D&D General here's how to stop jealousy in between lucky players and unlucky ones


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Interesting, this is very far from my own experience. Maybe less so 1); the 10-14 clustering is inherent of the 4d6-drop-lowest method. It has nothing to do with the sharing of arrays but out of four series, one invariably ends up something like 11,13,12,11,12,13. As for 2) the plethora of classes (and subs), races (and subs), backgrounds, and builds within the same permutations has always ensured high mechanical diversity and differentiation between characters in my experience, not to mention roleplay elements.
The plethora of classes, subclasses, races, etc ensures diversity in a point buy game as well.
 

Ah, didn't see that post. It would have saved me to write a long one!

Increasing the variance between character is not the intent. On the contrary, the intent is to reduce power discrepancies caused by high variations between characters. If the goal is to increase in the variance between characters, then yeah, don't use this method; it's counter-productive
Fair enough: arguably, there are multiple reasons one might want to increase or reduce randomness in character generation.

However, from my perspective, most of the methods that ensure “fair” outcomes among players aren’t an improvement over point buy, and in many cases, are just more complicated (though I recognize that the method you proposed is not more complicated).
 

The plethora of classes, subclasses, races, etc ensures diversity in a point buy game as well.
No argument there.
  • Point-buy is best for players who enjoy some individual custom-building but don’t mind standardisation.
  • Rolled stats is best for players who enjoy thrill of rolling but don’t mind discrepancy between players.

Rolled arrays is just a middle avenue, with its pros and cons. You seem to think I’m crapping on point-buy; I’m not. I only bring it up because of similarities in results, not in opposition.
 

some people are lucky and use it ( luck ) for their own sake;
others use randomness without influence on the rolls and usually obtain stats below those obtained by the lucky ones .
 

I feel I'm lucky my group doesn't like the gambling aspect. I personally use Standard Array so everything is fair and we've removed even system mastery from the character baseline.
 

I feel I'm lucky my group doesn't like the gambling aspect. I personally use Standard Array so everything is fair and we've removed even system mastery from the character baseline.
To be fair (ha!) with the OP however, his method **is**fair despite the (rather safe) gambling aspect.
 



If you are not allowing rolling at your table, I suggest using the array 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, as it is the median roll for 4d6 drop low six times. You'll note this costs 30 points if you do point buy and allow a 16 for a 12. The array and point buy options are penalized a little in the rules for being safe bets compared to rolling. Either that or the designers didn't understand the probabilities.
 

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