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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kerbarian" data-source="post: 2965592" data-attributes="member: 40393">After reading the recent thread on point buy, I was curious about how point buy compares to dice rolling in terms of overall stats, so I wrote a program to do some calculations.If you roll 4d6 and drop the lowest 6 times and then work out how much those stats would have cost you in the point buy system [1], it comes out to 25.1 points.  However, the rules let you reroll if your stats are too low.  Taking that into account (which was much more complicated), the average cost becomes 26.3 points.  As a side note, the chance of having stats low enough to allow a reroll is 7.9%.Since you get more control, I'd say that the standard point buy is pretty comparable, on average, to the standard dice rolling.  That's assuming your DM follows the rules strictly, though, and makes you keep 14, 10, 10, 10, 10, 8 if you roll it.  Most DMs I know are somewhat more lenient with rerolls, which would shift things in favor of dice rolling.I also worked out the average points value for the "High-Powered Characters" method -- 5d6 and drop the lowest 2.  The average point buy cost for the stats you'd get with that method is 38.3 (including rerolls, which are only 1.4% even with the higher thresholds).  That's much higher than the "High-powered campaign" points value of 32 for point buy.So if your DM ever gives you a choice between the DMG versions of high-powered point buy or high-powered dice rolling, go with the dice.With the programs I just wrote, I also have the ability to come up with all kinds of other statistics about dice rolling, if anyone has any numbers they've been curious about.[1] Rolling dice lets you get scores less than 8, which you can't get with the point buy system.  To make the comparison, I gave the scores 3 through 7 points values of -5, -4, -3, -2, and -1.</blockquote>

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