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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 7074439" data-attributes="member: 6799649">So I foolishly try to live my real life and when I come back there's been 100 posts about whether DMs should change the adventure to target either the PC's weaknesses or their strengths....The first time I ever used point-buy in D&D was in order to have a legal PC for the Pathfinder organised play. I absolutely hated point-buy in both theory and execution but I wanted to play and point-buy was the only way.So I came up with Malachi Silverclaw, a paladin who dumped both Int and Wis.My next PC for organised play was born out of my frustrations with point-buy. I wanted to play a halfling bard/dervish dancer, and I realised that I could start with both Dex and Cha at 20. In order to do so I had to have the other four stats share the one remaining build point! The highest score you could buy was 18 and the lowest was 7. She started with 7/7/7/8/18/18. After assigning to stats and applying racial modifiers she started with Str 5 Dex 20 Con 8 Int 7 Wis 7 Cha 20. I then had to think of a way to play the little airhead, but that was easy!The point is that I could have no expectation of DMs deliberately targetting either my weaknesses or my strengths because the DMs are all using the same pre-written adventures. The challenge here is all about risk/reward: does having a couple of great stats make up for having four bad ones?Well....it depends! It depends on how you play. Specifically, you play in a way that maximises your strengths and minimises your weaknesses. This is the challenge!As much as I resented having to dump FOUR stats in order to get the two I wanted, this is definitely only possible through point-buy!Being made to use point-buy and then not having enough points to realise my concept, the choice that point-buy forces on me is to either be weaker in the stats I really need OR weaker in the stats I don't care about and which I could play in such a way as to minimise their potential disadvantages. Given that challenge I go for (in 5E terms) 16/16/16/8/8/8 over 13/13/13/12/12/12 every time.And that challenge, the challenge to use those few points in the best way possible, motivates me to get the highest stats (or stat modifiers) as I possibly can.And this is encouraged by point-buy! Demonstrating this is trivial: point-buy make me get my stats as high as possible, but when I'm allowed to freely choose my own scores (no rolling or point-buy or anything else) then I do not choose to give myself six 18s. With this freedom I have no pressure, no challenge to choose to have the best possible stats (six 18s), while point-buy challenges me to make the best use of my points.</blockquote>

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