Worlds of Design: Rolls vs. Points in Character Building

Let’s talk about methods of generating RPG characters, both stochastic and deterministic.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

"Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will." Jawaharlal Nehru

When creating character attributes, there are two broad approaches to generating them: stochastic and deterministic. The stochastic method involves chance, while the deterministic method does not. Most any other method is going to be one of the other, whatever the details. The pros of one method tend to be the cons of the other.

Stochastic
The classic method is rolling dice, usually D6, sometimes an alternative like percentage dice. There are various ways do this. For example, some of the old methods were to sum the roll of 3d6 six times in a specific order of six character abilities. A variation was 3d6 and change the order as desired, another was roll 4d6, don’t count the lowest die, and then you might be able to change order or not; and so forth.

What are the pros of rolling the dice? First of all and primarily, variety (barring cheating). You get a big range of dice rolls. Dice rolling promotes realism, you get a big variation in numbers so you get some 3s, in fact you get as many 3s as 18s, and with some methods you have the opportunity to play characters with “cripplingly bad" ability numbers. Further, it's always exciting to roll dice, whether you like it or not. (Keep in mind, when I first saw D&D I said “I hate dice games.”)

One of the cons of rolling dice is that it's unfair in the long run, a player can get big advantages lasting for years of real-time throughout the campaign just by getting lucky in the first dice rolls. This can be frustrating to those who didn't get lucky. Perhaps even more, rolling dice encourages cheating. I've seen people roll one character after another until they get one they like - meaning lots of high numbers - and then they take that to a game to use. That’s not possible with point buy. Another con is that you may want to play a particular character class yet the dice just won’t cooperate (when you’re rolling in specific order).

Deterministic
The other method which I believe has been devised independently by several people including myself (I had an article for my system published a long time ago) is the one used in fifth edition D&D. A player is given a number of generic points to buy ability numbers. The lowest numbers can be very cheap, for example, if you are using a 3 to 18 scale, when you buy a 3 it may cost you one point, while an 18 may cost 20-some points. You decide what you want, for which ability, and allocate until you run out of points.

Point buy is very fair (FRP is a game, for some people). No one need be envious of someone who either 1) rolled high or 2) rolled many characters and picked the best one. It prevents the typical new character with sky-high abilities, it prevents cheating, so the player has to supply the skill, not rely on bonuses from big ability numbers. Of course, the GM can choose the number of points available to the players so he/she can give generally higher or lower numbers on average as they choose.

But point buy lacks variety for a particular class. The numbers tend to be the same. It's not exciting, it’s cerebral, and as such it takes a little longer than rolling dice. That's all the cons I can think of. Keep in mind I'm biased in favor of point buy. It's clean, fair and simple.

I haven’t spent much time trying to figure out yet another method of generating a character. The only other method I can think of that isn’t one or the other is to have some kind of skilled contest determine the numbers, such as pitching pennies or bowling. Then the question becomes why use one kind of skill over another?

Do you favor one method over the other? And has anyone devised a method that is not stochastic or deterministic?

 

[Hussar]

I'm just trying to come at this from a different angle: Are you okay with D&D's tiers of play? (and) Do you accept a campaign where a character can die? If so, what's the difference between reaching tier 2 or 3, a spot where characters are far stronger and their abilities far greater?

The way I'm looking at it is an enormous amount of the PHB is relegated for tiers of play many don't see, either because they play in a gritty campaign where death happens often or they don't continue play longer than six months. So why is it so bad for a class to be in there that many players won't be able to play. I mean, characters die all the time because of bad dice rolls. For the paladin it's just inverted, you can't reach this pinnacle because of bad dice rolls.

Anyway, just a thought. Thanks for reading.

Character death can be pretty easily mitigated, for one. For another, the notion that most of the game is cannot feasibly be reached hasn't been true in a couple of decades as well. There's a reason 3e is based on a 1 year, 1st to 20th level play model. Now, I don't think it actually achieved that - I think it takes a bit longer - but, it is entirely possible, in 3e, 4e and 5e to reach most of the tiers of play within a fairly short and plausibly short period of time. The game is designed for that to be true.

