D&D 5E (2014) Is Point Buy Balanced?

[Thomas Shey]

We've been told, point-blank, that active testing did not occur beyond level 6--just far enough to test the most basic of scaling elements and no further (e.g. level 6 is when you first get iterative attacks, when you get your third level-based feat, etc.) So no need to maintain it, it's simply true. 3e was very minimally-tested, and that's a big part of why it goes off the rails so quick--and why E6 and such exist. They're part of the levels actually playtested.

This appears to be very much the problem that happened with the Dragon Age RPG and that haunted the AGE system for more than a little while after it (it appears from my reading of Fantasy Age 2e that probably at least most of the worst culprits have been addressed over time since something like six more iterations of the rules system happened between now and then) was because as an artifact of the way the game came out, the first five levels were probably pretty thoroughly playtested, and the 6-20th levels far more minimally. Unsurprisingly when I ran the game people (including me) liked it a fair bit up through the first five levels and then problems with the system progressively blew it up.

 

[Maxperson]

So? I didn't say you would get more variety from point buy, I said you could get a wide array.

You literally did. This is you.

"You can get more variety by creating a number of arrays from point buy and roll for which array you use. Some will start with a 15 as a high, some with a 13 (with 5e you get a +2 and a +1 to add for a 17 or 15 high number). But the 15 will have some pretty low numbers, the 14 will gave all numbers above average. Everything from 13, 13, 13, 12, 12, 12 to 15, 15, 15, 8, 8, 8."

I don't care. I want every player to have the option to make a character as proficient at their chosen class as any other.

So you want me not to be able to play the game, because that's what happens if rolling isn't at least equal as a default to point buy/array. I will never use point buy/array. Not having the ability to roll stats is a deal breaker for me.

I've seen tables where there was significant imbalance. Where if two people wanted to both play wizards, one would have started with a 20 intelligence, 18 dex and con, nothing lower than a 14.

The odds of rolling 18, 18, 17, 14, 14, 14 on 4d6 drop the lowest are incredibly small. Too small to even be a concern.

The player that the low end would have a 12 DC on their saves and start with 6 HP, base AC of 10. The high? DC 15, 10 HP, AC 14. As they level up, the wizard with the high values is free to do whatever they want with feats because their stats are high enough the way it is. The low end? They'll never ever catch up or be the best wizard possible.

So that's wrong. There are other ways to get stats. A headband of intellect 19 is just an uncommon item. Tomes to get +2 to a stat exist and you can get them multiple times. And that's assuming that you need high stats in 5e. You don't. You're better off getting feats that influence your magic ability than raising your stats.

It is a significant imbalance that adds nothing to the game as far as I'm concerned.

You aren't the only one who plays the game, so what concerns you isn't king. It doesn't trump what concerns me. My desire for rolling is every bit as meaningful as your desire for arrays. They should be equal options.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem isn't D&D, the problem is overly hostile people when your propose something to 'improve' the game. And apparently the game wasn't perfect already because someone thought it was a good idea to propose...

Oh, you meant the opposite of my reading of your post. Apologies.

As for 'forcing' combat in D&D, I would say that it's traditionally been very combat focused. And while 5e allows for more other activities then for example 2e, on the other side I do see on some levels a reduction on functionality outside of the combat cycle (spells, magic items, and even monster statblocks).

Sure. The problem with the game I was referencing was the designers had applied that principal broadly when the prior version of the game at hand hadn't done so (in fact, it hadn't forced a character to necessarily be good in any particular sphere) and since it was a semi-generic system, some old hands took offense at this (the fact there were a signficant number of changes in general probably didn't help).

Personally I've identified many situations were there are opportunities to RP in my current campaign, but the players choose pretty much combat each and every time as the solution to all their problems. That's fine, if they enjoy that. I won't force social situations on them either. It might also be that due to how we've developed (Foundry) VTT usage, combats have become extremely quick, so they can do many different combats in a four hour session, while in the past in person combat wasn't all that quick, especially when things got a bit more complicated. And social situations tend to eat up a LOT of time, the players often feel a lack of progress.

