D&D 5E Why no 16-18s allowed in Point Buy?

[Lalato]

For the record, I don't have a problem with rolling stats or point buy. I also don't have a problem with 4d6 drop the lowest. Or rolling the 3x3 grid (which is actually a pretty interesting variant). Or re-rolling 1s and 2s. Whatever method you choose, have fun with it.

What I find odd is continually re-rolling characters and then picking the best set. I realize that modern dice rolling programs allow you to do it easily. But let's say after you roll your half dozen or more sets of stats, you still find them wanting? What next? Just keep re-rolling? At what point does it just make more sense to make your stats up?

This is less about min-maxing than it is about creating the exact character you want to play. I guess what I really want to know is what's the point of rolling your stats if you're not willing to live with the results (even after several re-rolls)? I would think that if you can't create the exact character you want with point buy, then you need to consult with the DM... and just get the stats you want.

 

[Ramaster]

I started playing with "Roll 4d6, drop lowest" with a homebrew system that only used 4 stats (CON was merged with STR and CHA was replaced with different skills).

When I switched to 3e we kept that system, but once I found out about pointbuy I migrated there and haven't looked back in 5+ years. The only way I'm going back to rolling is if a single array is generated and all PCs use it (distributing the scores however they see fit, of course); but I still would only do it if that's what most players want.

 

[Shadimar]

Hmmmm.

Big fan of 4d6 drop lowest, arrange to taste (since the 80's).

I wonder though, as a standard, should I;

a. "Player, you may roll 4d6 style, and if your character is not acceptable you must use point buy"

or

b. "Player, you may use point buy, or take your chances with 4d6 style, keeping what you get".



Maybe let them use 4d6 style twice...so they can choose character 1, 2, or 3.

Personally the house rule I'll be using with dice rolling is the following.

If the total of your final set of 6 numbers is under 72 you may re-roll*

and/or

If you have more than 1 stat under 10 you may re-roll*

*When you re-roll you must re-roll the entire set you cannot "save" individual numbers.

So hopefully this still keeps some of the risk with dice rolling over point buy, but it also means there is a greater chance of being "above average" as a result. If you want your characters to be more average, you could reduce that figure of 72 to 60 if preferred.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I wonder though, as a standard, should I;

a. "Player, you may roll 4d6 style, and if your character is not acceptable you must use point buy"

or

b. "Player, you may use point buy, or take your chances with 4d6 style, keeping what you get".

[c.] Maybe let them use 4d6 style twice...so they can choose character 1, 2, or 3.

For me, "b" is greatly preferable to "a.".

"a." removes all risk for the player, and it guarantees them a minimum threshold. your third option (let's call it "c") keeps the minimum and gives them two chances to exceed it. Both of these necessarily leads to overpowered characters (in that the point buy becomes the minimum anyone will have). While that can be fun to play, for a campaign I would much prefer to be given a choice.

"b." gives them the opportunity at getting much higher numbers, but it comes with an actual concomitant risk. And if you end up with lower rolls, you make do. This way, they might even come away with a little story about the time they had an underpowered character, or when everyone else played it safe with pout buy, they risked it and got an 18.

 

[thunktanker]

Just expand the table, I will increase point buy back up to 30 like in the last playtest and expand the table to allow 16-18 point ability scores if the players want them.

16 = 12 pts
17 = 15 pts
18 = 19 pts

Natural progression, each ability score costs a number of extra points equal to its modifier so the 16 costs 3 points more than a 15, 17 costs 3 points more than 16, and an 18 costs 4 points more than a 17.

If you use your expanded table, I suggest you allow 31 points instead. That way you can create arrays on par with the average rolled stats for 4d6, drop the lowest. As explained elsewhere, the average stats for 4d6, drop the lowest, are about 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9. http://catlikecoding.com/blog/post:4d6_drop_lowest . To get that you would need 31 points: 12 pts (16 score) + 7 pts (14 score) + 5 pts (13 score) + 4 pts (12 score) +2 pts (10 score) + 1pt (9 score). Since you're so close with 30, why not just go to 31?

