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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9867329" data-attributes="member: 4937">About 2.9% chance if you straight up rolled 3d6 rather than 4d6 pick the best three.  The odds you'd have at least one 5 or less on six sets of three rolled six times is closer to 25% of the time though.  So if you really did it that way - and the official AD&D rules didn't tell you to do so - one in 4 characters you rolled up would be locked into a single class, and about one in 30 would be forced to be a 0th level fighter with no ability to progress.In practice most tables used 4d6 pick best three and arrange to taste, but IME even then players would make 20 or 30 characters by this method and then after getting one with 18's or at least two 17's or otherwise qualifying for a class like Ranger, Cavalier, Barbarian, Paladin, or Bard that would let you play something useful without maxing out one ability score would then bring that to play and tell me how they rolled it up legally and could they play it.  Which of course, I sighed and generally said "Yes", because as long as everyone was doing this it wasn't a problem.  It was only a problem if the one guy was being honest and brought to the table something with nothing higher than a 14 because that's really what he rolled, and everyone else was lying or telling half-truths.In retrospect, knowing what it takes for a 1e AD&D character to actually be good in the long term, I should have used method III at my table and made everyone roll in front of me.  That yields across the board good stats without an excessive number of 18s, and it would have made everyone happy and no one would have felt pressured to lie or cheat.</blockquote>

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