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I have always been a firm believer in the randomness of character generation throughout all of the editions of D&D I have played. It was once a badge of honor to be willing to risk really crappy rolls for the chance of really outstanding rolls. You'd roll your stats and, since you had an outrageously strong grasp of the system, fit your rolls into a character you were comfortable playing. When did that give way to point buys that merely give you the illusion of control?
I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version. It seems to work well enough. How does everyone else handle it?
We did the same method for our first 3.0 game. After a few adventures I added up the stats of all the characters in point buy, took the lowest and told them all to redo their characters with that number of points. It ended up the character with the lowest total was 45 point buy in 3.0 rules. So yeah, no more rolling.
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I do 4d6 drop the lowest exclusively in my home games. Sometimes other "weird" rules get inserted (such as +1d4 to a stat if you roll four-of-a-kind, giving a 1 in 1296 chance of a stat higher than 18), but not often.
The only qualifiers I put on an experienced group is an optional "total modifier at least +1, at least one 14" and a "if your stats are awesome, expect to be the target".
For new players I generally force re-rolls for a total mod < 3 or > 7, or if the don't have at least one 14 or higher. This means they'll have a fairly normal character that is still random so that they know the "baseline" power to compare to for other games.
If a player rolling really really high becomes a problem then I just enforce the 3-7 mod range for everyone. Sometimes I'll up that to 4-8.
The dice gods like to hump me…and not in the good way. I used arrays back in 2e.
I personally prefer 4d6 in a perfect world. But I dont use it. It has cause too many headaches for my game. First and foremost is time. My group has precious little time to get together, when we get to the table we want to game. Character creation has thusly been moved away from the table via email. Dice really doesnt lend itself to this. Even if you have complete trust in your players, if they do actually get the good point and really roll those awesome stats because the dice gods blessed them, there is doubt. And too if you are cursed that day, do you really think your players are going to take those garbage stats and bring them to the table?
But even if you can work that out, there is the issue of disparity. For whatever reason, we had some players that always seemed to roll well at character creation, and others who rolled poorly. The dice were watched, at the table, and no one doubted them. But some characters had clearly better stats. If you have 13 13 14 12 7 5 as your stats and someone else rolls 16 16 18 17 12 and 10, you are going to be upset even if you believe them to be legitimate rolls. We tried adjusting this with all sorts of point systems to move bad dice rolls up and the best dice rolls down. But in the end we realized we were just doing an assbackwards method of point buy. So we cut out the middle man.
I miss the feeling of rolling a characters stats, and I still do it for my npcs sometimes. But in the end, its just not worth the headache it causes for my group.
I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version.
Whatever happened to rolling 3d6 six times in order and letting the dice gods decide?
Oh, right -- someone came up with a better system, and so you used it. :-)
I have always been a firm believer in the randomness of character generation throughout all of the editions of D&D I have played. It was once a badge of honor to be willing to risk really crappy rolls for the chance of really outstanding rolls. You'd roll your stats and, since you had an outrageously strong grasp of the system, fit your rolls into a character you were comfortable playing. When did that give way to point buys that merely give you the illusion of control?
I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version. It seems to work well enough. How does everyone else handle it?
Lately, I've been getting nostalgic for those days, myself, and considered finding or running a game where you rolled 3d6, added them up, and that was your Strength. Followed by rolling 3d6, adding them up, and that was your Intelligence, and so on through Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. In that order. And then you could see what class (or classes) you qualified for, and play that. Rerolls only allowed if you qualified for nothing at all.
Only problem is nobody wants to play that game anymore.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
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I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version. It seems to work well enough. How does everyone else handle it?
It works well... until you get someone at the table with an unlucky streak who rolls rather substantially poorer than the other players. What do you do, then? Do you allow him to re-roll to attempt better stats? What if his new stats are then BETTER than the other players? You could offer the other players re-rolls too, but where does the cycle end? Few people would ever want to play a DEMONSTRABLY handicapped character. Imagine you roll a set of stats where your highest stat is a 13 and most of your stats fall in the 6-10 range. It can certainly happen with 4d6 drop low. It's unlikely, but it DOES happen.
D&D (particularly 3.0 and beyond) is designed with the "CR" system in mind. It makes basic assumptions of player characters' level, skills, and abilities. It also assumes that said characters do not have completely pitiful ability scores. Keeping everyone on the level playing field ensures that the system functions as it should. If you end up with a lot of high stats, the game will be too easy. Too many low stats, and it will be too hard.
I like 3 sets of 4d6, pick the one you like the most and assign as you see fit. I was debating on using point buy, and realized that it would result in at least 1 player (after talking with him) having multiple 7s, a 20 and a 16. After looking over the players rolls, they all range from 18-22 point buy and are a much more ballanced set than anything I would have gotten using point buy. I am really happy I chose to roll.
