D&D General Having your players roll their stats

[Redwizard007]

My tables are mixed. I'm partial to point buy, with a little bonus +2 as a cherry on top. Half my friends prefer to roll. The other half like the array.

 

[R_J_K75]

We usually run a session zero, sometimes we will roll then for players stats but more often than not these days we'll decide on what type of D&D game were going to run and players will go home and make their PCs while the DM comes up with the adventure. Players usually fudge a stat or two which in the grand scheme doesnt really matter so I dont bother being heavy handed about how stats are rolled, chosen, etc. Too many other things in life to worry about.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Never again the random times.

 

[billd91]

I have my players roll in a session 0 for D&D. We have, a couple of times, had everyone roll up an array and then shared them so a player could take any array that struck their fancy.
If my players balked at rolling (and they generally don't), I'd go with a standard array over point buy any day.

 

[Quickleaf]

I let players choose...

Standard Array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8

Standard Roll: 4d6 drop lowest

Two by Two by Two: Roll two strong (6d6 keep 3), two good (4d6 keep 3), two weak (3d6)

Three Up, Three Down: Roll three up (10+d6, 10+d8, 8+d10), and three down (15-d6, 15-d8, 17-d10)

Character Wheel: Roll 3d6 eighteen times, arrayed in the character wheel, select a set of 6 contiguous stats

Old School: Roll 3d6 in this order: Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha. Discuss a boon with the GM to offset the risk of lower stats – an extra uncommon magic item, a bonus feat, more spells in your spellbook, a few extra regional or backstory variant human traits, etc.

Rolled Point Buy: Roll 8d6 – the total is how many points you have for making your character point buy

Standard Point Buy: 27 points

 

[Hex08]

These days, the D&D games I run are point-buy.

I got tired of dealing with the issues raised by the common over-powered or under-powered characters that dice produce.

I understand that completely.

When my players choose to roll I always tell them to keep in mind that some of them will be over-powered and some under but they shrug it off, even when I tell them I may or may not compensate for that in game as the DM. Sometimes they just think the randomness and luck of character creation is fun, kind of like gambling. This especially seems to be the case with my players who have been with me since my AD&D 2E days, newer players are less fond of rolling but will still do it on occasion.

 

[Hex08]

I wasn't aware that the standard array was a thing. Is that a 5E thing (which I don't play) or has it been around longer and I just ignored or missed it? While that seems to go a long way towards achieving balance it seems really boring to me but, of course, your mileage on that may vary.

 

[Deekin]

Your choice of: Point-Buy, Standard Array, or 3d6 down the line.

 

[humble minion]

I wasn't aware that the standard array was a thing. Is that a 5E thing (which I don't play) or has it been around longer and I just ignored or missed it?

Standard array was around in 3e I'm pretty sure. If it showed up before that, I'm not aware of it.

I haven't done point buy for a long time, it's normally some sort of rolling method with a floor or insurance against very bad results. Currently in two campaigns, one did 4d6 drop lowest rerolling 1s, the other did 3d6 + 3 capped at 18. Neither campaign has thrown up any wildly overpowered or underpowered PCs though, so it's a bit hard to know how things would have gone in an extreme case.

We've had two PCs roll a bit under averages, by which i mean nothing over 15. You really do notice the in-combat difference there when you're in a party with a barbarian with starting Str 20, it's very hard to be effective by comparison. Both (one of them is my PC) have largely structured themselves as support or skills-based characters to compensate for their relative lack of combat effectiveness. One is an alchemist artificer focused on buffing, the other is a arcane trickster rogue who spent his feats on getting All The Proficiencies and is really cleaning up now that he got Reliable Talent.

 

[Ogre Mage]

Most of the time we use point buy. The only roll for attributes method we use is where everyone rolls a set of 6 attributes and the group chooses which set everyone will use (sometimes the DM has veto power). So everyone is working with the same set of numbers. I have been in the situation where I had much higher stats or considerably worse stats than the group average. Both tend to cause balance problems. When I was the low stat person I felt like a sidekick.