OTOH, there is nothing actually mitigating the lack of chances of actually playing these classes that are walled behind luck for no particular reason. It's not like a monk or a ranger, or a druid or a paladin is particularly more powerful than any other class. And, any power issues in the class are paid for through the xp tables. So, if the class already pays for any additional power by having a higher xp requirement, what is the justification for restricting its numbers by placing it behind the luck wall?

 

[Lanefan]

My preferred method when I ran my last four player campaign was stat array with a twist. No two characters could share the same high or low stat (including whatever stats the retiring or recently dead character had).

[EDIT as an example, If the high str/low int barbarian died, and the rest of the party was an int/con wiz, a cha/wis bard, and a wis/dex cleric, the new character could either have dex or con as their high stat, and str or cha as their low stat]

What did you do when you got to your seventh character? Or your tenth? Or your forty-fifth, after some turnover? Or when there were more than six characters in the party?

It was maybe a little heavy handed, but it made sure that the group always had singular specialists, new characters wouldn't step on the toes of the established characters, and that new characters were never just a carbon copy of the person who died.

It also completely wrecks the idea of playing a non-standard party e.g. three Fighters and a Wizard, which seems an odd thing to do.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really get the points buy = samey thing. Here are three reasons for that.

(1) The last two times I've played AD&D I gave the players the option of rolling 4d6 drop 1 (reroll if two < 6 or fewer than two > 14) or allocating 76 points (with an 18 costing 19 points). We had a mixture of rolling and points-buy. And we got different spreads - eg a points-buy monk (needs 3 15s) looked different from a points-buy F/MU.

(2) In our main 4e game, the PCs were all points-buy. Here are the starting stats (including racial adjustments in brackets, and then 30th level stats in square brackets):

8,10,13,14,14,16 (8,10,14,15,16,16) [10,12,18,19,20,26]
8,10,12,12,16,16 (8,10,12,12,18,18) [10,12,14,14,26,28]
8,10,10,11,14,18 (8,10,10,11,16,20) [10,12,12,1324,28]
8,10,13,14,14,16 (8,10,13,14,16,18) [10,12,15,16,26,28]
10,11,12,13,14,16 (10,11,12,14,15,18) [12,14,14,18,20,28]

Of those 5 starting spreads only two were the same, and they were different after racial adjustments. The difference have only grown with levels.

(3) In our Prince Valiant game, two PCs were built (without collaboration) almost identically: Brawn 4, Presence 3, Arms 3, Riding 1, Hunting 1, Archery 1 - and then one had Fellowship 1, Healing 2 and the other Fellowship 2, Healing 1.

The players - once they saw they had built two similar PCs - decided that one was the son of the other. The father's description was "A broad-framed knight of early middle age who, while a veteran, has achieved little". The son's description was "Mighty thews [and] long blond hair". The two characters have played in ways that one might expect from those descriptions - the brash son, the calm and sensible father. In play the son has married, on the basis of romantic passion; the father (who it turned out was widowed) has remarried to cement a political alliance between the knights and French nobility.

So even when stats are near-identical, that doesn't mean that the two PCs must or will be the same in play.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I don't really get the points buy = samey thing. Here are three reasons for that.

Usually people are meaning that if someone plays a [race + class + build] combo more than once using point buy, the ability scores are going to come out the same - or at least are encouraged to come out the same because you can choose where to put the points and certain configurations provide benefits compared to other configurations.

What I don't get is how rolling gets a pass just because placing scores with the same order of priority happens to result in different numbers. It's still the "same" even though the volume has been turned up or down compared to point buy depending on how well the rolls went.

 

[pemerton]

Usually people are meaning that if someone plays a [race + class + build] combo more than once using point buy, the ability scores are going to come out the same - or at least are encouraged to come out the same because you can choose where to put the points and certain configurations provide benefits compared to other configurations.