I think the boards give a biased view in favor of point buy. Its hard to compare builds and characters if you are not using the same baseline. Many of the people I see coming here asking for help are using rolled stats though.
Edit: My players were also happier with their stats, even though they were fewer points and less optimally distributed than if I went with the 25 point buy I was debating. I think its because they had to deal with what they had and could make something acceptable, rather than having total control and then compaining about not having enough points to do what they want.
I have always been a firm believer in the randomness of character generation throughout all of the editions of D&D I have played. It was once a badge of honor to be willing to risk really crappy rolls for the chance of really outstanding rolls. You'd roll your stats and, since you had an outrageously strong grasp of the system, fit your rolls into a character you were comfortable playing. When did that give way to point buys that merely give you the illusion of control?
I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version. It seems to work well enough. How does everyone else handle it?
Lately, I've been getting nostalgic for those days, myself, and considered finding or running a game where you rolled 3d6, added them up, and that was your Strength. Followed by rolling 3d6, adding them up, and that was your Intelligence, and so on through Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. In that order. And then you could see what class (or classes) you qualified for, and play that. Rerolls only allowed if you qualified for nothing at all.
Only problem is nobody wants to play that game anymore.
The problem is that when that was the system stats mattered less. You could roll an 8 or a 15 in str and the only difference was your carrying capacity and bend-bars scores. 16 gave you a +1 to damage. When they evened out the curve in 3.0 they changed the importance of stats, and then they reballanced the game on those new stats. There is also a growing trend to play what you want to play instead of what you are forced to, which has something to do with it.
Occasionally I want to roll the dice and see what I get, so I roll the dice and place them in order. Then I take my points and mimic the rolls as best I can. Sure I don't ever end up with a complete waste of flesh or the pinnacle of human perfection, but it satisfies my urge for randomness.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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I'll direct you a recent extensive thread on a similar topic.
And I'll note that my campaign offers players a choice:
Option One Dice Buy.
You start with 28 six-sided dice. You can buy additional traits with them:
1st trait costs 1 die
2nd trait costs 2 additional dice
3rd trait costs 3 additional dice
4th trait costs 4 additional dice
or you can assign them to attributes. Once you assign them (at least 3d6 per attribute) roll and take the best three. If you roll more than three 6's, special rules apply.
Option Two 4d6 Grid, as created by Asha Greyjoy.
Option Two tends to higher attributes than Option One, because the grid allows you to shuck one or two low rolls. But Option One is better for people who come to the table knowing what they want to play, or who are willing to accept lower stats for additional traits.
While I like the idea of randomly determining character attributes (such as ability scores and hit points). Far too often it happens that a person will get a set of bad rolls that will just mean they will be a fifth wheel until the character is soon killed.
If I could get a combination of random and relative balance between scores, I would prefer that to point-buy. But until then, most dice rolling is way too swingy.
I have always been a firm believer in the randomness of character generation throughout all of the editions of D&D I have played. It was once a badge of honor to be willing to risk really crappy rolls for the chance of really outstanding rolls. You'd roll your stats and, since you had an outrageously strong grasp of the system, fit your rolls into a character you were comfortable playing. When did that give way to point buys that merely give you the illusion of control?
I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version. It seems to work well enough. How does everyone else handle it?
Some of us are more favored by the dice gods than others. I am favored heavily(except for one time). One of my friends on the other hand is cursed. He Never rolls well. It's ok to have crappy stats sometimes, but every time makes the game not fun. I rolled for his last character, and between my blessing and his curse he came up with decent stats, but the dice did not fall like they do when I roll for myself. Point buy also takes away a player's excuse for his character always dying. If everyone has the same stats, and player X is always dead......
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I've seen some amazingly crappy dice rolls using 4d6 drop. Once I saw a guy roll up his character 3 times in a row and the final roll he got was about the same as a 15 point buy. Most everyone else exceptionally well.
I've seen a lot of attempts to fix this but none of them are perfect and most of them generally wind up just increasing the curve overall rather than just helping the guy with the bum rolls.
Maybe 4d6 drop one and your 'mulligan' is 20 point buy? That will undoubtedly skew things higher also but I don't think too much and it eliminates the crappy roller which IMO is worse than the great roller.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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The dice are my enemy when I play, and I vastly prefer a point based system than rolling. But, my players love them their dice, so we use random stat generation to this day. It never fails that one or two players end up with god characters and one or two end up with feebs.
The one saving grace is that, for some strange reason, the dice gods seem to favor noobs - they almost always roll the best stats in the party.
Funny thing is, as a player, I don't mind much one way or the other. It can be fun in fact to roll stats and then make up the character's personality out of it rather than the other way around.
As a GM, I usually insist on point buy, for two reasons.
