D&D 5E (2014) Is Point Buy Balanced?

[AlViking]

Yes, because of Arrangement both the Standard method and Point Buy have the Dump Score problem. However, I would say that most Point Buy characters with a low intelligence (or any other low score) have it because there were no points left to spend on it.

It seems that our cookies have a top half and a bottom half determined by the Class we want rather than the Character we want. The top half is 2 or 3 abilities that are useful to the Class whereas the bottom half is 2 or 3 abilities that aren't.

So, when Arranging our scores we usually don't have much left to distribute to the bottom half, and our cookie, frustratingly, takes shape right before our eyes almost every time.

If you roll dice unless you roll all 18s I don't see any difference. You also don't get the character you want when you roll, you get the character options as determined by the results. Meanwhile I've played plenty of characters using point buy where a 10 was their lowest score. I don't consider "average" to be a dump score.

 

[Maxperson]

dice are random. There is always going to be unfairness if you are rolling.

Rolling is 100% fair for everyone involved as long as they are all using the same rolling system. The word you're looking for is inequality.

 

[Maxperson]

How likely are two people at a table to roll exactly the same six values with random die rolls? I'd suggest its very, very low. Whereas the only thing two people with point assignment need to do is to decide to have the same six values.

In 5e, though, stat bonuses don't mean a whole lot. The big differentiators are class abilities, feats, skills and player ability, and those are pretty much never going to be equal.

 

[Maxperson]

Or, for a perhaps silly but hopefully illustrative example, consider the "All 18s method" vs "3d6 strict method". Technically speaking, both methods can produce the same result. It's nearly impossible for the latter to do this, e.g. odds worse than 1 in 101 trillion, but it is technically possible. Would you say that the two characters, the results, are balanced, given the results are identical? Would you say "all 18s" is balanced, as a method, when compared to "3d6 strict"? As I said, this is intentionally extreme to prove a point: two methods can be wildly out of balance with one another, despite the fact that each method might (regardless of probability) potentially produce the same result.

I need to find me a DM who uses the "All 18s method!" 43 years and I still haven't found a DM who uses it.

The long and the short of it is that most DMs don't make players play really crappy rolls, so ultimately the disparity typically won't be nearly as great as folks in this thread are making it out to be.

 

[Maxperson]

Randomness effectively guarantees different results so your hypothetical doesn't really add anything to the discussion as far as I can see.

Different results don't matter a whole heck of a lot in 5e. Even if you end up rolling +6 bonus higher than I do spread over 6 stats, the amount your are better than I am is going to be so minor that it will be virtually unnoticeable.

If you roll 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 and I roll 17, 16, 15, 14, 12, 10, the number of time I will succeed at any given roll over you is on average 1 time out of every 20 rolls. That's not even going to be noticeable.

 

[Maxperson]

Anyway here's more pointless details because I can hear the reply now that "nobody will notice". As a reminder I got these numbers after rolling 5 characters for 10 groups. It's not like I rolled a thousand and found the worst case.

Nah. The response nobody is going to have to play the first set.

 

[AlViking]

Nah. The response nobody is going to have to play the first set.

If you have a house rule that says otherwise. But then you aren't really using 4d6dl. Point buy can't really compete with some variation of "roll enough times to get above average stats", that's why 3e had the option to buy up to an 18 and heroic point buy.

 

[Maxperson]

If you have a house rule that says otherwise. But then you aren't really using 4d6dl. Point buy can't really compete with some variation of "roll enough times to get above average stats", that's why 3e had the option to buy up to an 18 and heroic point buy.

No. Not even a house rule. Countless are the games I've played in where without a house rule the DM just says to re-roll. This whole "massive disparity" thing is much ado about nothing.

My response to you in post 385 is more like a typical disparity, and often not even that much.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

If you roll dice unless you roll all 18s I don't see any difference. You also don't get the character you want when you roll, you get the character options as determined by the results. Meanwhile I've played plenty of characters using point buy where a 10 was their lowest score. I don't consider "average" to be a dump score.

You don't have to roll all 18s, the same would be true if you rolled all 13s or all 4s.

It's true that both the Standard method and the Point Buy method encourage score dumping. The difference though is that with the Standard method you're not making a 27-point cookie. You're unlikely to roll up a set of scores that equals 27 points.° You might end up with a 23-point equivalent, a 36-point equivalent, or even an unevaluatable set of scores.

Dump scores are the problem. Not low scores. Not average scores. Not even high scores. Dump scores are not the same as low scores. Low scores are low, but Dump scores are lower scores that enable another score to be higher.

This all originates from Arrangement of scores. For instance, if we rolled this set of scores (3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4,) and rearranged them then 3 would be the dump score.°°

Yes, 10 is just an average score. But it is a Dump Score of you placed it in an ability so you could use your 12 or your 15 for something more useful.

° This may not be true. I'm still cracking at the math to find the answer.
°° If we placed that 3 the in a score to enable another score to be a 4. But, there's not much difference between a 3 and 4 anyway.

 

[Lanefan]

The obvious argument here then, is if the stats have such a limited impact that the difference between high and low isn’t noticeable at the table, why are we maintaining them in the first place?

Two reasons:

1 - as informers to roleplay;
2 - for those times when (usually in-character physical) actions need to be abstracted through game mechanics.

Freeform text descriptors of our characters would seem to do a better job of differentiating characters, if the numerical stats aren’t actually providing meaningful mechanical differentiation.

When most of the stats for all the characters are forced to start out in the mushy 8-13* middle, the stats don't have much of a chance to provide that differentiation.

* - IMO there should be very limited if any mechanical difference between 8 and 13. The mechanics should have more of a say at-near the ends of the bell curve rather than in the middle.