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

[Mannahnin]

Back in the day my AD&D groups used Method I (4d6 drop low, arrange), but we gave each character three sets, pick your favorite.

One set was not going to reliably get you decent stats by AD&D standards. You'd almost always run into the "1-2 people get lucky*, 1 person gets screwed, everyone else has mediocre stats" pattern.

Giving each person 3 sets had SOME of that, but less extreme variance between the luckiest and the least lucky.

*(Although "lucky" in this case still usually only means getting two stats high enough for "real" bonuses. The average score of 13.27 Method 1 gives you is nice by B/X standards but junk when you're using the AD&D tables for bonuses).

 

[Celebrim]

Definitely partial to Method III. Like you said, not a super high chance of an 18 (about 15%) in the array, and rolling in order generates the “Huh, I didn’t think I would play that” effect which is more desirable in a strongly random game like AD&D.

If you want to give players more control over their class choices, use method III but one stat of their choice becomes an 18 is interesting.

I think method III is definitely my favorite, though it might not be great for optimizers because fighter classes really shine with an 18 to play with, and can almost ignore anything outside of Strength and Constitution as long as they have at least 9's or so elsewhere. The bad thing is that attribute dependency is both high and low at the same time. You are two or three times more powerful if you have 18's in your key attributes, but you hardly don't care what is in your other scores. So if you are power gaming, the fixed array and or the 5d6 take 3 and arrange to taste method will probably work better for you.

 

[Celebrim]

Back in the day we used 4d6 drop the lowest, arrange as you see fit. I never used it, but I kinda like BECMI's option to drop 2 points from another stat to raise your prime requisite by 1.

The problem with this is that AD&D (and I'd presume BECMI) has so much single attribute dependency that it's pretty much always a good idea. For most classes only your prime requisite and your constitution matter, and intelligence is basically a dump stat for all characters that aren't M-Us. There was a period where I was allowing this multiple times, and the result was always several 18s and several 6s and 8s, and the 8s never mattered.