1) Fairness to the players. I have seen games where one player rolled three 18s and the rest decent stats, and the other player rolled nothing over 10. The party could sit back and let 18 guy do everything, and under-10 gal couldn't accomplish much even when she tried. That's not fair or fun. It's frustrating as hell.
2) Fairness to me. If I give players a reasonable point buy to work with, I know generally what range of abilities they are going to have and can use the monsters and NPCs with a similar range or less accordingly, depending on how they are supposed to interact with the party. If I end up running a game with 3-18-guy and under-10-gal, I have to find some way to keep 3-18-guy from pressing the win button all the time and make sure under-10-gal doesn't feel useless. And in the process if I don't do well I could piss 3-18-guy off for "gimping" him some way, or piss off the average rollers in my party because I'm always paying attention to the two extremes in my group. A good GM will be able to work with this situation, but it's a heck of a lot easier to avoid it altogether by just getting rid of stat rolling to begin with.
When did that give way to point buys that merely give you the illusion of control?
To actually answer the question, what I think happened was the "reroll" button. I blame Pool of Radiance. When it came out, it was really the first CRPG that felt almost like you were playing D&D. At least your could recognize the rules. But in the character generation screen, it would roll stats and give you a list of classes, and if you didn't like them you could hit the reroll button. I think that changed the general mindset of D&D from "want to play what you roll" to "roll what you want to play." Then players would start new characters, roll stats, and say "Well, that's a good Dex, but I really wanted to play a cleric. This guy has a low wisdom, so he kills himself in desperation. I roll again." And repeat as necessary. After a little while of that, DMs figured it wasn't worth it to try to force people to play what they didn't want, so let them move stats around. Well, that led to maxing out physical stats, and everyone but the paladin dumping Charisma. After that, it really seemed pointless to even make people roll at all, so as long as everyone was about even, or at least uneven in the parts that they were comfortable with, might as well make up a metric to keep it fair. The first point-buy systems I played in 2e were all one-for-one, something like 78 total stat points, spent where you want, nothing higher than 18 before racial mods, nothing less than 3 after racial mods. I don't think I've actually ROLLED a character since 3e hit the stands.
But in my opinion, it all started with the reroll button.
On the occassion that I have players roll attributes, I have them roll 2 sets of numbers picking the best set. Each set is roll with two stats rolled with 3d6, two stats at rolled with 2d6+6, and two stats rolled with 1d6+12.
I now typically do the point by as I have seen one of my player roll seven back-to-back number sets that were lower than the 15-point buy.
Personally I use the 4d6 method, but I always give them a set of scores they can pick if they don't roll great. For my current campaign I went with 8 10 12 13 14 16, so yea they got a shot to beat it, but they always got decent scores to fall back on.
In my campaigns, some of us found a system that worked for us...
You roll 4d6, drop the lowest die. You have two choices, however:
Choice 1: Roll 7 times. Keep the best 6 rolls.
Choice 2: Take a free 18, but roll 5 times more for the rest of the stats; no extra roll.
That seems to work all right. I have had one player in my whole life that rolled multiple 18's, so it's rare enough for me to handle it....
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But in my opinion, it all started with the reroll button.
This feels like a pretty astute observation.
One of my friends had a "method" of rolling dice where he'd do the 4d6/drop the lowest method... but he'd sit there rolling dice until he rolled an 18 and THAT would be the first die roll of his character.
Had another friend who wrote a computer program that would generate stats using the 4d6/drop lowest method, but only report on results where the average ability score was 16. Wonder of Wonders, his character ended up with having all 16s for ability scores.
And ANOTHER friend would simply roll up three or four pages of stats (that's about 250 or so characters) and then picked the set he liked the best.
All of which, to me, feels like behavior that was encourage by that pesky reroll button, since all of these "methods" were popular among my college friends at about the time Pool of Radiance and those games first hit.
I rolled a 62 point-buy Whisper Gnome last night. As a result, the universe had a stroke and retroactively inserted point-buy into all RPG systems in a gradual fashion so that such a creature will be looked upon with much derision. Only I know that, until last night, rolling for stats was the only option in every RPG, as arrays or any sort of crude point-buy equivalent was seen as "horridly unfun".
I would like to note that this could have already happened with a kender one of my old gaming group members played and considers his favorite character, if you took his stats at face value. He cheats at his dice, however, so it's all my fault.
I would like to note that I am pleased with this.
Over the years I've become more and more opposed to rolling stats. Your stats stay with you for the entirety of the character's career, and crap rolls will haunt you the entire time. Sure, you can get magic to raise it, but it's still based on your original crap stats. That's just not leading to fun. Especially if you're the only gimp in the group - it's hard to avoid envy which will lead to bitterness, and heads right back to No Fun. Sure, your character can have bad rolls just about any adventuring day, but only stats (and hit points to a lesser degree) can never ever be fixed by a better roll next time (or a cleric). This was less of a problem back in the early days - there weren't that many penalties and bonuses given out for your stats, and many stat boosting items gave you a fixed result, not just a modifier of what you started with. But that's not the game I'm playing now. From 3.x onward, stats matter a lot. It can be fun playing a character with some low stat (I've played a character with a 3 STR before), but that's a choice, not something forced on you by an unlucky roll. I start with a character I want to play, and I build from there. Bad rolls instead of point buy mean that I get stuck with whatever I can salvage with my stats. Once more, No Fun.
