Point buy

[lukelightning]

Point Buy methods are straight from video games - no thanks!

I think point buy is more based on games that had point-based character creation, e.g. Hero System and Gurps.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

Interesting... Having used the dual system approach I've instinctively just assumed to working out the point buy and rolling method at the same time. (The point buy is about 45% of the average rolled results to compensate for the certainty and control.)

I guess my underlying assumption has been for the player to weigh up the decision before picking. Overall they'd hardly be any difference between before or after, although doing it before could result in the point buy being above the rolled characters if they really lucked out. Maybe that's my pro-point buy bias kicking in. I'll keep that a wee secret.

 

[Elf Witch]

Interesting... Having used the dual system approach I've instinctively just assumed to working out the point buy and rolling method at the same time. (The point buy is about 45% of the average rolled results to compensate for the certainty and control.)

I guess my underlying assumption has been for the player to weigh up the decision before picking. Overall they'd hardly be any difference between before or after, although doing it before could result in the point buy being above the rolled characters if they really lucked out. Maybe that's my pro-point buy bias kicking in. I'll keep that a wee secret.

LOL

I am lucky most of the DMs I play with want you to enjoy the game so they really work with us to make our character do what we wanted them to do.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

Yeah that's the key eh? Maximizing fun is ample reason enough but a pretty useful flow-on effect is that the players look forward to running their characters, which then minimizes nihilistic play and character production lines. Man... one guy would run through knight pcs until he got one with an 18 (str%, 2nd ed.) and a couple of 16+... and then he'd kill that one off because of habit.

I reckon it would be a fairly good habit to discuss stat generation before starting a campaign. That'd be what I want but my friends have been taught otherwise, they accept, no I think they prefer, that the dm just say how it's going to be. In the current game where I'm a player I had to actually throw a tantrum to get the character I wanted. lol I'm 29 and I had to throw a tantrum because the collaborative method wasn't just not understood, it simply wasn't comprehended. I call this a case of 2nd edition-itis where there is an undercurrent of adversarial play going on... and I think I was in part a carrier. Nothing like being a genuine player being dm'd by the student to realize the flaws in the teaching.

 

[Arnwyn]

My players and I get a perverse sort of pleasure from rolling abilities... At the start of the campaign, we usually have a party in which we do no outright playing except for building charaters altogether as a group. It all starts with everyone rolling their abilities publicly, with lots of cheering and such going on as good stats get rolled. It's a lot of fun.

You've just precisely described the beginning of every one of our campaigns for the last 14+ years.

 

[Mark Chance]

I have said this many times we have had rolls that ran from 58 points to 27 points in the same game and no one whined or felt overshadowed no one felt that their character was subpar and we played these characters for two years.

Hear, hear!

I've never, in more than 20 years of gaming, ran into a player who said, "His character's stats are much higher than mine, and that doesn't seem fair," who wasn't really just whining, "I want high stats! Boo hoo!" A quadriplegic friend of mine responded once to this attitude: "I got dealt a crappy hand in life, but that hasn't stopped me from living well."

Roll the dice, arrange to taste, play what you get as well as you can.

 

[Elf Witch]

Hear, hear!

I've never, in more than 20 years of gaming, ran into a player who said, "His character's stats are much higher than mine, and that doesn't seem fair," who wasn't really just whining, "I want high stats! Boo hoo!" A quadriplegic friend of mine responded once to this attitude: "I got dealt a crappy hand in life, but that hasn't stopped me from living well."

Roll the dice, arrange to taste, play what you get as well as you can.

And what I think some people forget is that a high stat character can die just like a low stat character. As a matter of fact in the last big combat of our Kalamar game the player with the 58 point character did not make it out alive.

The only time I think stats can really make a differnce which can cause problems is if you have someone with high stats playing the same type of character as someone with low stats that might lead to the player playing with the lower stats to feel overshadowed.

 

[Pbartender]

I've never, in more than 20 years of gaming, ran into a player who said, "His character's stats are much higher than mine, and that doesn't seem fair,"...

Although I have heard from my players, on occasion, "My character's stats are much higher than theirs, and that doesn't seem fair."

 

[Vorput]

My little thread is popular... ::sniffs:: I'm so proud.

Vorp

 

[Nonlethal Force]

Roll the dice, arrange to taste, play what you get as well as you can.

So long as people want to roll the dice, of course.

There is nothing wrong with a point-buy system. There is nothing wrong with a "roll 'em" system. I'll walk away from a "roll 'em" system typically unless I know the gamers to be good RPers and not just in it for the glory of combat. But that is just my opinion. Other people are welcome to say the same thing about "point buy" systems.

The point of this thread, though, is not necessarily to debate roll vs. point-buy. The point is more "If point buy ... which variety?"

I say roll/point buy is fine either way. But if point buy ... then no lower than 28 - preferably 32.

Actually, that does bring up an interesting side about point buy. Obviously, the higher the point buy the more paladins/monks/favored souls/etc you should see because the ability scores seem to lend toward voercoming MADD. Which is actually more of a sympton of our assumption of "good ability scores" and not a function of the classes. After all, if we assume a good score doesn't begin until 14, we're less likely to play a character suffering from MADD. But if we think of good as anything above 10 then suddenly MADD characters are much more feasible.

So perhaps as an add-on to this question is what constitutes a "good ability score" in your game? I would imagine that those of us who go for the 32 point-buy (or higher) system have a higher conception of a good ability score than those who are content playing under a 25 point-buy.