Interestingly, if you expand the table by making 16 = 11 pts instead of your 12 pt suggestion, carrying on the pattern of 2 points per score over 13, then you only need 30 points to get the average rolls for 4d6, drop lowest. That suggests to me that WOTC was thinking along the lines of 16=11 pts when they were using 30 points: 11 pts (16 score) + 7 pts (14 score) + 5 pts (13 score) + 4 pts (12 score) +2 pts (10 score) + 1pt (9 score).

Either way, this does suggest that the point buy cap of 15 and the points amount of 27 that WOTC uses now means that the basic array will get you, on average, slightly lower scores than 4d6, drop the lowest--which has an average score set with one score exceeding the 15 cap and would require 30 or 31 points to replicate. I think this is fair if the players rolling really do risk rolling something completely crap, like a 5. But if the DM will allow rerolls of crap scores, than you might as well increase the point buy amount. Otherwise rolling is strictly better when there is no risk of a crap score. Sounds like a table question to me.

Somehow this post has gone long, so why not continue at this point? All this made me wonder how many points you would need to be on par with the average rolled scores for the 3d6 method. 3d6 clusters scores around the 10s and 11s that could be thought of as the "average person" scores for an ability, whereas 4d6, drop the lowest, clusters scores around the more heroic 12-13 range. Using anydice.com, I see those average scores for 3d6 are 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7. To figure this out, we would need to expand the table downward, which I would guess would be -1 for a 7. If so, then the points needed to get the average rolls for the 3d6 method would be 16: 7 pts (14 score) + 4 pts (12 score) +3 (11 score) +2 pts (10 score) + 1pt (9 score) -1 (7 score).

So, a 16 point point buy would put you on par with the 3d6 method and make characters that would start out more average. A 30 (or 31) point buy makes characters that clearly start at a more heroic level of abilities than the general population. WOTC's 27 point system is certainly closer to the heroic 30 than the 16, but gives a little bonus for those who will take the risks of rolling 4d6 drop the lowest instead.

Sorry for the novel.

EDIT

Additional thoughts: I kind of like your idea of using the modifier amount for a score as the interval for the point cost increase to get that score. If we really committed to that, this would make a point buy system like this (which I think is what pathfinder uses?):

3: -16 pts
4: -12 pts
5: -9 pts
6: -6 pts
7: -4 pts
8: -2 pts
9: -1 pts
10: 0pts
11: 1 pts (really should be 0, but this would make 10 irrelevant)
12: 2 pts
13: 3 pts
14: 5 pts
15: 7 pts
16: 10 pts
17: 13 pts
18: 17 pts

Extending my analysis above to such an array, the 3d6 "average character" point buy amount would be 3!: 5 pts (14 score) + 2 pts (12 score) +1 (11 score) +0 pts (10 score) -1pt (9 score) -4 (7 score). The 4d6, drop the lowest, "heroic" point buy amount would be 19: 10 pts (16 score) + 5 pts (14 score) + 3 pts (13 score) + 2 pts (12 score) +0 pts (10 score) -1pt (9 score).

I'm done now.

SECOND EDIT

Just realized that the 3 point buy amount in my first edit for the average character makes sense because making an 11 cost 1 point increases the cost of 3 stats by 1 more point than they would otherwise cost. If both 10 and 11 instead cost 0 points, then the average character replicating the 3d6 average scores would only require a point buy amount of 0! This just blew my mind as unexpectedly elegant, maybe because I'm writing this late at night, but I guess it makes sense. You also get 0 if you add all the modifiers you get for having abilities of 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7--and this point buy system is based around modifier increases.

Thanks for reading my 1:30 am ramblings. Hope they made sense to someone.

Now I'm really done.

 

[Joe Liker]

For me, "b" is greatly preferable to "a.".

"a." removes all risk for the player, and it guarantees them a minimum threshold. your third option (let's call it "c") keeps the minimum and gives them two chances to exceed it. Both of these necessarily leads to overpowered characters (in that the point buy becomes the minimum anyone will have). While that can be fun to play, for a campaign I would much prefer to be given a choice.

