Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder Character Creation: Point Buy or Roll of the Die?

[Psion]

Don't like point buy and I particularly don't like Pathfinder's point buy. It lets you buy stats below 8, which lets you make even more hyper-optimized min-maxed charactes.

My preferred method these days is card gen, described here:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/blogs/...en-more-equitable-random-stat-gen-method.html

As random methods go, I like grid method:
Character Statgrid

 

[gamerprinter]

We roll for character generation and always do.

Just to minimize the rants when somebody gets an 18 and nobody else does, we allow two sets of six rolls, reroll 1's. Almost always everybody gets one 18 score, sometimes two.

Back in the days of wondering how to beef up your characters at 1st level, this method of character generation rolls is how we did it for our PCs.

I know its more powerful than other standard groups, but we don't play with anyone else. We don't play Society games so it doesn't matter.

I understand the consistency and better balance with point buy, but nobody in our group wants to be gimped to get an 18 score. They'll risk some low rolls on some of their stats then forced to have average stats.

For one campaign, as an experiment (too powerful) we even allowed everyone to start out with 12's on all their stats, then roll 6d6 and add one dice roll to each stat - then everybody is over-powered equally at 1st level. Minimum of 13 on any stat up to 18.

GP

 

[Padreigh]

Since I usually roll extremes (a GM in Call Cthulhu once forced me to deduct 2 from each attribute I had rolled, stating that there were half-gods with worse scores in the "bestiary", but I also had rolls where everyone was wondering how that character would have survived childhood ") I prefer point buy.

 

[Jhaelen]

In my games, every player gets 75 points to distribute (1point = 1 score unit), but the min is 8, and the max is 15.

Well, the problem with all non-weighted point-buy systems is that they encourage min-maxing.

These days I prefer using default stat arrays.

 

[Padreigh]

I must say that I have no problem with min-maxing. If someone wants to do it, fine.

But usually my groups don't really do this. They probably noticed that when I am GMing there are no dump stats.

 

[Maidhc O Casain]

As random methods go, I like grid method:
Character Statgrid

Plus one! This is by far my favorite method.

 

[Jhaelen]

Plus one! This is by far my favorite method.

Huh, what's that? I don't think I've ever heard of this method.

 

[Maidhc O Casain]

Huh, what's that? I don't think I've ever heard of this method.

It's detailed on Invisible Castle, which is where I stumbled across it.

 

[Jhaelen]

It's detailed on Invisible Castle, which is where I stumbled across it.

Thanks!
Hmm, that's an odd system. I'm not sure what to make of it.

I guess I could tweak it by filling the grid randomly with numbers from a standard array (say, 10-18) to make it work for me... But would it still have an advantage over simply using a fixed array?

Still, it's at least thought-provoking

 

[Joseph Rossow]

3d6, down the line. Reroll one. Swap one score with another.

Bear in mind, when the base stats come out and you tally the ability modifiers and get a negative number, I allow a full reroll.

While this method can result in some fairly average stats (like my one player who's best stat is 14), but I think it goes a long way to "flesh out" characters who otherwise might not be so well defined.