I recently had a pang of nostalgia for some old style AD&D adventures and so we created some new characters to run through such classics as the Village of Hommlet and the Keep on the Borderlands.
So I got the players to roll characters, after playing around with different methods for a while, I came up with this system which seems to work well and so far all the players are happy with it. I call it High-Low Pairs.
The basics are you roll 4d6 dropping the lowest 12 times. Then you take the highest number and add pair it with the lowest, then second highest with second lowest and so on until you have 6 pairs. The player can then choose any 3 pairs to use for their six attributes, arranged as they see fit.
So far it seems to work pretty well, allowing all the players to create the character they want and seems about on par with the standard 4d6 method.
Here is an example:
Bob wants to play a big brutish Barbarian, so he rolls his 12 sets of dice:
16, 10, 16, 6, 14, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 12, 15
Arrange as pairs:
1) 16 & 6
2) 16 & 7
3) 16 & 10
4) 15 & 10
5) 14 & 12
6) 14 & 13
So as you can see, apart from the two low rolls, Bob got lucky. Now he wanted to play a huge Barbarian, so he takes the top 3 pairs.
For 16,16,16,10,7,6.
Now if he was wanting to play a more rounded character, he might instead of gone for pairs 3, 5 and 6:
For 16,14,14,13,12,10.
Have a play and see what you think, I like the system and so far so do the players.
Seems like that would work out about as well as the point-buy system, only with a tiny bit more randomness.