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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7215763" data-attributes="member: 996">It has always been an option, it has not always been the default, however.   Niether of you are hung up on exact numbers when extolling or defending your preferred chargen method - both of you do when criticising the others, though.    It absolutely is, if you don't get exactingly hung up on numbers, and do consider that others will be playing the same game.Under point buy, if you want to be the big dumb barbarian, you dump a lot of points into STR and dump INT.   Unless you're hung up on numbers, that's letting you play the character you want.  Now, depending on the details of the system, you might well get an even higher STR and even lower INT rolling randomly - you also might roll a low score of 13 and high of 15, and come nowhere near it.Similarly, if you want a more all-around set of stats, point buy let's you be at least a bit above average across the board, while random might deliver a bit more - or a collection of 3's and 18s...So, yes, unequivocally, point buy  let's each player 'play what you want'  ... Nope, that can easily fail completely.  Without any build system, there's no common ground, so one player whose concept calls for 'very strong' might take a 16, while another takes a 24, and a third gives his 'all-around' concept straight 18s.  Point-buy puts everyone in the same page, so they actually can all build the characters they want, in the context of the campaign, and relative to eachother.Sure, since D&D is a game, and needs to be balanced (point buy) or at least fair (rolled) to be playable, you can't always perfectly model the stats you guesstimate  this or that fictional character might have.  But, compared to all the game's other failings when it comes to modeling genre, that's a trivial objection - in addition to being a strike against both sorts of methods.</blockquote>

Verification