There's always going to be people who are only interested in some aspects of a broad campaign (or don't belong in certain kinds of focused campaigns). I've discovered over the years that I only have a limited amount of tolerance for puzzle-solving or investigation (I'd rather get to either the combat or the social interaction in games, or in ones where its relevant, the setting development elements). but I try not to drag my feet when other people are doing it and supply assistance to them to the degree I can while not really feeling it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As above, I think there is a compromise. "I roll, you don't".

The problem is that only works as long as the range of impact is limited. If you're doing the build end of it and someone else isn't, then there's still potentially a lot of room for them to either be playing the cruddy character that isn't holding up their end (but is still probably factoring in how difficult the game is) or generated the ubermensch that is making anyone who covers a similar niche look substandard in comparison.

Its not impossible to make this a largely non-issue, but it requires more than just having both systems in play; you have to have a relatively compressed range of meaningful difference in the random end, and I'm not sure that would feel particularly satisfactory to most people who want the random gen in the first place.

 

[Thomas Shey]

what about total balance compromise, the people who wanna roll, roll, and the people who wanna point buy, point buy, but then, after the rollers have rolled you translate their scores into point buy cost, if it's more than standard PB the point buyers get to add that many more points to their arrays, if the rolls turn out less then they get to add to theirs until they meet the PB.

edit: i forgot the possibility that multiple people might want to roll, if they do then same as the above everybody just increases their PB to the highest rolled point cost off of what they have,

I've done things somewhat like that; it only really works when the point buy system is actually in the same scope as the random gen method (as in, has the same minimums and maximums--and it isn't a given this will be true) and turns pretty heavily on the specifics of how the random system works (I think it works better on roll-and-place systems than roll-as-you-go systems, because the latter still can produce arrangements of stats that no one would deliberately do).

 

[Clint_L]

So? I didn't say you would get more variety from point buy, I said you could get a wide array.



I don't care. I want every player to have the option to make a character as proficient at their chosen class as any other.



I've seen tables where there was significant imbalance. Where if two people wanted to both play wizards, one would have started with a 20 intelligence, 18 dex and con, nothing lower than a 14. The player that the low end would have a 12 DC on their saves and start with 6 HP, base AC of 10. The high? DC 15, 10 HP, AC 14. As they level up, the wizard with the high values is free to do whatever they want with feats because their stats are high enough the way it is. The low end? They'll never ever catch up or be the best wizard possible.

It is a significant imbalance that adds nothing to the game as far as I'm concerned.

Your point about feats is well taken; in 5e feats allow a lot more customization and even a 1 point advantage to the initial set of scores allows you to take an extra feat while still letting you maximize your essential attributes.

 

[CleverNickName]

There is not, though I think it’s probably best practice for most groups of people. Actually, standard array and point buy work together fine, but I’d be cautious about using rolls unless everyone was into it. And I would insist on the rolls being done together, very publically, at Sesssion 0, with each player taking their turn while the others watch.

But then you can’t cheat

Yikes. Is this a real concern?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

You can't get more variety from point buy and arrays, since rolling can produce all of those plus more.

I've seen athletes that were dumb as a stump, super unwise, or both. I've also seen athletes with doctorates and who go on to become billionaires. Some athletes are strong, but not super agile. Others don't have great endurance.

I can tell you, though, what athletes don't all have. And that's 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 for starting stats. They also didn't get to choose what their stats were from a list of arrays or point buy. They were the lucky ones who rolled decently well.

Actually, that is one of my "peeves" with D&D - stats barely change.
'Realistically', you might start with about average stats everywhere (whatever is average in your environment, the average might be lower if you live in a time and place where people are often malnourished versus someone having access to decent meals versus someone having access to lots of food full of sugar and fat.), and then your stats grow by what you're doing. Maybe you are a bit quicker learning than others, maybe you build out muscles faster than average, maybe your coordination is a bit better than average, but you need regular exercise and training to reach decent attribute values.

And I could very easily see that this results to something far closer to a point-bought array than some odd combinations like Strength 15 and Constitution 7 for a Fighter. Quite likely, the Fighter would train Strength, Dexterity and Constitutions to some level, and reach an above average Strength, Dexterity and Constitution, simply because that the attributes they're training all day.
But if the Fighter decides to spend most of his time reading books on magic, their muscles will atrophy, their stamina will sink, but their Intelligence might improve.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Yikes. Is this a real concern?