Avoid No Fun. Use point buy.
Hopefully I will be starting a new campaign soon, and the each individual player will have the option of point buy or roll. Everyone gets what they want.
I won't use a point buy method in D&D. It has been my experience that rolled stats lead to better results at play time, particularly since 3x came along and made astronomical stats a lot less important. With 3x, you can get magic to improve any stat, stats can improve with level, and you can have the same bonus with 14 that you used to need a rarer 16 for in 1e/2e.
I also find that rolled stats keeps the balance between multi-attribute dependent and single-attribute dependent classes better than point buy which favors the single-attribute dependent classes.
One player in a game I played in only once spent maybe forty-five minutes making a character. The GM let us all roll once and held us to what we rolled for our stats, so, naturally, this guy re-rolled his stat pool as many times as he liked. He always got generally high statistics, but sometimes he wouldn't get high enough, so he'd re-roll. He re-rolled 17 times in a row until he got a stat line he liked.
The best part was this was RIFTS. There is no difference in RIFTS between, say, a 5 and a 15, from what I remember. If you roll a 16, you get to add another d6 to your stat. He re-rolled until he got three stats that were 16 plus-- previous incarnations of the character had only two stats that were 16+, and therefore, unworthy of actual use.
This is why I'm a firm believer in 20-25 point buy. It keeps everyone on the same playing field and lets everyone do what they like with the stats. Characters can have tertiary stats at 14 if they like. People usually start with 18. They like that.
It's why I do average to high HP as well-- roll below half and take half of your die +1. 1 on a d8 turns into a 5, 4 on a d12 turns into a 7. It works out nicely.
It's not until you play someone with stats like this guy that you really begin to appreciate point buy though, I'd imagine.
My groups tend to use three columns of 4d6, drop the lowest and reroll ones. I love to roll, personally. You could end up with utter crap or you could end up with two 18s and a 16. It's all up to the dice.
I like both methods, myself, but the fairness thing (one player rolling well and another horribly) is always an issue, so here's how I avoid that:
Rolling method: 4d6 drop the lowest 7 times, keep highest 6 rolls...but the players all have access to all the sets, and can pick whichever they like. Which tends to mean they all pick the best set, but it also means they're all on even footing. You can do this with any number of dice of course, I simply prefer characters to be heroic so I like them to have good stats.
Point buy method: straight point buy, with the number of points determined by how powerful you want characters to be. Note that I say straight point buy, to differentiate it from the weighted point buy that's used in the core book. Straight point buy is exactly what it sounds like - increasing a stat by 1 point costs 1 point, whether you're increasing from 10 to 11 or from 17 to 18. I hate weighted point buy, because it feels like you're being punished for being really good at something even though the mechanical advantage of increasing from 17 to 18 or from 11 to 12 is the same.
Just for fun:
Strength
3d6
Dexterity
3d6
Constitution
3d6
Intelligence
3d6
Wisdom
3d6
Charisma
3d6Yikes. I guess I'll be a rogue.
Assuming you have to put what you rolled in order. Many of us don't :)
I hate weighted point buy, because it feels like you're being punished for being really good at something even though the mechanical advantage of increasing from 17 to 18 or from 11 to 12 is the same.
Hear hear! That's what I loathe about point buy systems as well. What, I'm punished for wanting an 18?
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I have run one too many games where you have the uber character and the guy who is barely above a commoner and trying to balance it all out to have any nostalgia for rolled stats as a DM. As a player, I'll take anything. Don't care. But for running the game, I dislike rolled stats. I do really like the system that RE and I came up with and will be using that for the next game I run.
Point buy vs rolling is something that needs to be decided upon between the GM and that particular group of players...I don't think any one way is the right one, and for me at least, it largely depends on the campaign style I'm playing.
For old times sake though, let's give this a whirl...
Edit: Whelp, looks like Wizard for me...
And ANOTHER friend would simply roll up three or four pages of stats (that's about 250 or so characters) and then picked the set he liked the best.
My group actually has this sheet. We were on a long food break, so my wife and I sat there talking, rolling and writing the rolls down. 4d6, reroll 1s, drop lowest. That's what our group used for games, so that's what we rolled. It's 2-3 pages worth of rolls of all kinds arranged into groups of six. When you make a new character, you can grab off the sheet. Just circle your set and it's of limits for the next time.
Seems to work for us. But then again, our group isn't a point buy group.
