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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6027397" data-attributes="member: 8461">I have a lot of differences of opinion with my gaming group in regards to the "how" of gaming.I attribute this to my having started with Basic D&D and Second Edition, whereas most of them started with either Third or Fourth Edition.One of these areas of friendly disagreement is over the method of determining ability scores. They strongly perfer point-buy, to the point of being extremely wary of any method of random stat generation that doesn't slant things in favor of higher scores.I, personally, eschew this method of ability score generation, as I find it leads to a degree of optimization that I don't care for. As such, for a while I had been ribbing them about how we did it "old school." This was somewhat ironic on my part, as my "playing" during those times had largely been isolated events with one or two other people, punctuated by very long periods of reading and re-reading the books over and over (and GMing a rather ill-fated campaign in college). To put it another way, I was familiar with old-school character generation, but had never experienced it.This reached a head in the middle of last year, when I boldly declared "the next time I run a PC" - I was GMing at the time - "I'll use the 3d6-in-order method."This earned several chuckled, and was quickly forgotten. Or at least, forgotten by most.You may think, at this point, that someone whipped out that little goblin of a phrase I had so proudly trumpeted and used it against me, but you'd be wrong. In the new campaign we started last week, I actually brought it up myself, despite everyone else having largely forgotten about it.So I sat down to roll my character, and everyone held their breath, waiting for my boasting to come back to bite me in the ass as I rolled up my scores:Strength...5Dexterity...9Constitution...6Intelligence...11Wisdom...15Charisma...11The laughter was deafening, from myself along with the rest of the group, but I got some smiles and fist-bumps when I announced that I was going to play the character anyway, instead of abandoning the whole experiment. Against some advice, I put the +2 human racial bonus (we're playing Pathfinder) into Wisdom instead of trying to bump up my lower scores.Since I didn't really see a druid with those stats, I decided to play to the one class that otherwise relied on Wisdom heavily: a cleric. Already this was new for me, as I'd never played a divine spellcaster before - I'll admit that I was intimidated by how that class had a stronger tie to the campaign world, via his religion, than other classes (we were playing in the GM's homebrew world, which I don't know very well). Much to my surprise, I had a fun time playing my first cleric. The even bigger surprise was that my character survived his first night of adventuring, even though he was involved in two fights (one of which saw him attempting to melee, albeit only for a round before the heavy-hitters moved in).The best part, though? My character was actually useful over the course of the night - when we got into a tough fight almost immediately his healing ability kept the party's barbarian from dying...something extraordinary, since he went below 0 hit points four times during that first fight (and a fifth time in the second one).Now, there's no guarantee that my cleric will survive the second session of the campaign, but I figure that's true of any character, particularly after the near-slaughter of our barbarian right out of the gate. In the meantime, I'm having a great time playing a character that, given his stats and his class, I would never have played otherwise.I don't know if I'm bringing the rest of the group around on random stat generation, but I'm having an absolute blast with really experiencing it for the first time myself.</blockquote>

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