AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

[Evil-B]

The thing I always start wondering about when talking about random stat generation vs. point buy/array is...what is the reason that you are randomly rolling stats? Not as in "why would you DO this?" question, but really...what is it you are wanting to achieve. If you want to see what the world gives you and roll with that, then taking the bad with the good should be fuel for a fun roleplay. I just feel like the more you add more dice...5d6k3, 6d6k3, etc etc...the more you kind of don't want to see the bad? If you must have certain stats to enjoy the game...then work with a point buy, array, or really if it is going to stress you out enough to not enjoy things, maybe just work with the DM to give you what you really want?

This assumes a group of like minded friends, of course, and not all games are like that...games in FLGS, at cons, etc. may be very different. And of course, not all people enjoy things the same. I get that.

I've been playing since the early 80s, and it used to be "by the book" 3d6, then 4d6k3...then we figured if the dice didn't favor you, you couldn't play certain rare classes. But even then as kids we knew that the game was a meat grinder and you would be rolling up a new chara soon enough. (plus...we naturally tried to cheat when we could...)

After college and when 3.0 came out, we switched to point buy, to play what we wanted but still wanting to follow what we saw as the spirit of the game. Now, in 2026 we just kind of go with what will make us happy for a campaign-length heroic story.

We still like 4d6k3 for things like one shots and delves, things where there's some sort of competitive challenge thing happening. Also, some games just thrive on that cold random world thing.

Note that this is NOT a "why are we talking about this" post. I'm genuinely curious on why other people who enjoy the same hobbies as me consume their content in different ways.

 

[Celebrim]

Looked fair at the time - I was standing right there - and the same player had rolled up and played various others before that that weren't nearly so crazy.

Let's put it this way, for each roll like that one on 6 5d6 take the best three, you are statistically like to see more than 20 rolls where there were no results higher than 11. How many of those do you remember?

 

[Celebrim]

The thing I always start wondering about when talking about random stat generation vs. point buy/array is...what is the reason that you are randomly rolling stats? Not as in "why would you DO this?" question, but really...what is it you are wanting to achieve.

I think this is a really good question.

There are a lot of competing impulses I think.

a) One of the reasons to use random generation is to force the players to play characters that are not optimal and somewhat surprising. Note this is different than take the bad with the good. This is about character variation. If you use a stat array, then for each class there are just optimal places to put each number because some attributes give a clearer and more obvious advantage than others. If you generate things randomly, you end up with arrays that don't optimally fit any class, resulting in strange compromises and diverse characters. You'll note that this is why I tend in my discussion to disfavor "arrange to taste". It's not just that "arrange to taste" is effectively an advantage to stats because some stats have low value to some classes, but that "arrange to taste" to me defeats one of the main reasons to roll the dice.

b) The problem with random generation though is that it makes some players winners and some losers before they even start playing. If you have massive disparity in stat blocks, then you end up with massive disparity in game impact. And that's not really fun for everyone. So you want randomness, but you want controlled randomness that tends to give everyone something that they are happy to play in the long run. Because 1e AD&D tends to place all the good stuff from an attribute at 16+, this means a means of generation that tends to favor producing at least one 16 and nothing below a 6.

c) Additionally, as a GM I find PC churn to be tiresome. Some amount of death in dangerous pursuits is expected, and no one wants the game to be a cake walk, but if you are replacing characters on a regular basis it means breaking connections between PC's and NPC's, and between PC's and PC's, characters that have no memory of prior game events, pauses to bring in new characters, and dealing with the hassle of equipping new characters. For many ways of playing, just giving a player a new 1st level character and asking them to play alongside an existing party just is game distorting and tends toward unfun. So I tend to favor systems that produce survivable characters. It might be worth looking at for example my house rules for CoC character generation to see what I mean: [PEACH] House Rules for Call of Cthulhu (roughly 5e, 1920's setting). Those rules might not be easily explicable to everyone, but trust me when I say that they make your starting character much less luck dependent by giving the player options for making a playable character out of virtually any likely rolled set of attributes. I have similar feelings about D&D CharGen. So I'm all in favor of just giving the player the sort of character that they actually want to play.

d) When you talk about "taking the bad with the good should be fuel for a fun roleplay" you are typically meaning having one score that is in the 6-9 range. And that can be a part of playing a fun suboptimal character, but "cartoonish" characters defined by their foibles are only so interesting and if you have too many of them it can just be annoying IMO.

