D&D 5E (2014) Point Buy vs Rolling for Stats

[Eric Olson]

What about some combination of point-buy and rolling to minimize some of the issues with either method. For example:
First point buy. Then re-roll each ability once (in-order) and keep the higher. [with DM to eliminate cheating]

(adjust both the point-buy total and/or the roll (3d6 vs 4d6 keep 3) to tune strategy)
You should generate a good character for your class - but with a chance of something interesting.

 

[Oofta]

What about some combination of point-buy and rolling to minimize some of the issues with either method. For example:
First point buy. Then re-roll each ability once (in-order) and keep the higher. [with DM to eliminate cheating]

(adjust both the point-buy total and/or the roll (3d6 vs 4d6 keep 3) to tune strategy)
You should generate a good character for your class - but with a chance of something interesting.

Then you're just guaranteeing higher ability scores, with some lucky people getting much higher and others just a little bit higher.

If a character needs high ability scores to be interesting, why not just allow more points in your point buy and allow people to buy numbers above 15?

 

[Wiseblood]

What about some combination of point-buy and rolling to minimize some of the issues with either method. For example:
First point buy. Then re-roll each ability once (in-order) and keep the higher. [with DM to eliminate cheating]

(adjust both the point-buy total and/or the roll (3d6 vs 4d6 keep 3) to tune strategy)
You should generate a good character for your class - but with a chance of something interesting.

Unless the problem people have is too many high scores or too many max/near max scores.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So... Who's winning?

Everyone who's neither posting to nor reading this thread.

 

[cmad1977]

Everyone who's neither posting to nor reading this thread.

Amen!


Damn it. I lost.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Tony Vargas]

Amen!


Damn it. I lost.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Once the thread is locked, we can tabulate who made the most posts, that'll determine the thread's official Loseriest of the losers who lost by failing to not play, which is the only way to win.

Yeah, something like that...



(I think my chances are pretty good.)

 

[Satyrn]

I like the point buy as best and really only fair solution.

it's simple and you can easy play with power curve. Just add or reduce few points from the pool for various campaign types.

Standard array while equaly fair is boring as it makes more or less whole party same.

Rolling, I hate with passion. Unless it is bordered with high or low score limits(which is another point buy method(worse) in effect).

Also it leads to too much power spread between characters. From "ubermench" to more or less candidates for disability aid.

I just want to stand up for Standard Array a bit, here. My group uses it and our party never actually feels the same to me. The stats just never get noticed in play.

It's only in character creation that the "boringness" creeps up on me, but I find it a reasonable cost for skipping allocating points - especially because the result of point buy is likely to be something close enough to the Standard Array to not be worth it for me.


. . . Oh, and I've added a rolling system for randomly allocating the array to my stats. It's proven to be quite fun for me.

 

[Oofta]

I just want to stand up for Standard Array a bit, here. My group uses it and our party never actually feels the same to me. The stats just never get noticed in play.

It's only in character creation that the "boringness" creeps up on me, but I find it a reasonable cost for skipping allocating points - especially because the result of point buy is likely to be something close enough to the Standard Array to not be worth it for me.


. . . Oh, and I've added a rolling system for randomly allocating the array to my stats. It's proven to be quite fun for me.

Do you randomize anything else, or just placement of numbers? For long term campaigns I want more control, but I've thought of doing a short-run campaign where just about everything is randomized. Races, classes, ability score placement, background, subclass, feature, so on. Allow 1 or 2 ability score swaps so the character works. Just because I want to see what someone would do with a high intelligence female halfling barbarian with a noble background. Princess Pipsqueeka Terror of the North anyone?


But back to "sameness" feel ... I've played living/rpga campaigns off and on for years and never felt the cookie cutter some people did. Or if I did it was because there was a certain type of player that would always go for the optimal build which didn't seem to be affected one way or another by ability scores. As long as you allow people to rearrange ability scores, some people are going to build what the message boards tell them is "best".

 

[Satyrn]

Do you randomize anything else, or just placement of numbers? For long term campaigns I want more control, but I've thought of doing a short-run campaign where just about everything is randomized. Races, classes, ability score placement, background, subclass, feature, so on. Allow 1 or 2 ability score swaps so the character works. Just because I want to see what someone would do with a high intelligence female halfling barbarian with a noble background. Princess Pipsqueeka Terror of the North anyone?

I do indeed randomize more than just score placement. Now, this is just me, not the rest of the group.

I've done this for my last 2 characters, the forest gnome battlemaster who just died and the stout halfling moon druid I've just created. After placing the ability score, I randomly picked race, subrace, class, subclass, and background and subbackground.

But I didn't quite do it all as a hard and fast rule. For example, the forest gnome had a low Str and high Dex and was originally a berserker barbarian. I picked a concept from that - dual wielding swashbuckler with a lust for battle! - and after fleshing it all out I looked closer at the barbarian's features and realized they just don't work well with an 8 Str and 16 Dex (it's rather a little too unoptimized for a table with lots of fighting), so I swapped it out for battlemaster.


Then with the moon druid, I never rolled for subclass because another player is playing a land druid and I didn't want to step on his toes.. I had actually rerolled for a new class but then the druid's player said "Hey, if you play the shapeshifting druid, that's cool with me."

 

[Lanefan]

When I sit down at the table with point buy, I have dozens of options available to me. Anything from 15,15,15,8,8,8 to 13,13,13,13,13,10 and dozens of option in between.

Overall averages of these two stat lines are 11.50 for the first one and 12.50 for the second.

In my opinion? Rolling is more restrictive than point buy. Then again I don't gamble either, I know the odds are always going to be in the favor of the house and that rolling 4d6 drop lowest gives me less than a 50% chance to roll an overall better character than I would get with point buy.

I'm not sure I agree with your math here. 4d6x1 gives an overall long-term average of 12.24. Point-buy can give a higher average, as you've shown above with the 13-13-13-13-13-10 line, but only if you make the stats a) mostly the same and b) rather pedestrian. As soon as you start varying the stats (which by default means buying higher ones) your average starts to drop because you're getting less bang for each point spent, until at the other extreme (15-15-15-8-8-8) you're down to an 11.50 average.

For comparison, the standard array has a 12.00 average and straight 3d6 gives a 10.50 average.

Compare this to rolling. Rolling a particular set of stats is obviously going to give a different average every time, but almost half the time it'll be higher than 12.24 and almost half the time it'll be lower; with an occasional occurrence of hitting it bang-on filling in the last few percent.

Every time the average is higher or the same (so, very slightly over 50% of the time) as 12.24 one can easily argue you've done better than point buy would usually give you. The range between 12.01 and 12.23 is a more open question: you've beaten array here but are roughly in the range of what a normal point-buy might look like. Anything at or below 12.00 means you've done worse than array and probably worse than most normal point-buys.

So...I have to say the odds when rolling of a higher stat average are at worst flat and more likely slightly in one's favour over point-buy and certainly in one's favour over array; and this is in exclusion of any re-roll options. Your point about not liking to gamble is fair enough, but saying the odds are against you in this case is, I posit, incorrect.

Lanefan