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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 3322850" data-attributes="member: 1656">A few systems I've seen to try to retain the 'organic' feel of roll-in-order without completely removing flexibility:Roll seven 4d6 rolls and remove the highest; the other six are in order, but the player can swap the 'spare' roll for one of the six.Roll six 4d6 rolls in order, and swap any two.Roll six 4d6 rolls in order, and roll 1d6 or 2d6 to grant a 'pool' of bonus points that can be added to those scores (to a max of 18).And there's always Method V from 1E Unearthed Arcana <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />One really interesting system I saw was nemmerle's 'Stat Draft' system.  I may get some details wrong, but from memory... let's say there are five players.  4d6 are rolled seven times (6 ability scores plus 1), five times, to give a matrix of five lines of scores - Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha, and Wild.  The players each, in order, select one score.  So player 1 might choose the 17 Dex, player 2 chooses the 13 Int, player 3 chooses the 16 Wild, and so on.Once all five players have picked, the second round begins... with players choosing in reverse order of the abilities picked in the first round.  So player 2, who picked a 13 in round 1, chooses before player 3 (16) and player 1 (17).  Proceed until all players have six ability scores (where a Wild can go anywhere, but the others are fixed).Repeat the process so that all players have two sets; they pick the one they like the most.  It sounded like fun.One other system I heard described, but I can't remember many details, involved replacing the dice with cards.  The DM would shuffle a bunch of playing cards, and deal them out to each player.  The players could then arrange their cards - black for physical stats, red for mental stats - or trade cards with other players.So if the player who wanted to play a fighter had a bunch of red cards, he might be able to trade them with someone who had more black cards than he needed.  If someone had two black tens to put in Str, for a total of 20, 2 points would be wasted (max 18)... so he might give one to someone else in exchange for a black 8.Or something like that.  It sounded interesting, but it was a while ago I read it...Edit - hmm, doing some experiments, it looks like four hands of 13 cards, discard one, allow trading, picture cards worth 10 points, makes for perfectly workable characters in most cases... and it's reasonably elegant given that it uses the whole deck for a standard four-person party.  For non-standard sizes, it's not quite so nice.Totals tend to sit in the 70-95 range (before discard or trading), though there's the occasional anomaly where one player gets 110 and another gets 60.  I guess it would be easy enough to institute a rule along the lines of "If you get dealt under 70, you can request a redeal".  (In a sample of 50 4-person deals, 14 had someone under 70; 24 had someone under 73.  Even if you had to deal three hands to ensure everyone was over 72, it wouldn't take too long...)-Hyp.</blockquote>

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