D&D 5E Why I Am Starting to Prefer 4d6 Drop the Lowest Over the Default Array.

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's embarrassing how many times I had to mentally parse this sentence. I kept thinking "what does a Dwarf's Stats have to do with this more than any other race?"

I'd like to blame it on a case of the Mondays.

Probably my fault. I may have sinned against Strunk & White.

Attempted rewrite, just for practice: The effect of high stat rolls is dwarfed by the effect of player skill.

 

[Oofta]

Therefore, the most overpowered character is the one with a 3 in Constitution, because that DM will ensure that he is immortal. 18,18,18,18,18,18 is therefore, at that DM's table, a less powerful array than 16, 14, 12, 12, 10, 3. ;-)

Sadly, I remember a poster on a different "roll vs point buy" thread a while back that basically said that if they suspected someone purposely got their character killed that they would force the player to continue to play the same character.

I know from my own personal experience, when my wife asked if she could use point buy (or re-roll) she was told no. Some otherwise decent people have a blindspot.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Holy crimeny, a couple years ago when we ran HotDQ, the DM let us roll stats. One of the players is....not very bright in getting concepts. So while I don't think he intentionally cheated, he most definitely didn't get what the DM was saying. When he showed up with his PC, every one of his stats was between 16 and 19. Every one. Obviously he screwed up (I'm guessing he forgot to drop the lowest dice).

But it didn't matter in the game at all. He was probably the least effective PC in the game because he just didn't get it. And forget any sort of tactical thinking. I kid you not, we completed that campaign and he still couldn't figure out how to calculate his attack and damage bonuses.

I hope he was playing a Champion.

 

[Lanefan]

If you are okay with a party where one person has every stat at 16+ and another has no stat over 8 more power to you, but that doesn't fit my concept of what a cooperative, party-based adventuring game should be.

The odds of that kind of spread happening within the same party (one character all 16+, another all are so extreme that if you ever see it, get thee hence to your local lottery retailer ASAP because you're on a serious roll!

In fact, there are rows upon rows of graves out my window. Many dead 18 percentile fighters with names long since forgotten. So many combat focused mechanical dreams shattered and lives cut short. I need to animate them all sometime.

I had a guy in my game who'd been playing 1e or variants since nearly forever. He'd lost yet another character (he was good at this) and decided to bang out another one - and in front of the table to much celebration and cheering rolled 18.00 strength for the first time in his life.

That character made it out of his first adventure, but not his second. What did him in was a serious lack of hit points - a true glass cannon, he was. Never mind that in his short career he'd racked up so much debt that the party declared him bankrupt, and sold his corpse to the party's Necromancer!

Which leads to: do all of you lot who don't like random stats also de-randomize hit points?

Lan-"good or bad luck on hit points can counterbalance good or bad luck on stats in a real hurry"-efan

 

[Sacrosanct]

I hope he was playing a Champion.

Thief rogue actually. And yes, he kept forgetting when to apply sneak attack.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Which leads to: do all of you lot who don't like random stats also de-randomize hit points?

No, I'm not that hard-core. I allow my players to de-randomize HP of course, per PHB rules, but when I myself roll up a PC (or NPC) I always take the average. Two reasons:

(1) It reduces the number of stats I need to remember, if I lose a character sheet. Instead I can always recompute them.
(2) It has a higher expected value than rolling.

I suppose the smart move, from a powergaming standpoint, would be to always take the average for PCs with good stats, and to roll for PCs with mediocre or poor stats. That way they have a chance to acquire an outstanding characteristic of some kind (high HP), and if they don't, not much loss. But really I don't find HP very interesting--having 50 HP at 5th level is more improbable for a Con 10 fighter than having a Int 16, but also less interesting. So I don't think I will powergame HP even now that it has occurred to me to do so--it's just not worth the hassle.

 

[BookBarbarian]

I'm fine with rolling stats, but personally I hate rolling HP. But if a player wanted to I wouldn't stop them.

 

[Lanefan]

No, I'm not that hard-core. I allow my players to de-randomize HP of course, per PHB rules, but when I myself roll up a PC (or NPC) I always take the average. Two reasons:

(1) It reduces the number of stats I need to remember, if I lose a character sheet. Instead I can always recompute them.
(2) It has a higher expected value than rolling.

Side question, but why would you ever lose a character sheet? Don't you leave them with the DM between sessions?

As for h.p., just like with stats the game has dice for a reason.

Lanefan

 

[cbwjm]

Players have the choice of rolling their hit points at my table or taking the set amount. Set amount does average out to slightly higher but it can be fun to roll hit points on level up. The thrill of rolling max. hp, the sadness of rolling a 1, it's a lot of fun and the whole table tends to sit down and watch and laugh or cheer along with the player rolling.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Side question, but why would you ever lose a character sheet? Don't you leave them with the DM between sessions?

My fundamental approach toward character sheets is to view them as props. The reality is the information, not the object on which the information happens to be recorded.

When I'm DMing, I lose NPC character sheets because I'm kind of disorganized, and sometimes it's an NPC that I wasn't expecting to have to reconstruct. I can usually manage to remember name + level + key stats, but having one less important thing to worry about is convenient for me.

When I'm playing (rarely), well, I don't have a good excuse for losing character sheets, but I know I've done it.

Also as DM, I've had players lose character sheets (especially new players), and we had to reconstruct the PCs from memory, either for a session or permanently. I don't make players leave character sheets with me, and in fact I do my best to remain somewhat ignorant of what is written on the character sheet. My job is to run the world, not the PCs. (Nevertheless I do sometimes memorize PC stats incidentally--if not I wouldn't be able to help recreate them from memory. With a new player, it helps that I was probably involved in helping create that first PC, so I have a better-than-usual chance of knowing what stats go where.)