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I am a beginner GM. Yes I admit it, I'm not an uber knowledgeable RPG guru. The first time I played any sort of tabletop RPG was earlier this year when a friend of mine at collage convinced me and another friend to try it. I tried DMing once, but trying to remember which stats were in which books, figuring out all the stuff related to multiclassing, and especially trying to understand how a grapple worked just confused the heck out of me. (but to be fair, it confused my DM too. It was an unofficial house rule that you just didn't grapple). Through all of the games I played in, and even the ones I GM now, all players role dice to determine their stats. Now the thing I like about this is that it gives them a nice pool of generally decent numbers to pick from, and for some reason everyone in my groups generally rolls nearly identical sets of stats to pick from (one 18, one 16, two 13 or 14s, and eleven, and either a twelve or a 8-9).
Now until recently, I've never even TOUCHED the point system when making characters for a campaign. (I have played around with it on test characters though). But then, something rather strange happened. One of my players got three 18s, a 17, a 16, and a 14. I just gaped at his stats, but I let him keep them because I know he didn't cheat. In the very same session, another character rolled terribly sucky stats. I don't remember exactly, but it was something like a 9, a 10, two 12s, and maybe a 13 or two (something terrible like that). This wasn't their first session, so they knew that the dice rolls are law when generating characters, so there wasn't any complaining for the most part. But it just seems so imbalanced sometimes, leaving it up to the dice. I'm even debating using the point system for our next campaign just to avoid something like this in the future.
Now for what I'm getting at. Which system do you guys think is better, a dice rolling method, or the points method? And why?