D&D 5E Point Buy vs Rolling for Stats

[DeJoker]

Clearly you have never been on the internet before.

No sadly I have, I just can never understood why some folks enjoy beating their heads up against the proverbial brick wall over and over and over and.... ad infinitum

For those that Point Buy

1. Does anyone ever play a point buy or array character with less than 14 post racial in their primary stat?.

Well considering the fact that, even in 5e, racial stats at level 1 are very important and only become a bit less so as you get higher level so this precludes doing this but then again I have already played all the extremes so having done that if I have to use point buy I attempt to create the best character I can as they supposed to be one of the heroes of the story.

2. When you play with point buy or array do you nearly always put a 16 post racial in your primary stat?

Almost always unless I can engineer to a higher value with out crippling the character somewhere else

3. When you play with point buy or array character how often do you place your 2nd highest stat into either con or whatever other stat you need to help your AC?

Well that greatly depends on the concept of the character and thus I cannot really say. Although I can say that I have done this and I can say I have not done this.

4. When you play with point buy, how often do you totally dump a stat to an 8 or 9?

Well again it greatly depends on the concept of the character but I can say that I have not only dumped 1 stat completely to an 8 but I have dumped 2 stats completely to an 8 for the same character.

For those that roll

1. Do you really ever play less than a 14 post racial in your primary stat?

Well that greatly depends on the method of rolling being used but generally speaking I design a character around the rolls that helps them the most. Which if you look at it is how things naturally go. I mean if you were born with an 8 Strength and 8 Dexterity you obviously would not have pursued being a fighter or you would have been dead long before you became an adventurer and the same principle applies to point buy.

2. Do you typically always play with 16+ in your primary stat?

Again that greatly depends on the method of rolling if the rules are you play what you get and you do not roll a 16+ then no I never put a 16+ in my primary stat but I would refer you back to #1

3. Do you almost always play place your 2nd highest stat either in con or whatever stat you need to help with ac?

Refer to the answer for Question #2 same principle

4. How often do you play with 9 or below in at least 1 stat?

Refer to the answer for Question #2 same principle

I'm betting that both point buyers and rollers answer almost all these questions the same.

Then you would have lost your money. You should have said I bet that both point buyers and rollers answer almost all these questions the same if they could. That is because you are assuming that the roller will get to choose where is stats go and whether or not they get certain rolls which is not guaranteed.

The main difference between the 2 is one you sit down and plan out what you are going to play then set your stats and the other you get your stats and then sit down and figure out what you are going to play. Neither is better they are just different and create a different paradigm from which to play from. As a GM I prefer the rolling process but then if you refer back to my first post I also build in guidelines to make sure no one gets stuck with an absolute putz as frankly very few people want to play a putz for enjoyment and the game is supposed to be about having fun not saddling a player with a character that no one would really want to play. You will also find that my rolling method guarantees that your character will not start with a pre-race stat less than 8 which of course in 5e means you will never start with a character that has less than an 8 in any stat which equates to point buy just in rolling you have a chance to start with a character with a stat as high as 18

Now I have played in games where you were allowed to "freely" engineer your character and as such I actually played a character with all 18s and found them to be rather boring after a while. Having some diversity and weakness is actually kind of fun which is why I do not mind having an 8 in a stat and it is nice the 5e does not penalize you has heavily as previous versions of DnD (and I have played them all)

 

[TwoSix]

Nope! Wrong again. Fluff and crunch just have to match or there is a disconnect. I don't hang with that new fangled "My dex is 20, but I'm clumsy." crap.

You misspelled "Skilled play at reconceptualizing attributes into new character paradigms" as "crap". Don't worry, it's a common mistake.

 

[Yardiff]

You misspelled "Skilled play at reconceptualizing attributes into new character paradigms" as "crap". Don't worry, it's a common mistake.

It wasn't misspelled, he just used 4 letters to describe what took you 9 words.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Fluff and crunch just have to match or there is a disconnect.

Fluff can be something like 'strong' but 'clumsy.' A STR 15, DEX 8 fits that fluff, when the range of available stats is 8-15. When the range is 3-18, STR 18, DEX 3 fits it - but STR 15 DEX 8 also still fits it, it's just less extreme.

But, sure,
STR 11 DEX 10, not so much.
STR 15, DEX 18, not at all.

I don't hang with that new fangled "My dex is 20, but I'm clumsy." crap.

If anyone ever claims that a DEX of 20 is clumsy, I'll keep that in mind.

We're discussing characters that are acceptable within the default game rules.

