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

[Lanefan]

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.

Personally, I far prefer the bolded to be the default: for the most part, you play the hand you're dealt.

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.

On this, at least, we agree.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

If I ran a game of D&D proper (rather than DW), I'd allow it!

It'd just come with the understanding that your powerful nature attracts attention--people wanting to overcome you, or use you, or exploit you, or recruit you. Obviously every party member needs those stats if the method is gonna be used.

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.

But that just makes rolling superior to point-buy, which is kind of the problem. If you can't roll poor stats, but you can roll great ones, that's kinda unbalanced as a method vs other accepted methods, no?

Imagine if you could "take 10" on attacks, but you reroll anything 5 or lower if you choose to roll. The average result is 13. Sure, "take 10" is more reliable...but 2/3 of the time you'll do better than "take 10" would provide. Even though "take 10" is balanced if everyone is doing it, and this roll could be balanced if everyone uses it, mixing the two is clearly not balanced. There's an obvious correct choice: always roll. Much more often than not, you'll get something better by doing so.

I get that the "don't force players to play awful stats" thing is a GM kindness, but it's a kindness that distorts the game in other negative ways.

 

[AlViking]

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.

The 4d6dl rules are clear. You roll the dice you get what you get. I'm not saying we ever played that way but I also admit that back when we rolled for stats we had house rules to ensure everyone got something they were okay with. There's nothing wrong with house rules.

The disparity you are likely to see at the table are more than I personally care for. I'm not telling you how to play your game.

 

[AlViking]

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.

You're always going to arrange you numbers no matter how you get them based on what you prioritize so I don't see what the issue is. Your lowest number - whether that's a 3, an 8 or something higher will always go to the same stat depending on what you values least.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You're always going to arrange you numbers no matter how you get them based on what you prioritize so I don't see what the issue is. Your lowest number - whether that's a 3, an 8 or something higher will always go to the same stat depending on what you values least.

Well, at least beyond the old "roll in order and keep" method. What normally happened there is you picked class based on what you rolled. Of course in those days usually stats had limited impact in many cases, too.

 

[Lanefan]

I get that the "don't force players to play awful stats" thing is a GM kindness, but it's a kindness that distorts the game in other negative ways.

To the bolded: how so?

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

You're always going to arrange you numbers no matter how you get them based on what you prioritize so I don't see what the issue is. Your lowest number - whether that's a 3, an 8 or something higher will always go to the same stat depending on what you values least.

Yes, this is true. I don't know about the 50th Anniversary edition, but the 5th edition leaves us with three methods that all encourage dumping scores, but there are different ways to generate scores that don't encourage dumping, minimize it, or eliminate it all together.

You know, Point Buy was strange when it was first presented to us. [CENSORED], what's called the Standard method (4d6 drop 1) was strange. I was one of those people complaining about it.

 

[TwoSix]

Two reasons:

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

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.

So basically, there's no reason to keep a numerical descriptor over just using free text, if the numbers aren't actually driving anything.

"Herculean stevedore" paints a lot more of a picture than "Str 17".

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To the bolded: how so?

I just said so. Like in that very post?

The point-buy method is, in part, designed in order to approximately match the spread of using the advertised rolling method as written. If you chop off the bottom third or quarter of it, you are very directly making PB-based characters weaker--or, if you prefer, making all characters stronger (on average) since a rational player will choose to roll under such conditions.

E.g. let's say we switch from regular 4d6k3 to the same, but you reroll all 1s, meaning it's functionally 4d5k3+3. Not only does this raise the average by a meaningful degree, it also narrows the spread, making nearly all values (over three quarters!) 12 or higher. This is functionally equivalent to throwing out any array which generates a value lower than 6, and makes 6 extremely rare (0.16% of single rolls of 4d5k3+3.) Most stats will be 12, 13, or 14--but you have a very good chance of getting at least one 18, which, at least in 5e, isn't possible via point buy, because the highest you can buy is 15. In fact, you have more than a 1-in-5 chance of rolling at least one stat higher than you could possibly buy.

So...you'll rarely, if ever, have any downside from rolling--worst you're even remotely likely to get is a single 7--but you get a whole bunch of upsides. That distorts the power curve of the game in many ways. Sure, the GM can try to compensate by (for example) just pretending that your level is 1 higher than it really is, or whatever, but that's a kludge, not a solution. With 5e already being...tenuously balanced at best, this could very easily result in tearing the whole thing wide open. One of the bigger problems of an already unbalanced game; there are degrees of imbalance just like balance, but it's far easier to accidentally make things much worse than it is to make things much better. Patterns are easy to break and hard to build from scratch, that sort of thing.

 

[CleverNickName]

The point-buy method is, in part, designed in order to approximately match the spread of using the advertised rolling method as written.

This. This is why I say that point-buy is balanced.

There was some discussion not long ago (in this thread) about how unlikely it was to actually roll one of the 65 valid sets of point-buy stats using the 4d6 method. I threatened to do another histogram to demonstrate that it was, in fact, very likely.

There aren't any balance issues with using 4d6-drop-lowest, as-written. But when you start adding rerolls and other house-rules, the balance shifts and it gets harder to make that claim.