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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 4637856" data-attributes="member: 3400">I voted random for some games, totally crafted for others. Superhero games, for instance, work really well totally crafted. Though I will say that random power generation in Villians and Vigilantes did lead to some interesting power combinations that were fun to creatively wrap together in an origin story.But I think that there is something about totally crafting your character that can lead to trouble. Take a look at D&D 3.5 and some of the debates that come up about balance, imbalance, uber-caster characters, useless fighters, and system mastery. Part of the problems associated with such debates come from or are exacerbated by people using point-buy character creation in a game designed around random generation.I remember a lot of debates on ENWorld about rolling stats vs point buy and how much more "balanced" point buy was because you couldn't end up with lucky vs unluckly players. There's an element of truth to that. But relying on point buy makes the problem players with more system mastery dominating those without worse. There's no possibility of luck helping the player with less mastery. The difference between point buy and random generation exacerbates the problem we see with high-powered casters, weak fighters, and the gulf between good and weak saves. When you have the freedom to throw your points exactly where you want them, system mastery suggests putting them into your spell-casting stat to raise your save DCs. The strategy of putting a lot of points into the one stat is strong and seductive and probably nets you a good 2 points over your stat rolling peers on your DCs. Fighters, under the same regime, invest heavily in Strength which ends up shorting their Save-feeding stats like Dex and Wisdom, making their weak saves even weaker in comparison to your stat roller.Point buying systems also, I think, make the problems you see with single stat dependent and multi-stat dependent classes worse. If the characters are rolled, the monk gets a modicum of moderate stat bumps around his abilities and probably one good one and the wizard gets a good stat bump for his main ability. In point buy, the monk gets a moderate set of stat bumps and one good one while the wizard gets an exceptional one around his prime ability.I've just been thinking about this stuff for a while and realized how the difference between the two systems complicates things.</blockquote>

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