If you want to see what the world gives you and roll with that, then taking the bad with the good should be fuel for a fun roleplay. I just feel like the more you add more dice...5d6k3, 6d6k3, etc etc...the more you kind of don't want to see the bad?

It's less about avoiding the bad than guaranteeing some good. I think you'd be surprised how often bad rolls can come up even of 5d6k3 or 6d6k3. Don't rely on intuition. Go to a dice roller and play with it.

But even more than just trying to banish the bad, what I'm really trying to do is by the law of large numbers ensuring that most characters will be similar. The problem with 4d6k3 is the standard deviation is incredibly high, so that in the same party of six you are likely have to a character that is in point buy terms a 35 pt or higher character and another that is 16 pt or less. IMO that's really a problem worth mitigating against even it means "the loss" of no one is playing a character with a 8 INT or 8 CHR.

 

[Evil-B]

Good reply, thanks! Yeah, I agree with you, "arrange to taste" is sort of defeating the idea.

Personally, I like rolling stats...I like rolling dice to begin with (heh), but these days I don't know what I want to even play most of the time, so I like letting the dice sort of help with that. Going down the line is part of that. "Hey, a 12 strength. Maybe a fighter, but let's see what else we have...9 intelligence, totally not a wizard, lol. 11 wisdom, probably not a cleric...16 DEXTERITY? Sounds like we are thieving things up!"

That all said, rolling a low constitution just is kind of a universal bummer. Sure, you can roleplay that one out, but mechanically having a disadvantage for hit points makes things harder starting out, many times to an unfun level. We tend to allow min scores there.

 

[S'mon]

2e or 1e or which edition?

OSRIC/1e - with Monks.

 

[Lanefan]

Let's put it this way, for each roll like that one on 6 5d6 take the best three, you are statistically like to see more than 20 rolls where there were no results higher than 11. How many of those do you remember?

Remember? None, because I'd suggest the player re-roll* and then promptly forget about it.

* - my cutoff is if no roll is higher than 13 OR if the average of the six rolls is less than 10.0, you can reroll if you want to.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Good reply, thanks! Yeah, I agree with you, "arrange to taste" is sort of defeating the idea.

Personally, I like rolling stats...I like rolling dice to begin with (heh), but these days I don't know what I want to even play most of the time, so I like letting the dice sort of help with that. Going down the line is part of that. "Hey, a 12 strength. Maybe a fighter, but let's see what else we have...9 intelligence, totally not a wizard, lol. 11 wisdom, probably not a cleric...16 DEXTERITY? Sounds like we are thieving things up!"

That all said, rolling a low constitution just is kind of a universal bummer. Sure, you can roleplay that one out, but mechanically having a disadvantage for hit points makes things harder starting out, many times to an unfun level. We tend to allow min scores there.

Yes to everything you said. I did play a character with a 4 CON in Freebooters on the Frontier (Dungeon World hack) (that shares the stats with D&D). But I rolled a 16 Dex - so Range was their thing...

 

[lall]

what is it you are wanting to achieve.

High COM. Thus, thief and method V.

 

[S'mon]

Re 18/00, @Upper_Krust rolled 18/00 STR for an Elf Cavalier in my high school 1e campaign - Immortality - would have been best 3 of 4d6 arrange as desired. He was a Lesser God with 117 levels across 3 classes by the end of the campaign.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Re 18/00, @Upper_Krust rolled 18/00 STR for an Elf Cavalier in my high school 1e campaign - Immortality - would have been best 3 of 4d6 arrange as desired. He was a Lesser God with 117 levels across 3 classes by the end of the campaign.

I remember rolling those 'double zeroes' that like it was yesterday*, what a character!

*which is crazy because with my terrible memory I can barely remember yesterday..