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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8660640" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures, an OSR game designed to evoke young adult fantasy like Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books and LeGuin's Earthsea takes an approach like this.  Each player picks a character pack with an archetype like Wizard's Apprentice, Hunter, or New Guardsman, and gets a baseline set of scores.  They then roll on an included set of tables for life events growing up, and get bonuses to their ability scores until they complete the lifepath.  That gives you your starting array.(if your god is Gygax) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />(1979 old!)Yes.  4d6 drop the lowest, arrange to taste is the primary recommended method in 1E AD&D, per the 1979 DMG.  The PH (which, awkwardly, was published in '78) doesn't actually specify how to roll, but Gygax tells us in it that a character without at least two 15s is probably not good enough and should likely be re-rolled.  Which makes sense given the complex AD&D ability bonus tables, which MOSTLY (with a few exceptions) require quite high numbers to get any meaningful bonuses.In the 1974 OD&D game, and in the Basic/Expert (1981) and BECMI (1983+) lines you roll 3d6 down the line, but a) Bonuses are almost nonexistent/not very important (1974) or easier to get ('81/'83), and b) you've got the ability to trade ability score points, reducing above average stats which are less relevant to your character to increase your Prime Requisite.2E AD&D fumbled the ball on this pretty badly, offering 3d6 arrange to taste as the primary method of character generation, but keeping (somewhat rationalized and simplified) ability bonus tables which require high ability scores to get bonuses, and not giving any point-trading rules.  The example of character generation in 2E offers a couple of famously mediocre ways to build the fairly weak PC they demonstrate with.  Extremely uninspiring for anyone looking to make a hero.In practice even 4d6, drop lowest, arrange to taste isn't generous enough to reliably produce PCs with the two 15s minimum Gygax envisioned and the AD&D ability score charts expect, so for most of my 90s-2000s gaming career my main groups used 4d6 drop lowest, roll three sets and pick your favorite, arrange scores to taste.</blockquote>

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