Elder-Basilisk
First Post
In my experience, playing at 25 points like the ebberon adventure at the 30th aniversary game or Living Green Regent feels like you're always making up for a weakness somewhere. It can work well for "standard" PCs--the iconic fighter, wizard, etc but doesn't support unusual concepts as well.
Playing 22 points like Living Greyhawk cohorts is an exercise in pain management. You can make a character who can contribute but you need to be rather narrowly focussed.
Playing a 28 point character like Living Greyhawk is where I've decided the baseline of difficulty is. There's enough points that you have some flexibility in character creation but not enough that min-maxing doesn't require serious minning.
When my home group played RttToEE, we settled on 30 point buy. That felt about right too though it increased flexibility a bit more, it didn't change the power equation. The one character who decided to really max all his combat stats still had to make a lot of sacrifices in other areas.
Playing 32 points like Living Arcanis feels like the high end of normal. It doesn't feel as powerful as the roll until you get something you like or converted from 2e roll until you get something you like (and you needed better rolls back then so direct conversion of stats is a significant power-up) campaign. But you start to see some really serious power in traditional iconic build characters and there's enough flexibility that a lot of different concepts will work.
I ran a 36 point campaign for a couple years and my current group is generally using that. It gives really powerful characters following any of the traditional builds and is probably equivalent to giving everyone an ECL+1 race--with all the normal caveats and limitations. Parties can dish out more damage more quickly and can take down foes that would normally be out of their reach but don't generally have the hit points or defenses so the game often escalates to something a bit more deadly than the norm.
After that, more stats will not really change the power-levels as much as they will ensure that the characters have the combat power of min-maxed combat monkeys without sacrificing int, wis, cha, or anything else. You are likely, however, to see a lot more tweaking to take advantage of the high stats and a lot of combinations really come to the fore. A low-mid level combat cleric, for instance, performs much better if he doesn't have the strength, dex, con, wisdom, or charisma: pick three dilemma. A multiclassed paladin/monk also works very well if you have all high stats even though it's next to impossible to pull off if you have the "pick two high stats, four moderate stats, or have all your stats be pretty darn low" dilemma that you face with lower point buys. That's something I noticed when one of our 36 point buy campaigns went for "OK, roll until you get something better than what you had--at least a 17, 16, 15 combo." A number of characters went up to 54 or 56 points, however, the increase in combat effectiveness from 36 points wasn't especially dramatic (partially because we didn't get to spend the points as we saw fit and a lot of those points were stuck in odd stats that won't be increased (gee, my paladin has a 15 dex--how is that different from a 14?) and some of them just resulted in marginal save increases (like my paladin's dex going from 12 to 15--he wears fullplate and doesn't often make ranged attacks so the net benefit is +1 reflex).
Playing 22 points like Living Greyhawk cohorts is an exercise in pain management. You can make a character who can contribute but you need to be rather narrowly focussed.
Playing a 28 point character like Living Greyhawk is where I've decided the baseline of difficulty is. There's enough points that you have some flexibility in character creation but not enough that min-maxing doesn't require serious minning.
When my home group played RttToEE, we settled on 30 point buy. That felt about right too though it increased flexibility a bit more, it didn't change the power equation. The one character who decided to really max all his combat stats still had to make a lot of sacrifices in other areas.
Playing 32 points like Living Arcanis feels like the high end of normal. It doesn't feel as powerful as the roll until you get something you like or converted from 2e roll until you get something you like (and you needed better rolls back then so direct conversion of stats is a significant power-up) campaign. But you start to see some really serious power in traditional iconic build characters and there's enough flexibility that a lot of different concepts will work.
I ran a 36 point campaign for a couple years and my current group is generally using that. It gives really powerful characters following any of the traditional builds and is probably equivalent to giving everyone an ECL+1 race--with all the normal caveats and limitations. Parties can dish out more damage more quickly and can take down foes that would normally be out of their reach but don't generally have the hit points or defenses so the game often escalates to something a bit more deadly than the norm.
After that, more stats will not really change the power-levels as much as they will ensure that the characters have the combat power of min-maxed combat monkeys without sacrificing int, wis, cha, or anything else. You are likely, however, to see a lot more tweaking to take advantage of the high stats and a lot of combinations really come to the fore. A low-mid level combat cleric, for instance, performs much better if he doesn't have the strength, dex, con, wisdom, or charisma: pick three dilemma. A multiclassed paladin/monk also works very well if you have all high stats even though it's next to impossible to pull off if you have the "pick two high stats, four moderate stats, or have all your stats be pretty darn low" dilemma that you face with lower point buys. That's something I noticed when one of our 36 point buy campaigns went for "OK, roll until you get something better than what you had--at least a 17, 16, 15 combo." A number of characters went up to 54 or 56 points, however, the increase in combat effectiveness from 36 points wasn't especially dramatic (partially because we didn't get to spend the points as we saw fit and a lot of those points were stuck in odd stats that won't be increased (gee, my paladin has a 15 dex--how is that different from a 14?) and some of them just resulted in marginal save increases (like my paladin's dex going from 12 to 15--he wears fullplate and doesn't often make ranged attacks so the net benefit is +1 reflex).