I was laughing when I typed it

I never cheat at any game, ever.

Except for when I was 10 and tricked a player into believing cards in the draw deck
Might be stuck together and he had a 50/50 of drawing a certain card, knowing it was 100 percent there as the last card.

I have never knowingly cheated at D&D in my 40+ years of play.

I do point buy while friends roll. My stats are usually lower. Hmmmm

 

[Lanefan]

Really? People aren't that variable IRL. Like genuinely. There was some vague loose notion in the early editions that ability score modifiers correspond to standard deviations. 68% of people have |z|<1; 95% of people have |z|<2. Even though that's only on a single score, going with the 95% figure, .95^6 = 73.5% of people lack even a single ability score modifier bigger than +/- 1. 10% of people have no nonzero modifiers of any kind. The vast majority of people are, in fact, very minimally variable.

Sure. I'm fine with this. Most of the bell curve's population is in what I call the mushy middle; and the question is how to game-mechanically deal with the extremes on either end of the curve.

The problem in game terms is that the WotC editions assume linear rather than bell-curve progression when applying bonuses, giving the game-mechanical difference between 10 and 12 in any stat the same mechanical heft as the difference between 18 and 20, or between 3 and 5. This is where things fall apart, as the difference between 10 and 12 (or even 8 and 12) shoud be mechanically zero as you point out, with bonuses and penalties only accruing at the outer ends of the bell curve.

It is an artificial, genuinely unrealistic expectation that characters should have highly variable stats--doubly so when we start factoring in a dangerous world that has razor-thin margins of error, as is typical in early-edition D&D play. Under those conditions, it's actually quite unrealistic to expect that some Fighters have a strength of 6 and some have a strength of 18/00 and some have 14 etc.

That's why in 1e there were minimum stat requirements in order to be a class. A Fighter had to have Strength at least (9? I forget and can't be bothered to look it up right now). A 5 or lower in a stat dictated your class; two stats of 5 or lower made the character unplayable as it couldn't qualify for any class.

We not only can, but should expect that extremes, especially low extremes, should be quite rare--because few people who have such shoddy strength would do all three of (a) bother trying to be a Fighter in the first place, (b) stick with being a Fighter through all the training where they failed and failed and failed and failed and (etc.), and (c) never got any better at Strength things as a result of their training.

We shouldn't expect someone with Str 3 to be a Fighter but that character could very well be playable as a mage type, or a talky type, where physical strength isn't a requirement.

Like...failing at something a lot of times but never getting even the slightest bit better at it is kind of crazy, and reflects either a profoundly damaged human being (since most characters in early-edition D&D are human) or someone incapable of growth and adaptation...which means they shouldn't survive their first dungeon, let alone their tenth.

Wouldn't your hypothetical Str-3 Fighter (which even in my game can't exist in practice) put level-granted ASIs into Strength?

Not sure, though, how we got to a Str-3 Fighter in the first place.

My point here is just...people only get as variable as the dice indicate when you look at the extremes. And when you do look at the extremes, you're necessarily going to see extremes that...work with what they have, or that got better at what they sucked at. Which means most Fighters are going to be fairly strong (or dextrous, if that's their bag). Most priests are going to have a little wisdom, even if some are lower than others. Etc.

I think we might be agreeing here only from very different directions.

I also think people tend to improve in what they practice at, and it makes sense that members of most adventuring classes are going to practice at those things which improve what they do as that class: Strength for a warrior type, Intelligence for a mage type, etc. The way to reflect this improvement-through-practice in 5e game mechanics would be to force level-based ASIs to go into those "primary stats".

Personally, I'm of the opinion that players should be given an incentive to have crappy numbers in "good" stats like Dex, Con, or Wis. That way, players actually want to opt in for "these stats make my character succeed less, but experience more interesting things".

Before doing that I think the class-agnostic elements of the different stats need balancing, though I've no real idea how to do this. Dex is way too powerful (and has been in every edition), Con is too powerful (though less so than in the early days), while in the early editions Cha was fairly useless and often dumped.