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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7636264" data-attributes="member: 19857">(This is one of my pet bugaboos, so I'm going to jump on my horse over here which is very high).No, actually, it wasn't.  In fact in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gary Gygax explicitly says something along the lines of "do not use 3d6 in order,  you mostly generate awful characters and it turns new players off the game because they don't get to play the characters they want".  He then went on to give out 4 better methods of generating stats that you could choose from.  He practically begged people to not use 3d6 down the line.Method I in the original 1e DMG is 4d6 drop the lowest arrange to taste. To this day the fact that 2e went back to 3d6 in order as the first one they list confounds and irritates me.  Because it's terrible - it's a fine method of generating stats for a game where the stats barely matter (OD&D and B/X D&D average stats mean nothing, bad stats mean a penalty to XP) but it's a terrible method of generating stats for a game where the stats are important (AD&D - where your choice of race and class is gated by how you roll the dice).Gygax understood this, and I've always wondered if the reason why it was the first method listed in 2e was just for historical reasons, or if the guys putting together the second edition just did not understand prob and stats well enough to get why using 3d6 down the line means that either most of the classes in your book are useless, or your players are going to inevitably cheat at rolling up stats (like the guys I knew who played 2e and would generate 50 characters to find the one set of stats they wanted and then play that one).</blockquote>

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