D&D 5E What is your current way to roll stats

[redrick]

In all my years of gaming one player having great stats has never caused an issue, and has never been the key for a character dominating the game. My players always seem to view anything that makes the group stronger as a good thing, and intelligent play and good luck is far more crucial to a PC and party survival than a few additional points of bonuses IME.

It really depends on the kind of game.

In a lot of games, party success is (mostly) a given. The players always win unless they do something really stupid, and the DM's job is seen, in part, as tweaking the goalposts to keep it that way. So anything that makes a group stronger is, ultimately, irrelevant, because the only question is, "which character (or maybe 2) will die before we finish the campaign?" I'm trying to move my game away from that mindset, but I really think it is the assumption in the mainstream game as published and played over at least the last decade or two, if not longer.

So, under those circumstances, if one player makes the group stronger, nobody notices, because the group always wins. But they do notice that that one player sticks out a little more. And, even if your players are all pretty mature about it and not bragging about their damage output all night, it changes things up for the DM. Challenging one player destroys the other PCs, like trying to teach math to a class with one physicist-to-be and a bunch of artists. (I know lots of artists who are great at math, but, whatever.)

And, while I don't want to play the game that way, the reality is that a lot of us do play the game that way, and plenty of people want to play the game that way. And rolled ability scores, with the power level disparity that that brings (especially when it comes to choosing feats instead of ASIs), can make that kind of play harder. The standard array, on the other hand, does nothing to jeopardize a gnarly, old-school style of play. Those characters are not natural-born munchkins. They have built-in weaknesses. Even a fully optimized point-buy character is still going to have one 12 where another character had an 11. Or maybe 3 decent strengths and 3 weaknesses. (If you go for the 15, 15, 15, 8, 8, 8 array.)

I love random, and I love the idea of "playing what you roll," and I love the idea of playing a suboptimal character against long odds (and possibly failing), but that's not how most people use the rolled abilities anyway. We don't play what we roll: we can reassign our abilities to whichever stat we want. We don't play sub-optimal characters, because even the official method generates, on average, better arrays than the point buy, and most tables have some sort of system, official or under-the-table, in place for helping out the truly skunked random arrays.

 

[Miladoon]

Again, this is not about best better bestest.

What method are you currently using to generate stats? That simple.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Threads often get beyond your control when you release them into the wild.

 

[Miladoon]

I will see if I can edit my first post and link to posts with methods

 

[redrick]

Again, this is not about best better bestest.

What method are you currently using to generate stats? That simple.

Ha, sorry, may have gotten a bit pre-emptively defensive.

I like the standard array. We've created dozens of characters with it in my current group, and none of them feel cookie cutter. On the other hand, everybody always plays a new class when they roll up a new character, which helps. I also will use a "random" point buy (as turned into a script by [MENTION=13962]Aramis[/MENTION] and linked above by [MENTION=6789971]bedir than[/MENTION]), because it gets me what I want from rolling — inspiration, without a dramatic swing in power level.

I would use straight 3d6, with the option to swap one pair of scores, if I were playing in a high-mortality, low-adventure, grimdark type campaign with players that I knew were good sports. Rolling is only fun if you roll badly.

 

[pdegan2814]

The first method described in this thread(the "Advantage/Disadvantage" method) is really intriguing, one I'd never seen before. When I made my current character I just used the standard array because I was joining a new group and rolling him up before I arrived, so I went with a default that wouldn't cause anyone to give me dirty looks. If I had to do it again I probably would've used the point-buy system to tweak it just a little.

What about this for a dice-rolling method: Do the 4d6/drop-lowest 8 times. Player gets a choice, they can drop the highest & lowest, or 2nd-highest & 2nd-lowest.

 

[Mercule]

I do point buy. I like that it avoids potential inter-player issues, if there is a great difference. I also like that what is a challenge for one is a challenge for any. In 3.5, I figured that a +8 point buy was roughly equal to a +1 ECL.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

It really depends on the kind of game.

In a lot of games, party success is (mostly) a given. The players always win unless they do something really stupid, and the DM's job is seen, in part, as tweaking the goalposts to keep it that way.

True, not my bag though and not how I try to DM. I just try to be a fair referee and keep things running according to the rules of the game. Sometimes they don't succeed. But you are right, game style and setup would have a big impact on this.

 

[Miladoon]

The first method described in this thread(the "Advantage/Disadvantage" method) is really intriguing, one I'd never seen before. When I made my current character I just used the standard array because I was joining a new group and rolling him up before I arrived, so I went with a default that wouldn't cause anyone to give me dirty looks. If I had to do it again I probably would've used the point-buy system to tweak it just a little.

What about this for a dice-rolling method: Do the 4d6/drop-lowest 8 times. Player gets a choice, they can drop the highest & lowest, or 2nd-highest & 2nd-lowest.

That seems reasonable.

 

[Mavkatzer]

I have a chart of all 65 arrays generated from the 27-point-buy system.

Some of the the options have multiple % of being rolled, stretching 65 arrays into 100 rollable outcomes on d100.

Players roll d100 once, get that array, and can arrange the stats in any order.