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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7217517" data-attributes="member: 996">You and Oofta seem desperate to paint eachother as 'hung up on the numbers,' when, clearly, neither of you are putting forth such positions for yourselves.  27 is a number, sure, but it's just what one point buy system happens to use.  D&D's used 25 and even 32 at other points, IIRC.  The point is not the number, but that giving everyone the chance to design from the same number of points is less likely to be too imbalanced (...the stats can still be imbalanced, though...). Point-buy very clearly /does/ let players play the concept they want, assuming said concept comes to them prior to chargen, that is.  They may have to "compromise" it slightly so that /everyone/ at the table gets to do so.Conversely, random generation is ideal when you don't have an idea in mind.  You roll stats and see what they inspire.  You may not even avail yourself of re-arranging them (if that's even an option), because the combination you roll inspires something cool.  But, if you come to it with a concept already in mind, and the de-facto 'array' you roll for yourself doesn't fit it, or, if you're using the purity of roll-in-order the stats you get may just be entirely wrong for the concept.It's not that you /can't/ build-to-concept with random generation, it's just that it might fail catastrophically, at which point, coming up with a different concept inspired by the results generated, and building to /that/ concept, may be the better way to go. In essence, it can't be used to 'play exactly what you want,' because what another player wants may completely undermine it.  Point-buy, OTOH, allows you /all/ to play what you want.Y'know, unless you get 'hung up on the numbers.' Yes, it does.  That's a strength of any build system.  It lets /everyone at the table/ play the character they want, not just the one that gets luck on some dice rolls, or the one that aggressively writes down the highest numbers in the game of cosmic-one-up-manship of an undiscipline freeform chargen. Actually, it does.  He may have some other lower stats, though.    D&D isn't real life, it's a game.  That line of argument is a profound category error.  Don't bother going there again.   A 'paragon' sort of character is a reasonable concepts for some genres, sure.  D&D clearly doesn't model anything of the sort, however, or it wouldn't have classes, nor, for that matter, be played in a group, it'd be one Paragon-hero-player and one DM. (Either that or it would extend point-build beyond just stats, like Hero did.  In Hero, you could play a paragon with all-human-maximum stats across the board, it cost, IIRC, 165 points, and characters ran 200+ points, so you weren't a whole lot else, but you could do it.) Say you decide you want to play your paragon who is just as strong as the strongest brute, but also brilliant &c.  You sit down, roll him up using 1e DMG method III and get a bunch of 15s, 16s, & 17s, and, joy, a 17 (+1 hit & damage!) is in STR.  Then someone else sits down, same method and happens to roll an 18/00 strength (+3 hit/+6 damage).  Your concept is as dead in the water, as it would be if you were doing point-buy in a WotC ed and had had to settle for a 13 STR (+1) to his 16(+3).  Nor does write-down-whatever work for you.  You sit down, create your paragon, aggressively with a slate of 18s.  You're not alone, oh, and someone else wrote down a 24 STR.  In order to deny the legitimate advantage of build systems - they let you build-to-concept the character you want to play - you have set a standard for 'play the character you want' that no chargen method can meet.  That's a meaningless standard.</blockquote>

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