D&D 4E Point buy, 4e & you.

[small pumpkin man]

Why is this a bad thing though?

Previously people have mentioned that more well rounded PC's are better but at the end of the day, if you have a primary stat, then it's better to have that maxed.

The ideology that weighting encourages a more even spread of points is flawed. Most people I know and most characters I see made are given the highest score in their primary stat, which in turn means less points to distribute for a more even spread.

It works against itself, in other words.

With point for point, you're still having to spend more points to get higher scores, you're just not punished for it.

You're assuming you get the same amount of points, which is obviously false. The point is that in a weighted system, if you wanted to play a 14 int as a Barbarian, you're penalized less for it (18 str to 16 str) whereas in a non-weighted system you'd have to give up 6 points of your physical stats, which no-one is going to do.

The hopeful end result is that you can play a Barbarian with either 14 int, or 5 int, and have both be playable, yet different.

 

[Surgoshan]

I dunno about you guys, but I've spent just an awful lot of time in the gym over the last 6 or 7 years, and the result is that if I were to go back in time I could break my old self in half and laugh at my pitiful mewlings. However, for all my efforts I'm not an Olympic class weightlifter. I'm not a professional weightlifter of any stripe. Last I checked, I couldn't break 16 on the old AD&D scale. I've no idea about 3.x. No matter, I'm still pretty damn strong.

My point is that exceptional scores should be just that, exceptions. If I really wanted, I could bust my ass and spend all my time in the gym and become a professional weightlifter and be a manimal and grunt a lot. The key words there are "all my time". If you want an 18, it should cost you. Having characters walking around with the ability to bench press a pickup truck while simultaneously memorizing the Odyssey and juggling 5 chainsaws is a bit wrong.

Yes, the PCs are heroes and above the norm, but a bunch of 14s quite adequately reflects that because, in a 3d6 system, the norm is 10.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Point buy encourages flat, uninteresting stat blocks. Point-for-point opens up characters with both exceptional stats and remarkable flaws. Points buy also penalises character concepts that require two or more high stats.

Seems a bit overstated.

"Uninteresting" is a value judgment of the end result a long sequence of events involving many player choices. If the results are consistently boring, it is more likely a problem with the players allowing themselves to fall into a rut.

Changing the stat generation system may well spark a little creativity, but sometimes players fight to stay into their comfortable little rut no matter what you do. The stat generation method can always work either way.

"I was thinking of making skillful Half-Elf Ranger for a change of pace, but that phat 18 makes playing a Half-Orc Leaping Power Attack Fighter/Barbarian variant 3a I pulled off the WotC optimization boards, again, simply irresistible."

"I have plotted out all possible viable characters with optimized damage on this spreadsheet, so there is no real decision necessary..."

As for your second point, I would consider MAD to be a major design flaw.

It looks like 4e is making a strong effort to make all PC classes highly effective on 2 good stats. For example, while a Paladin might benefit from a high Str, there are sufficient options for pumping up damage on Cha alone that this is far from a necessity. The Paladin may not do great damage all rounds, but she can do very good damage on most rounds.

 

[TreChriron]

Weighted point buy lets the player make a decision:

Do I want an 18, 16, 10, 8, 8, 8 (total attribute bonus of +4) or
do I want 14, 14, 14, 14, 12, 8 (total bonus of +8) or
Somewhere in between, like:
16, 16, 12, 10, 10, 8 (total bonus of +6)
...

This is great advice and great design IMO.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I always perfer SOME kind of dice rolling. Yeah, sometimes the players can get obscenely lucky or obscenely unlucky. But hey, it builds character.


Pun possibly intended, and it makes me feel bad

 

[Gort]

I favour point buy over rolled stats, but I prefer arrays to point buy.

Iron Heroes introduced me to arrays - they're basically a set of three stat blocks, one with an 18, a 14 and some average stats, one with two 16s, and another that was mostly 14s.

It let you have close to the stats you want - you could have a maxed out primary stat if you liked, or a couple of high ones, or all stats at a reasonable level. But it didn't let you have EXACTLY the stats you wanted, and it didn't let you make characters with obnoxiously dumped stats.

 

[Rowsdower]

It's late and I don't want to read through 4 pages so forgive me if this is covered already.

BUT, I think you'r forgetting character innate bonuses. Since no race gets a negative value everyone gets at least one boost to their stats. This increases the amount of points you can spend in other stats and still get 18 in two stats (or 18 and 16, or 16 and 14, whatever).

 

[Lanefan]

Tales From the League Statistician

I'm in process, over these few weeks, of doing some number-crunching on just this topic: whether starting stats make any appreciable difference to the life expectancy of the character.

**Those who do not like statistics may wish to jump to the next post now. You have been warned!**

Study parameters:
- all are/were 1e-based characters played in games sometime between 1981 and now;
- roll-up method for all is/was 5d6 drop 2, 6 times, rearrange to suit - note this forces acknowledgement that these characters will be somewhat higher powered overall than the norm for the game;
- study comparison is between characters who lasted 10 or more adventures and a control group of characters who died early (career of 3 adventures or less);
- intent is to determine correlation if any between adventuring career length and starting rolled stats.

Data:
- including party NPCs, I have a potential pool of about 830 characters from maybe 10 different campaigns to pull from...in reality, I'd guess I have access to the character sheets of about 75% of these;
- of those 830, 72 have reached the 10-adventure benchmark; I have access to 69 of those character sheets and have the starting stats (after racial adjustment but before any other changes e.g. Con loss due to death) recorded for those 69;
- of those 72, 15 have reached the 20-adventure plateau; 2 of those have reached 30;
- note that about half of these characters would have had longer careers yet were it not for the fact the game they were in ended;
- I have not yet dug out and recorded a control group of 70 or so short-lived types - that's next on the agenda - note that this control group will be randomized by the most basic of systems: I'll just use the first 70 I find that fit the crieria.
- I have also not done any analysis on whether the prime stat is most critical to success or whether having most or all high-ish is better.

Findings so far:
- there's a rather wide variance in the stat-power level within the top 69, and even within the top 10, when average of the 6 stats is compared;
- taking the top 69, breaking them down into groups of 10, and taking the overall average stat for each block (add the 6 stats together, repeat 10 times, divide by 60) the 1-10 group has the lowest overall average of the seven groups as follows:

1-10 14.11
11-20 14.32
21-30 14.84
31-40 14.27
41-50 14.54
51-60 14.14
61-69 14.29

So, among the high end there's little difference between a 10-adventure character and a 25-adventure character...this alone indicates that once a character's career is nicely started, stats probably don't matter very much in terms of keeping it going.

I'll update once I've done the number-crunching with the control group.

Lane-"I'm too sleepy to know if this all makes any sense"-fan

 

[Cadfan]

Why is this a bad thing though?

Previously people have mentioned that more well rounded PC's are better but at the end of the day, if you have a primary stat, then it's better to have that maxed.

The ideology that weighting encourages a more even spread of points is flawed. Most people I know and most characters I see made are given the highest score in their primary stat, which in turn means less points to distribute for a more even spread.

It works against itself, in other words.

With point for point, you're still having to spend more points to get higher scores, you're just not punished for it.

You are arguing that if only high primary stats weren't so expensive, you wouldn't have to spend all the points on them that you would have otherwise spent improving secondary stats.

You realize that all you're really arguing for is stat inflation.

 

[Kzach]

My point is that exceptional scores should be just that, exceptions.

The PC's are the exceptions.

You are, at most, a BBEG's minion