D&D General How Did You Generate Your Most Recent Character's Stats?

[Clint_L]

"Life is sometimes crappy and unfair and so sometimes your RPG character should be too" is not a compelling argument for me. But there is nothing stopping players from choosing worse scores if they want to experience that.

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

We use point buy at our table with 30 points instead of 27. Gives a slight boost without completely messing up the game.

 

[prabe]

I prefer rolling in general. I like to have my character revealed to me - or at least certain aspects of the character - so then I can see what I can make of them.

For other pro-rolling arguments, I do have a couple:
1) The stat values are independent variables. One isn't higher because one is lower (and vice versa) - a tradeoff that's always inherent in point-buy systems, particularly one with such a narrow set of characteristics to buy (just 6). I think it works better if the whole PC is purchased with points and everything trades off against everything else - such as in Mutants and Masterminds, Champions, and GURPS. Six characteristics and no skills, powers, traits, or anything else is too few to make the exercise worthwhile.

2) Point-buy exacerbates the problems you see when some classes are SAD and others MAD. The discrepancies between SAD and MAD characters is, I think, not improved compared to the discrepancies between a lucky and an unlucky set of rolls when stats are rolled that so many people are complaining about. And worse, it isn't luck that's behind it, it's a systematic problem that penalizes MAD characters with the scarcity of points in the budget.
I think this was really obvious with 3e, and I've been wary of point-buy ever since.

I don't wildly disagree with you. I'd rather purchase everything out of the same point pool, and setting limits on ability scores does tend to make SAD characters easier to build, and the games that don't have randomly generated ability scores work more than well enough. On the other hand, if we're playing D&D (and we're talking about playing D&D, here) I'm not sure the option of playing a functional MAD character should be purely a matter of rolling well, and I find you can set the ability generation to be generous enough that everyone can build MAD if they want (at least, for 5e and its immediate kin--I haven't tried it for, and can't comment on, other editions).

 

[Lanefan]

I don't wildly disagree with you. I'd rather purchase everything out of the same point pool, and setting limits on ability scores does tend to make SAD characters easier to build, and the games that don't have randomly generated ability scores work more than well enough. On the other hand, if we're playing D&D (and we're talking about playing D&D, here) I'm not sure the option of playing a functional MAD character should be purely a matter of rolling well, and I find you can set the ability generation to be generous enough that everyone can build MAD if they want (at least, for 5e and its immediate kin--I haven't tried it for, and can't comment on, other editions).

This tangentially raises another point: with point buy or standard array something I like to do becomes impossible: that being to gate certain classes etc. behind high rolls in order to make them less commonly seen in play and a little bit special if-when they do arise.