D&D General How Did You Generate Your Most Recent Character's Stats?

[Lakesidefantasy]

Do people actually play the characters that roll poorly though? Or do you have a minimum of some sort? Because one of the issues I've seen in the past is that if a player is the DM's buddy (or worse yet love interest) the rules for rolling are more, shall we say, lenient.

If it is truly roll once and you get what you get and no your character is not suicidally brave then I'd still pick point buy.

Well that's just it, if you don't like what you rolled you can choose Point Buy instead. But yes, you get one chance at rolling.

 

[billd91]

The fact that you want to put a normative judgment on it tells me we have very different perspectives on its relative importance.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything described as an "illusory pretense" without that being pejorative. Seems like a label that comes loaded with judgmental implications to me.

 

[Dbudzik]

As Crom intended.

 

[payn]

As Crom intended.

“Crom grant me an 18 or to hell with you!!!”

 

[Stormonu]

So many other games have given up rolling stats, it sometimes make me wonder if rolling for stats in D&D is really worth it, and it might just be better to do some form of point buy. Or perhaps do something akin to Star Trek Adventures/Traveller, where you build your character not by merely assigning points but by building stats through your background choices.

That said, my last character was done 4d6, drop lowest and select which attribute to assign to.

 

[Clint_L]

If you like it, it's worth it, right? It's only a game.

 

[Nod_Hero]

Our regular Thursday campaign took an unexpected "DM needs some prep time if your party is going to do that!" turn so we stopped an hour earlier than usual.
Wanting to hang out a little longer, since we'll have a three week holiday hiatus, we had a "pre-session 0" for a new campaign starting next year.
The DM wanted "heroic characters" so gave us this method:
---
2024 Rules
All Official 5.24 sources available except Dragonmarks, UA at DM's discretion!
Character Generation has two options. Either option is available to each individual player in the campaign.
Level 1 character
---
Option 1) 27 point buy (max 15)
---
Option 2) THREE SETS OF: 4d6 drop the lowest, rolled six times, place where wanted
---
+ background adjustments (max 18) - (NOTE: Customized backgrounds per DMG allowed!)
---
advance to level 3
---
Starter gear only (no GP) from option a) of both class and background + 100 GP,
OR
Double the maximum value of option b) from both class and background, buy all your gear from scratch
---
choose two Common magic items - (NOTE: Generic items may not exceed a base value of 50 GP for weapons or 75 GP for armor)
---

This ended up with all of us having some pretty decent stats.
Example (picture doesn't show stats as rolled, shows stats after numerical ordering):

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

Look at all that fun!

 

[Clint_L]

Our regular Thursday campaign took an unexpected "DM needs some prep time if your party is going to do that!" turn so we stopped an hour earlier than usual.
Wanting to hang out a little longer, since we'll have a three week holiday hiatus, we had a "pre-session 0" for a new campaign starting next year.
The DM wanted "heroic characters" so gave us this method:
---
2024 Rules
All Official 5.24 sources available except Dragonmarks, UA at DM's discretion!
Character Generation has two options. Either option is available to each individual player in the campaign.
Level 1 character
---
Option 1) 27 point buy (max 15)
---
Option 2) THREE SETS OF: 4d6 drop the lowest, rolled six times, place where wanted
---
+ background adjustments (max 18) - (NOTE: Customized backgrounds per DMG allowed!)
---
advance to level 3
---
Starter gear only (no GP) from option a) of both class and background + 100 GP,
OR
Double the maximum value of option b) from both class and background, buy all your gear from scratch
---
choose two Common magic items - (NOTE: Generic items may not exceed a base value of 50 GP for weapons or 75 GP for armor)
---

This ended up with all of us having some pretty decent stats.
Example (picture doesn't show stats as rolled, shows stats after numerical ordering):

Why would anyone pick option 1 in that scenario? That's the trap option. Option 3 is okay IF it's a very short campaign at low levels. But option 2 seems like the obvious winner. I assume that's what everyone picked?

 

[AlViking]

Our regular Thursday campaign took an unexpected "DM needs some prep time if your party is going to do that!" turn so we stopped an hour earlier than usual.
Wanting to hang out a little longer, since we'll have a three week holiday hiatus, we had a "pre-session 0" for a new campaign starting next year.
The DM wanted "heroic characters" so gave us this method:
---
2024 Rules
All Official 5.24 sources available except Dragonmarks, UA at DM's discretion!
Character Generation has two options. Either option is available to each individual player in the campaign.
Level 1 character
---
Option 1) 27 point buy (max 15)
---
Option 2) THREE SETS OF: 4d6 drop the lowest, rolled six times, place where wanted
---
+ background adjustments (max 18) - (NOTE: Customized backgrounds per DMG allowed!)
---
advance to level 3
---
Starter gear only (no GP) from option a) of both class and background + 100 GP,
OR
Double the maximum value of option b) from both class and background, buy all your gear from scratch
---
choose two Common magic items - (NOTE: Generic items may not exceed a base value of 50 GP for weapons or 75 GP for armor)
---

This ended up with all of us having some pretty decent stats.
Example (picture doesn't show stats as rolled, shows stats after numerical ordering):

Shocking - don't actually follow the 4d6 drop lowest which point buy roughly models or roll 3 times and everybody chose that option? Don't get me wrong, we used to do something like that or other adjustments before we even had the concept of point buy. But it's really not much of a comparison.

There's nothing wrong with any specific way of generating stats, but if you're going to basically guarantee better numbers (although there will still be disparity between the best and worst characters with rolling) there are options like 3e's heroic array which would have given people a closer approximation of what was done here. On the other hand, we used the heroic array for our first 5e campaign and the characters felt overpowered to us. I think I would have the same response so rolling multiple and pick the best.

But that's just me. If you had fun with it, cool. Just don't pretend the options were balanced.