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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 7274141" data-attributes="member: 6799649">My main group has been using the 'Choose Whatever Stats You Want' method for over twenty years now, without issue. This is a method that lets you choose six specific numbers in isolation from one another.Of course, I can see that this method would not work for AL or competition play.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Although we can quibble about the specifics of how flat or not the bell curve is, no-one here has denied that the reality of populations is modeled by bell curves; how loose or how tight is up for debate, but the bell curve itself is not.So we can have a bell curve of 3d6, a skewed curve of 4d6k3, a tight curve from 15d2-12(!), and so on, and they will be 'realistic' to a greater or lesser extent by simply using a bell curve.But imagine a method which says, "Toss a coin for each ability: heads it's 18, tails it's 3, and if it lands on its edge then it's 10". This is not a bell curve! It is absurd, and as a method of character creation it is totally unrealistic (where 'realism' = 'verisimilitude').But nobody uses such a dumb system, right?Well, that's point-buy!If I use point-buy, and choose three 15s (and en passant also 'choosing' three 8s) then this is not a bell curve either. It is just as absurd as the 3 or 18 coin toss just mentioned.And yet, point-buy PCs seem to have come from a population where their Str and Dex scores were not on any bell curve but from a population that is either Str 15/Dex 8 OR Str 8/Dex 15.You don't see how one method can better represent reality than another? If one method is totally unrealistic and another is less unrealistic, then one IS more realistic than the other.</blockquote>

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