Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 2172710" data-attributes="member: 3146">If we go by the traditional 10-11 is "average model, then even iconic spread (a fairly common way to distribute 25 point buy) characters are above average in most of their abilities. 15 14 13 12 10 8 is above average in 4 abilities, average in one, and below average in one.That rather depends on your definition of "breaking the game" and how good your players are at efficient character construction. I ran a 36 point buy game for about 2 years and I found that the characters (who were not particularly well constructed) performed about as well as 28 point buy characters one or two levels higher than them against most foes. At the moment, I'm playing in a game where the DM decided that 36 points wasn't enough for "heroic" characters and had us roll until we came up with something better than the 36 points we started with. We mostly ended up at 40-55 points and now he continually comments on how we're taking his monsters apart. At the moment, we're 11th level and in a fight that looks like an EL 17, but it feels more like party level +3 or +4 than the certain death that EL=APL +6 should be. A good part of the reason for that is our stats. (I know my paladin would be hurting a lot more if he had the normal  77 hp rather than the 100+ that he has. (16 rather than 14 con and a generous hit point method). He'd also be hurting a lot more if his charisma were lower and he hadn't been able to heal 44 of the 77 points of damage he took.Higher stat characters have less trouble with encounters than lower-stat characters. High stat characters also have more ways to break the game. Ordinarily, a paladin/monk is a pretty challenging character to make effective since the only stat that isn't tied to an important ability is intelligence. If you have really high stats, however, you can do some nifty things with that combination.The question is what is overly limiting characters? My own experience, after playing a pseudo-dragonlance game where the minotaur fighter/mage with incredible stats pretty much did everything and the only thing the rest of the party was there for was to haste him, suggests that balance between characters is important. Thus I'm a fan of point buy. My experience also indicates that characters with PB 36+ stats are harder to apply the CR/EL system to and get accurate results. Thus, I think that 28-32 points is a good point for everyone having fun. Obviously, other peoples opinions vary.</blockquote>

Verification