I don’t understand the appeal of a lot of homebrew rolling methods. Somehow we’ve gone from 3d6, to 4d6 drop lowest, to some people even doing2d6 + 6. We’ve gone from roll one score for each ability in order, to roll in order but swap two scores once, to roll 6 scores and assign them to what ever abilities you like, to some people even rolling 7 scores, dropping the lowest, and assigning the remaining 6 to what ever abilities you like. And then there are other bet-hedging house rules like dropping any score lower than 7, or raising the highest stat to 15 if you don’t have any natural 15s it better, or discarding any set of stats with a total below a certain threshold. All these tweaks to reduce the variance seem to me to defeat the point of rolling stats in the first place.
Although I prefer point buy, I understand the appeal of rolled stats. The variance can lead you to play characters you might not otherwise consider. If you roll in order, it forces you to build your character around the stats, instead of building the stats around the character. There’s something charming about the idea of “let’s see what character the dice are going to give me!”, and it can be a fun role playing challenge to get landed with really oddball stats. Even if you assign the scores as you like, the potential for crazy high rolls and the risk of really low rolls is exciting, and it can be interesting to come up with narrative justifications for your 17 Int, 4 Wisdom Wizard or what have you. But the fun of that comes from the random chance.
I just don’t understand why, if you want to roll ability scores, you would want to reduce that random element. If the goal is to produce more balanced results, why not just use point buy? If the goal is to increase the chances of getting higher stats and producing more heroic characters, why not just use point buy with more points? If you want random stats, what is the value of intentionally limiting the variation?
