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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7186732" data-attributes="member: 4937">Really?  Perhaps my experience was abnormal.You think that the reality of 1ed AD&D was such coveted items were so readily available as to allow you to obtain high stats?  That was nothing like the reality I experienced, was that perhaps one such desirable item might be found over the course of a parties adventuring career.  A Manual of Gainful Exercise is as rare or rarer than wishes.  Outside of a Monte Haul campaign where the DM purposefully placed such treasure in large quantities, running into ability score enhancing tomes would either not happen, or happen less frequently than character deaths and certainly too infrequently make a difference if your starting stats were poor.  It's far more likely that your DM would simply reroll any result leading to a Girdle of Frost Giant strength as game breaking, than you'll actually get one.My experience with Method V is that it was generally an excuse to cheat.  The average scores it produces are not as high as you might think, but the math is not so easy that the scores it produces are intuitive.  So you could use Method V and claim you rolled 4 18's, and people would generally know you cheated but not prove it (and have less reason to care that you cheated).  Method V when done in front of the DM is generally not as impressive, as even 9d6 drop 6 lowest only produces an unintuitive ~18% chance of an 18, and has an almost equal chance of producing an undesirable 15 (leaving you potentially with a largely unplayable character of the class you choose).   Now, if you do Method V, reroll the 1's, sure... but by that time you're practically just choosing the stats you want and giving yourself the color of not having done so.In my opinion, the best all around method was Method III, which forced you to take what you got, but all but guaranteed both diversity and desirable characters.   Sadly, I never discovered how well it worked until after I'd left 1e AD&D.In any event, the ability to generate desirable characters with methods other than method I does not mean that my analysis isn't correct.  Quite the contrary, the adoption of methodology like Method V was actually a response to the truth I just outlined, because Method V was designed to produce a desirable and playable character and actually did so about 70% of the time without the need to cheat (and 100% of the time if you did, while still at least looking plausible).</blockquote>

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