"b." gives them the opportunity at getting much higher numbers, but it comes with an actual concomitant risk. And if you end up with lower rolls, you make do. This way, they might even come away with a little story about the time they had an underpowered character, or when everyone else played it safe with pout buy, they risked it and got an 18.

I'm not sure it's such a bad plan (except for option 'c'), depending on how you look at it.

I don't see it as risk-vs-reward; I think of it more as rolling being the default method, with point-buy as a fallback to keep people from getting stuck with unplayable characters.

I don't think there's much to be gained with the so-called "choice" offered in the rules. Your chances of rolling worse scores than point buy are actually pretty small. Unless you consider yourself abysmally unlucky (and no one really is, by the way), there's no reason to pick point buy.

It's not just the lower-than-rolled-average point allotment. It's also the fact that rolling gives you a nearly 57 percent chance of having at least one 16 or higher; point buy gives you a zero percent chance.

Point buy is terrible, absolutely terrible, but it is a good "bare minimum" to use if someone does manage to roll extremely poorly.

 

[delericho]

If you use your expanded table, I suggest you allow 31 points instead. That way you can create arrays on par with the average rolled stats for 4d6, drop the lowest. As explained elsewhere, the average stats for 4d6, drop the lowest, are about 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9...

Bear in mind, though, that point buy allows more control than random rolling, which means you can get greater bang for your buck - in 3e this manifested as just about everyone dumping Cha to the minimum 8 and using the saved points to maximise the stats that were important to their class. (In 5e, of course, the break-points are a bit different. Still, it's still the case that not every stat is of equal value to every character.)

So if using the expanded table for point buy, my recommendation would be to offer slightly fewer points than the average from random rolls - you trade off raw numerical advantage for greater efficiency.

(With 3e, the choice I offered was 4d6-drop lowest with the 'standard' rerolls allowed; or 28-point buy; or the array 16/15/13/12/10/8. I expect to do something similar with 5e, though obviously with very slightly different numbers. But I can't make a final decision until I actually get to play the game. )

 

[delericho]

Keep re-rolling stats until you get awesome ones? Do these DMs also let players reroll attacks until they crit and then reroll damage until it's max?

There's a big difference in the importance of those rolls, though. If you miss an attack roll, or get bad damage, or whatever, it's no big deal - you get another chance next round.

Bad stat rolls (or bad hit point rolls), though, potentially affect your enjoyment of playing a character for months.

Unless you consider yourself abysmally unlucky (and no one really is, by the way)...

No indeed. The dice just hate me.

 

[karolusb]

They had to include point buy for organized play purposes. I tend to agree that they seem to be skewing towards rolling with the official point buy (which I noted would not allow me to make some characters I had in various stages of the playtest). I find it strange though it is a backhanded boost to humans (in a world where you want a 16 or 18, being able to start with a 15 and add one or two is effectively the same).

There is a weird seeming straw man argument in this thread that anyone who rerolls stats must reroll until they have multiple 18's, and honestly that is rarely my experience. I can also say that in my experience the people who are obsessed with 3d6 in order are not fun to play with.

My funny roll story, 4d6 reroll 1's, gave it a few sets of stats and took the best to my GM (this was 2nd ed, so really good stats were amazing, and pretty good stats might as well have been straight 9's). He looks at my stats offended, picks up 4 dice rolls an 18, and tells me to write it down. The character I ended up playing must have had the best stats I have ever seen (well actually we had a hireling that was better, as you can imagine that GM's rolling was that good all the time, which mostly sucked for us), 3 stats of 17 or higher, nothing under a 13. Even with the generous rolling method it was pretty insane. For my rolls, pretty sure I had nothing over a 15 in a 6x6 grid of stats.

Currently planning on GMing with 3d6 12 times, you can replace one roll with a 15 but only in your prime requisite. A tad on the generous side, though to date I have yet to see anyone need a reroll, or have stats that were disappointing or ridiculous.

 

[was]

sorry..bad connection double post