Characters above first level are acceptable within the default game rules, so, even if you do get hung up on the numbers and simply must have a 20, you can, with any method - you just have to get a few ASIs under your belt.

There are still more concepts available to me via rolling than there are via point buy or arrays. I don't have to have all of them available on every roll for that to be true.

There really aren't. Stop and think about it. When you roll a character you get a set of 6 stats that you can arrange as you like. The options you have at that point are similar (perhaps even, if coincidence dictates) identical, to the options you have with standard array.

That' not a huge range of character concepts.

What you seem to be conflating with the actual ability to play what you want in any given instance is, rather, the theoretical range of things you might be able to play if you generated a near-infinite number of characters and got to choose from among them.

That just doesn't seem relevant.

You misspelled "Skilled play at reconceptualizing attributes into new character paradigms" as "crap". Don't worry, it's a common mistake.

Seems like a reasonable abbreviation. Seriously, though, Max's little "DEX 20 is clumsy" straw man was, well, clumsy.

 

[TwoSix]

Seems like a reasonable abbreviation. Seriously, though, Max's little "DEX 20 is clumsy" straw man was, well, clumsy.

Plus it's backwards, assuming he's attempting to re-litigate the "Geniuses with 5 Int" thread from last year. Not that you couldn't come up with a back story of being naturally clumsy but still have a 20 Dex, of course. Maybe you've been blessed by a wind spirit.

 

[TwoSix]

It wasn't misspelled, he just used 4 letters to describe what took you 9 words.

Brevity is the soul of something something.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, unless you have an Einstein out of every 200 people, and an Olympic level weght lifter out of every 200 people, and a Ghandi every 200 people, no, the 3d6 bell curve most certainly does not even come anywhere remotely close to approximating a realistic population.

No, it isn't, but that's mostly due to the bell-curve given by 3d6 being too "loose" - too easy to end up on one extreme or the other of a stat, as you point out above.

However, a much tighter bell curve would model the real-world population quite nicely...and that's really the point here: that anything that isn't a bell curve is going to be worse at modelling the population (and by extension reflecting that model within the played-character population) than a bell curve is. In other words, a bell curve that's too loose is still a better model than something that's not a bell curve at all.

Lan-"ding dong the bells will chime"-efan

 

[Hussar]

But if you're using the wrong bell curve, then you aren't actually modeling anything. And the 3-18 curve really is extremely poor at modeling population. For one, the peak of that bell, in a pre-industrial civilization would be FAR below a 10. Given the plethora of debilitating conditions starting from birth onwards, the notion that your population would peak at a 10 is ludicrous. Add to that, things like poor nutrition and whatnot, and the notion that you are going to have just as many people on one side of the bell as the other is also a bad joke.

I would argue that if your model doesn't reflect anything close to a believable reality, then perhaps it's time to reject the model. So, no, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], I disagree that a poor model is better than no model at all. Particularly when that poor model also comes part and parcel with all sorts of in game issues as well. If the defense of die rolling is, "Well, it's better than nothing at modeling populations", well, that's sort of damning with faint praise no?

And if the argument is that people like Olympians or Einstein or whatever are simply the result of years and years of training, then the point buy model works perfectly well here. Einstein simply has a couple of ASI's which get him to that 20. Poof, done. Same with any Olympic athlete or whatnot. It's not that they start with that much raw talent, its that their raw talent is developed through training.

So, how does a character start with a 19 stat? If Einstein can't, then, well, how is .25% of your population doing it?

 

[DeJoker]

Okay I would ask who cares -- but obviously the answer is the two of you -- but seriously the horse is quite dead so you might want to stop kicking as it is not going to get up now.

Why can the two of you not just agree to disagree and leave it at that, you are obviously not going to convince one another your both to opinionated for that so you are only exercising an aspect of futility with each and every post.

Oh yeah I know -- "ah shut up we're busy" -- sorry to have interrupted your futility exercise routine, go back to your work out

 

[Maxperson]

You've previously said that you come up with far more character concepts than you'll ever get to play. Not even one of those concepts can work with point-buy?

It really doesn't matter for me. I won't use point buy or arrays. It's a deal breaker and I'd walk out of any game that tried to make me use them.

You seem to have come late to the thread, so you probably missed very early on where I let people know that I like rolling for purposes of realism. It's more realistic to not have absolute control over the numbers. It's more realistic to have a 3-18 range. Later on [MENTION=6801845]Oofta[/MENTION] made the claim that point buy and arrays allowed any concept. That's why the it's all about concepts at the moment.