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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 897787" data-attributes="member: 1264">Now for the next step: assume that people using point-buy will "optimize" towards using mostly even stats. (Something that I've found to be true in >90% of all point-buy PCs.) So if a 4d6-drop-lowest set of stats might be 17, 14, 13, 11, 10,  9, the point-buyer would likely make a set that looks like this: 16, 14, 12, 10, 10, 8. He gets the same stats modifiers, but he does it with 6 fewer points.So, let's go back to your table... we already have the point-buy values for the scores. But what are the point-buy values that a player *really* has to spend to achieve the same stats modifier? A 4d6 player might roll a 9, but a point-buy player will most likely pick an 8 and save a point. So let's replace the point-buy value of all the odd stats with the PBV of the even stats, and look at the expected PBV per stat again... 4.2442/stat, or 25.4652 points for a set of 6 stats! Tadaa...This is the number of points a point-buy player would have to pay on average to get the same stat modifiers as the 4d6-drop lowest player.Of course, a 9 is slightly more powerful than an 8, and a 17 is more powerful than a 16. But how often are you going to notice? The difference is not nearly as much the difference between a 9 and a 10, or between a 17 and an 18. WotC has admitted left and right that even stats are more advantageous than odd ones, and that fact has even been encoded in the recommendations to only use even stat bonuses and penalties.PS: I'm not claiming that this is what's behind the default of 25 in the PHB. I do believe that one is due to faulty reasoning. But once you take the optimization twoards even stats into account, 25 points is pretty close...</blockquote>

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