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<blockquote data-quote="EternalDungeonMaster" data-source="post: 7984083" data-attributes="member: 75401">As an active D&amp;D 5e DM, I don't use dice rolling for ability scores in my game. Firstly, on average, what does it really get you? If you use the 5e standard array of [15,14,13,12,10,8] as representative of a typical point-buy character (remember, the standard array is built using the 27-point point buy method), that gives you 72 total ability score points. If you roll 4d6 (drop the lowest) six times, which I suspect is the most common method of rolling ability scores in D&amp;D, you end up with an average of approximately 73.5 total ability score points. Frankly, there isn't much difference there.Most importantly, though, it puts too much weight on the DM. If a player rolls substandard scores, the weight falls on the DM to decide that the character is unplayably weak. If a player were to roll all 3s, that's a no-brainer. Reroll. If a player were to roll all 5s or all 7s, also a no-brainer. Reroll. What if the player rolled all 10s, though? Not an exciting D&amp;D character, but is it unplayable? Surely, the player wouldn't want to play that character and would be looking to his or her DM to nix it and allow a reroll.What about on the other end? What if the player rolled all 18s? Is it okay for the DM to say that the character is too powerful and would unbalance the campaign? Imagine if you accomplished the miraculous, staggeringly improbable act of rolling all 18s for a character and the DM told you that you had to reroll.So if we're asking DMs to adjudicate a rolled character as being either too weak or too powerful, what we're really saying is that we need a mechanism for determining the acceptable upper and lower bounds of character ability scores. Well, we already have that. It's call a point buy method.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EternalDungeonMaster, post: 7984083, member: 75401"] As an active D&D 5e DM, I don't use dice rolling for ability scores in my game. Firstly, on average, what does it really get you? If you use the 5e standard array of [15,14,13,12,10,8] as representative of a typical point-buy character (remember, the standard array is built using the 27-point point buy method), that gives you 72 total ability score points. If you roll 4d6 (drop the lowest) six times, which I suspect is the most common method of rolling ability scores in D&D, you end up with an average of approximately 73.5 total ability score points. Frankly, there isn't much difference there. Most importantly, though, it puts too much weight on the DM. If a player rolls substandard scores, the weight falls on the DM to decide that the character is unplayably weak. If a player were to roll all 3s, that's a no-brainer. Reroll. If a player were to roll all 5s or all 7s, also a no-brainer. Reroll. What if the player rolled all 10s, though? Not an exciting D&D character, but is it unplayable? Surely, the player wouldn't want to play that character and would be looking to his or her DM to nix it and allow a reroll. What about on the other end? What if the player rolled all 18s? Is it okay for the DM to say that the character is too powerful and would unbalance the campaign? Imagine if you accomplished the miraculous, staggeringly improbable act of rolling all 18s for a character and the DM told you that you had to reroll. So if we're asking DMs to adjudicate a rolled character as being either too weak or too powerful, what we're really saying is that we need a mechanism for determining the acceptable upper and lower bounds of character ability scores. Well, we already have that. It's call a point buy method. [/QUOTE]

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