Level Up (A5E) My character for our new Level Up campaign
It's kinda my job!
VanguardHero
Adventurer
So looking at these, 3 distinct things stand out:
1. My god these might be the best default character sheets I've seen in a long time
2. "Specialty" Yessss I knew these were a thing but seeing it just makes me so happy
3. I don't know if this has been addressed elsewhere, but looking at Ability Scores made me think, is point buy going to be beefed up a bit to not be intentionally worse than the average of rolled scores? I know 5e wanted to encourage rolling but as someone who hates randomness in CharGen, I always felt slighted by that.
1. My god these might be the best default character sheets I've seen in a long time
2. "Specialty" Yessss I knew these were a thing but seeing it just makes me so happy
3. I don't know if this has been addressed elsewhere, but looking at Ability Scores made me think, is point buy going to be beefed up a bit to not be intentionally worse than the average of rolled scores? I know 5e wanted to encourage rolling but as someone who hates randomness in CharGen, I always felt slighted by that.
One of the things normally glossed over with high stats is how much it they limit the GM's ability to give out magic items without throwing things off. Back in some of the older editions when magic items were assumed by the system they could be used to shift the need for them early on back a bit. In 5e however there is no magic item budget & various bits of the system math goes into tailspin as soon as you start adding them.
Those alreadt are quite a bit above the "average of rolled scores" though. Average result of a d6 roll is 3.5, anydice.com will let you output a bunch of stuff with dice & math, but 3d6 ranges from 3-18 with a average result of 10.5
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
Was going to post the same thing. Whoever did the layout of the character sheet did an absolutely bang-up job.
VanguardHero
Adventurer
But you aren't rolling 3d6, you're rolling 4d6 drop one, which is a significantly higher spread. Anydice has an article on it in fact! The issue I have isn't "Want higher number" as much as "Don't want to feel punished for wanting a reliable, consistent playing field for character creation for a character I'm going to play for dozens or hundreds of hours". It works for more old school disposable characters, but for a more contemporary style of character driven stories, being subpar for their entire career based on bad luck at the start feels terrible. It's why more modern games like Pathfinder 2e and D&D 4e removed it as the primary way to generate scores, presenting it instead as an option for those who want it.
rules.mechanic
Craft homebrewer
Points buy is not quite as far off the 4d6 distribution as it first looks. But you can get a closer match if you play around with the costs and totals. When I've done this before, the closest match I found with reasonable integers was:
You can use the same approach to include higher and lower extremes (I modeled scores from 3 to 18 out of curiosity) but that messes with game assumptions of what a 1st level PC's highest primary ability score is likely to be.
Score | 5e Cost | 4d6 Cost |
8 | 0 | 0 |
9 | 1 | 2 |
10 | 2 | 4 |
11 | 3 | 6 |
12 | 4 | 7 |
13 | 5 | 8 |
14 | 7 | 9 |
15 | 9 | 11 |
Total to spend: | 27 | 42 |
You can use the same approach to include higher and lower extremes (I modeled scores from 3 to 18 out of curiosity) but that messes with game assumptions of what a 1st level PC's highest primary ability score is likely to be.
Not at my table. My last game started players with 13, 12, 12, 11, 10, 9.
VanguardHero
Adventurer
...good for you...? I was talking about RAW, not whatever goes on at your table.
We don't have the raw for levelup. "Whatever goes on at your table" goes both ways & it's a lot easier for a gm to sell giving more to players than wrenching it back. If all of the stat generation methods squeeze out room for magic items a GM needs to shift from "use x method" to "use this alternate method not found in the book". That alternate method not found in the book is an easy sell when players are getting more than what is there but an uphill battle when players are getting less.
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