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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 4638713" data-attributes="member: 3400">I would add another factor: point buy vs rolled statsI've been watching the Pathfinder Beta discussions and trying to wrap my brain around some of the debates people have with the problems perceived to be in 3.5. And while doing so, I realized that the difference between the two complicates matters, and not in the way I expect most people would think.Back in ealier 3.x discussions here on ENWorld, there was a lot of back-and-forth about point buy vs rolled stats and point buy aficionados lauding the balanced nature of the characters and potentially unbalanced randomly rolled ones. To a certain extent, that's true. You don't have the potential for really wild differences. But I find that point buy can strain the D&D system.Whenever later era debates came up about single-attribute dependent (SAD) vs multiple attribute dependent (MAD) characters, the gulf between good and bad saves, or super-spellcasters vs irrelevant fighters, minmaxers vs non-minmaxers, the decision to use point buy to generate characters can exacerbate every one of these issues by allowing the player to accentuate their primary stat beyond the expectations of most randomly rolled characters. The character may, as a result, be less well-rounded and have more save vulnerabilities, but can be laser-focused on their offense.I won't say that point buy is the cause of any of the issues I've listed in the above paragraph, just that it exacerbates them. I'd be fairly curious to learn, of the people who have found 3.5 the most problematic or least problematic, who uses point buy and who rolls their stats. It might be that the difference is less significant than the others we've discussed in this thread, but I'd be curious to see how it correlates...(though apparently not curious enough to fork the thread and create a poll  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)</blockquote>

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