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<blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5213810" data-attributes="member: 51942">That's an exemplary attention to detail - I don't think it's necessary, but it certainly ensures that regardless of a bit of balance swing in character creation, you'll have a fair baseline.However, you shouldn't balance by adding up total modifiers.&nbsp; There's a reason that going from 16 to 18 is more expensive than going from 10 to 12; they may both be a +1, but one is worth much more than the other.I wrote a little program that randomly rolls up chars and computes their point-buy equivalent and a few other quality metrics (such as the highest bonus).&nbsp; Using the common rules (you need to end up with positive modifiers on average, at least a 14, etc) and a hack to account for stats lower than 8 or multiple 8's, the resultant picture is that rolled stats aren't very attractive, and those that are higher than 22 point buy are almost always so due to high off-stats which are not a balance issue either way (16/14/14/14/14/14 is hardly any better than 16/14/14/13/10/8).Point buy tends to end up with more lop-sided stats as people buy a high primary and secondary and ignore the rest; rolled stats occasionally have extreme lows, lots of decent stats and more rarely very high stats.And none of it really has much impact on balance; the game's very robust like that.&nbsp; General level of optimization is much, much more relevant.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="eamon, post: 5213810, member: 51942"] That's an exemplary attention to detail - I don't think it's necessary, but it certainly ensures that regardless of a bit of balance swing in character creation, you'll have a fair baseline. However, you shouldn't balance by adding up total modifiers. There's a reason that going from 16 to 18 is more expensive than going from 10 to 12; they may both be a +1, but one is worth much more than the other. I wrote a little program that randomly rolls up chars and computes their point-buy equivalent and a few other quality metrics (such as the highest bonus). Using the common rules (you need to end up with positive modifiers on average, at least a 14, etc) and a hack to account for stats lower than 8 or multiple 8's, the resultant picture is that rolled stats aren't very attractive, and those that are higher than 22 point buy are almost always so due to high off-stats which are not a balance issue either way (16/14/14/14/14/14 is hardly any better than 16/14/14/13/10/8). Point buy tends to end up with more lop-sided stats as people buy a high primary and secondary and ignore the rest; rolled stats occasionally have extreme lows, lots of decent stats and more rarely very high stats. And [I]none[/I] of it really has much impact on balance; the game's very robust like that. General level of optimization is [I]much, much[/I] more relevant. [/QUOTE]

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