One wizard might be INT/DEX, another INT/CON, another INT/CHA to have social capability, etc. Unless people are playing very "same-y" games I don't think there's a unique optimisation solution for each class.

What I don't get is how rolling gets a pass just because placing scores with the same order of priority happens to result in different numbers. It's still the "same" even though the volume has been turned up or down compared to point buy depending on how well the rolls went.

This I agree with.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think point buy would result in a wider spread of stats if 5E wasn't so focused on maxing out key stats, and so tolerant of dump stats. There just aren't many convincing reasons to spread the love outside of maybe half the stats for a given character (generally DEX/CON plus class stat). I'd like to see actual reasons for fighters to take intelligence, or for a Wizard to take strength. Five Torches Deep manages that to a degree, so it is possible.

 

[Scott Christian]

Character death can be pretty easily mitigated, for one. For another, the notion that most of the game is cannot feasibly be reached hasn't been true in a couple of decades as well. There's a reason 3e is based on a 1 year, 1st to 20th level play model. Now, I don't think it actually achieved that - I think it takes a bit longer - but, it is entirely possible, in 3e, 4e and 5e to reach most of the tiers of play within a fairly short and plausibly short period of time. The game is designed for that to be true.

OTOH, there is nothing actually mitigating the lack of chances of actually playing these classes that are walled behind luck for no particular reason. It's not like a monk or a ranger, or a druid or a paladin is particularly more powerful than any other class. And, any power issues in the class are paid for through the xp tables. So, if the class already pays for any additional power by having a higher xp requirement, what is the justification for restricting its numbers by placing it behind the luck wall?

I agree. Death is easily mitigated. But my claim was that character death is sometimes based on chance, just like character creation rolls. And if you roadblock a character behind rolls (like the old paladin rules), that's roadblocking it behind chance. And higher levels are sometimes roadblocked by death; a string of bad rolls that is also chance.

As far as the 1-20, I have played in a few campaigns that did it - milestones almost every session. Played for approximately one year. And I have been part of campaigns that lasted a year and we reached 8th level. It's all DM discretion in my opinion.

And completely agree on the wall statement. No reason to wall them (I am glad they are not walled). And the older rulesets did have experience points to curve down the power of the walled classes. Both very good points.

 

[Mallus]

I don't really get the points buy = samey thing. Here are three reasons for that.

I don't get it either, Pem. Right now my group is playing Labyrinth Lord over Roll20. Two of us are playing clerics. Mechanical differences in that system are as minimal as they are besid the point.

One cleric an ox of the man; a goodhearted pseudo-Swede stout of the heart, weak of intellect, generally amenable to suggestions. The other is Pontius Pilate who discovered god -- well, Leviathan -- after being kidnapped by Vikings during his exile in Hibernia.

(guess which one I'm playing)

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

One wizard might be INT/DEX, another INT/CON, another INT/CHA to have social capability, etc. Unless people are playing very "same-y" games I don't think there's a unique optimisation solution for each class.

That's why I mentioned build in my earlier post. Not every wizard would be "the same" but every INT/DEX wizard build would be.

 

[pemerton]

Not every wizard would be "the same" but every INT/DEX wizard build would be.

But wouldn't one be trained in (say) Thievery and another in (say) Stealth?

Or even if two are trained in Thievery mightn't one be a parlour magician and another be a thief in the strict sense? Which for wizards would affect their spell choice among other things.

I mean, I guess it's true that two PCs both with high INT and DEX resemble one another in respect of having high INT and DEX but (i) that seems tautologous and (ii) the same thing will be true if those stats were rolled rather than allocated.

I guess it's possible using rolld stats to try and play a INT/DEX wizard whose high stats are CON and CHA. Is that very common? As I posted upthread, my understanding of the earliler D&D rulebooks and my experience in play was that rolled stats served as a soft funnel into class. There was no expectation that people would roll STR 16, INT 9 and try and play that PC as a wizard.