Stat Method vs. How long you've played

[A'koss]

You forgot the option for both...

Our group has been playing since the OD&D days and we tend to switch between the two every now and then. It originally took years and years to get the players to even consider point buy, but now they're more comfortable with it.

 

[Tzarevitch]

Started in 80

I have seen too many players roll 18-18-17-14-14-9
and the next guy in line roll 13-13-12-9-9-6

We just started a Jedi Campaign and one player rolled so ungodly his stats using point buy would cost somewhere in the 70-80 range. My own Jedi would cost 32 points. I just never liked the extreme inequities occasionally produced. Also, old school Champions so point buy seems natural.

That is exactly why I mandate point-buy in games I run. Die rolling for stats is inherently unfair. With the point-buy you make the character you want to play and everyone starts with a level playing field.

Tzarevitch

 

[Psion]

Played since 1e, would never use point buy.

I understand the point about variance in the party, but I think going to point buy over it is over-reacting. Just because you want to limit the varaince in the party doesn't mean everyone is cut from the same cloth. I just allow (or require) rerolls if rolls don't fit in a range I consider acceptable. Very simple, much less fidgety.

 

[tzor]

Well I have been playing AD&D since 1st edition, and rolling dice was fundamental not just for stats for for almost everything. We even imported tables from places like Arduim Grimore to determine social status, number of siblings in your family, etc. It was an age of ROLL playing. We role played all right, but our characters had the skeletons of random rolls.

I don't do that anymore. That isn't to say that randomness isn't an important part of my character generation, only that now I let my fickle feelings of the moment determine many of the things I used to roll dice for. I was never good at rolling dice when I needed attributes anyway.

 

[Norfleet]

I think that the preference for stat methodology, pointbuy vs. random rolls, is not a linear evolution at all, but one which is circular: Players start at one point, use it for awhile, become disaffected by its idiosyncracies, and become proponents of the other. Eventually, they become disaffected by the new idiosyncracies, and yearn for a return to the "good old days".

I know I've certainly gone through at least one cycle of this. I started out way back in the days of random generation, became somewhat disaffected with the system which produced wild imbalances and switched over to PB, and then grew to find the way characters produced under such a system became very cookie-cutter dissatisfying, and have come back to seeing rolling and variant-rolling as the system to use.

 

[d4]

i'm a point-buy advocate. started playing D&D around '82. (i guess that makes me "old skool.")

I just allow (or require) rerolls if rolls don't fit in a range I consider acceptable. Very simple, much less fidgety.

i'm pretty much the same way, except my range is "all your stats must total 32 points in the point-buy system."

i like my players to be able to really build their characters, not have them dictated by the dice. if you're going to roll for stats, why not roll randomly for class, race, skills, feats, and alignment, too? (i'm sure there are people who would thoroughly enjoy that. i would not. when i get a character idea in my head, that's the character i want to play. i am appreciative of the point-buy system because it more easily allows me to make the character i am envisioning, and doesn't try to saddle me with something unexpected.)

Players start at one point, use it for awhile, become disaffected by its idiosyncracies, and become proponents of the other. Eventually, they become disaffected by the new idiosyncracies, and yearn for a return to the "good old days".

i haven't really found this to be the case. i started with rolling for stats back with the Red Box Basic Set in '82. after three or four years, i moved on to other systems (such as HERO, and later GURPS) which exclusively used point-buy systems. i've been a firm proponent of point-buy for character creation for the past 18-19 years. i wouldn't even consider going back to rolling for stats.

i'm currently playing in a campaign where the DM allowed the PCs to roll for stats. i asked if i could just use point-buy instead. i even used 32 points (which is supposedly fairly above the norm) and yet i still managed to have the lowest set of scores in the party... (it should probably be mentioned that the DM did not require the other players to roll their stats in front of him.)

 

[Magic Slim]

Rolling for stats is a real fun moment for me, and when I DM, I try to make sure that everyone's in the same range, so whatever method I'll use, the guy that got pityful stats gets to reroll / adjust.

With 2e and a particularly killer DM, we decided that in order to survive, we needed better stats (since anything under 16 in 2ed didn't help). His method of generation is still 24d6, drop 6, arrange at will (3 dice per stat).

With the arrival of 3.0, I've decided to use the regular method, while he continued using his.

Slim

(been playing since, hm, 83? 84?)

 

[Severion]

I started using my 8-18 even numbers system back in 2e (been playing since around '84'85) because i had one player consistantly roll 16+ for each score, even with switching dice and lots of witnesses every one else would get a more average range.
One of the few times i had gotten to actually play (in 1e), they used the 3d6 in order take what you get. I barely qualified as a fighter (12 str, 8 con) and the rest of the group had exceptionally high stats (14-18 range). I played him brave and foolhardy, died quickly, never looked back.

 

[Hygric]

After running a quick chi square test on the 1st/2nd ed gamers response in the poll after 149 responses in that category, I am sorry to say that the null hypothesis (that their is no significant difference between choice of rolling and point buy as a stat generation method) has not been disproved. You only get an alpha level of 0.1, so there is a 10% chance that these results could be random noise.

While this is not capable of disproving the null hypothesis, it is indiciative that there may be something here, and that a more refined study may produce better results.

As for the third ed people, I would not want to trust any sort of stats for a population sample of below 100.

 

[Vaxalon]

I have played since 1.0, and I use point-buy for IRC games and rolling for in-person games.