D&D is surprise on 1-2 on 1d6, no modifiers, flat roll, nothing based on level. 2e is surprise on 1-3 on 1d10, though there are a number of situational modifiers. Dexterity can modify it, but not by more than +2 at 18 Dex, and levels don't affect anything. AD&D has some inconsistencies here because some monsters surprise on 1d6 or 1d8 rolls. Listening is also 1-2 on 1d6 in D&D, while 2e has options for d20 or d% rolls. In any case, thieves have a separate roll for hearing things.

Initiative isn't affected by ability scores though the RC has an individual initiative option that uses Dex to resolve ties. Initiative is traditionally opposed 1d6 rolls high roll moves first and ties occur simultaneously. 2e switches that to 1d10 roll low.

Negotiating is traditionally handled by role-playing rather than skills. Charisma may come into play with encounter reactions.

So how you generate ability scores really depends on edition. The older rules tend to be less dependent on your ability scores, and often have a bigger role in determining race and class choice, and if you get bonus XP from a high prime requisite.