New ways to generate ability scores.

[Asmor]

The one I've used lately was stolen from someone on ENWorld here, so if it's you, good job. We start with the elite array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 arranged as desired. Then the player rolls 6d6. For each 1 rolled you add a +1 to str. For each 2 rolled you add a +1 to dex and so forth, up to a maximum of 18 before racial modifiers. If you're a fighter and placed your 15 on str then rolled six 1's the max you could have is the 18 but then you could put the three 1's wherever you wanted, up to 18. The default array represents training in your field and the randomness of the roll represents talent.

Ooh, that's interesting and cool!

I prefer point buy, but my players prefer rolling, so I usually go with 4d6 drop lowest arrange as you like...

However, I also give people the option of raising their highest stat to an 18, at the cost of lowering their lowest stat to an 8. I feel every character deserves at least one 18

 

[Planeswalker Maloran]

There's something I've been wanting to try, that's not so much an alternative stat-gen as alternative racial modifiers after the initial stat-gen. For any ability the race normally gets a +2 on top of, instead give +1d4. For any stat the race gets -2, instead take -1d4. If the race gets more than +2 or less than -2, divide by two and use that many d4's. In theory, this makes for races that diverge farther from the "human baseline", and adds a little more randomness.

These would be rolled after the players assigned their scores, so if an elf put an 18 in Dexterity he wouldn't know for sure he'd get a 20... he could get anywhere from 19 to 24. Likewise he couldn't say, "oh, a 10 Constitution is fine, I'll put a 12 there," because he would end up with anywhere from an 8 to an 11.

EDIT: After reading this (http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/dnd/stat_generation.htm) and thinking about various methods mentioned in this thread, I have an idea... I call it the Organic Hubris method.

Players pick whatever ability scores they want, ranging from 2 - 14. Then they roll 6 d4's and add them, in the order they were rolled, to the 6 ability scores. Then add up the character's total ability modifier; this becomes the character's Hubris score. Record it somewhere on the sheet. Whenever something bad is about to happen to a random party member, each of them makes a Hubris check (1d20 + Hubris). Whoever rolls highest is the one it happens to. Whenever a player rolls a natural 1 on a d20, the player makes a Hubris check as above. On a 30 or higher (or whatever the DM decides is fair), the character fails critically, causing badness to happen as determined by the DM.