We've used the 4d6 method for over twenty years, 2nd ed and 3.5.
For our latest AP we used the points method and it's working well.
With a limited number to spend you don't get super characters, but having to carefully plan your build does make you care about them, and feel some involvement with them.
DBH
In general rolled stats are going to have a much bigger impact at low levels than high levels. Not that the difference ever goes away, but the more levels you get, the more your character's power is coming from class abilities, feats, and magic items rather than their own innate ability score.
Personally I think there's much more danger of one or two particularly lucky rolled characters steamrolling their way through challenges (particularly early on) than there is in the party being set up to fail.
This:
Personally I think there's much more danger of one or two particularly lucky rolled characters steamrolling their way through challenges (particularly early on) than there is in the party being set up to fail.
But you could always allow the "lesser" characters to be re-rolled once, to see if it evens out.
And in time, these things can be evened out with tomes, girdles, bracers, that sort of thing.
I will be switching over to point-based stats for future games. I did allow one character to "rebuild" her halfling after she rolled quite poorly. I mean, she had fewer "points" than if she'd been on a 15 point build, and that was even after I increased a couple stats and let her run it that way for a couple games.
Mind you, I prefer higher-stats with my PCs because it improves survivability, so I'll be going with the 25-point runs (though I also tend to run campaigns instead of one-shot adventures). I've noticed that a good set of rolls ends up with around 30 points, so having players use a 25-point build ensures a character that is powerful without either being over-the-top... or crippled in the case of bad rolls.
And seeing that players can increase stats every 4 levels, there's a gradual progression in power in any case.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Our group rolls 4d6 seven times, dropping the lowest d6 from each score and dropping the lowest score overall.
Fortunately we've been able to compensate for the elevated ability scores with our poor tactical acumen so everything has come out balanced in the end.
|
My group rolled 4d6 and we ended up with a range between 12 and I'm remembering 34? point characters. We're a large group so I'm campaigning hard for set arrays (like everyone gets the elite array) or 15 point characters because balancing encounters with that amount of dispersion is hard (and made harder by having extra PCs).
Even at 13th level with all the wealth and class-abilities that go with that, the 34 point Sorcerer is fundamentally hardier than the 14 point Wizard is. The 12 point rogue can't contribute in combat the way the 25 point fighter can.
Rolling ability scores amounts to 5 minutes of excitement when you're rolling in exchange for potentially being stuck with a sidekick type character for a campaign that could take years of twice a week games.
|
I had my players roll for ability scores (4d6, drop the lowest, assign as desired).
But I then let them pick whoever's array they want. So if Adam rolls a great set, Bob and Cathy can use his instead of the ones they rolled themselves. In my experience, it's faster than allocating points and more flexible than a set array, but still keeps parity between the players.
In my Rise of the Runelords game, two players took one array and the third player kept her own. Interestingly, the popular set had a great score, some good ones, and a 7. So they're actually both legitimately bad at things, which has added both some depth to their characters and some comic relief.
Cheers!
Landon
I've often found the only way to really roll a character is 3d6 straight down the line. Any other method is for wimps and parasprites.
How about subjecting the players to an exhaustive battery of tests and requiring that they play characters with their "real world" attributes.
STR - This is easy. Find out how much weight each player can lift over their head. Look up weight as maximum load to find strength.
DEX - Test of acrobatics. See how far the player can jump. They can have as many tries as they want so it'll be the equivalent of taking 20.
CON - Time how long the player can hold his/her breath. # seconds/6 = rounds. A player can hold his/her breath for twice their CON score in rounds.
INT - Crafting contest. Require each player to craft something they have no experience making. You decide what DC they hit and can back out their INT modifier and hence INT.
WIS - Perception test. Blindfold the player and have someone gradually walk closer to them. Have the person stop when the blindfolded player can hear them. DC to hear someone walking is 10 +1/10 feet. Assume the player takes 10.
CHA - Diplomacy. Have the player dress as a bum and try to get change from strangers. Consider strangers to be unfriendly and getting change a DC 20 task. Have them proposition 20 strangers and from their success rate you can back out their CHA modifier.
My real world stats are:
STR 10, DEX 8, CON 8, INT 4, WIS 12, CHA 3
Heh. 18 is STILL a big deal. =^-^=
It's just that a 12 or 14 is no longer a wasted stat as it was in 1st and 2nd edition AD&D. Seriously, the ONLY stat in which a 14 was at all useful was Wisdom. This is why people learned to min/max. After all, when even a 17 is of limited usefulness in Strength... well, you're going to try and maximize every benefit.
But what's nice is how Paizo realized humans (and their half-brethren) needed a boost of their own and gave them a +2 to any one stat. All at once, humanity became a race that can be exceptional at the very start; it's an aspect that was lost with 3rd edition D&D when anyone could reach level 20 in any class and humanity's cry to fame was one extra feat and a couple skill points. In some ways... Pathfinder is to 3rd edition D&D what AD&D 1st edition is to D&D Basic.
Since I was knee high to a Spriggan we've done what we refer to as the "ace" method. It was put forward by my friend Ace ().
We were always bummed out about not qualifying for a class we wanted to play, but we lumped it and moved on to be disintegrated in I3 anyway. So Ace, at the tender age of 13 thought...what if we rolled our stats up so that we could qualify for what we wanted? Of course Jack, our GM, immediately began putting his dice in the bag to be used as a bludgeon to smote the young Ace. But curiosity stayed his dice bag...
We all still liked the frightful randomness of 3d6. But for two scores we would roll 1d4+13. The remaining four scores would be rolled straight down at 3d6. It would almost guarantee that you could qualify for the class you wanted (). But it also left in the...oh man I just rolled a 6 for Dexterity and a 7 for Wisdom...that's gonna be crazy. And, it didn't give anyone a way to cheese their way into an 18 short of a triple 6, as the gods intended.
I've recently begun to answer the siren's call for point-buy. But the Ace Method will get you where you want to go.
I'm a huge advocate of 20 point buy. But, if you guys like the 4d6b3 method (which, on average, will produce ~19 point value builds, even when you consider comically bad rolls which would be valued very, very low), I say go for it! I doubt you're really setting up for failure at high levels. With 20 point buy, my campaign so far has had about 6 PC deaths, so if you get that many or less, you're doing fine. Final session is tomorrow (in which I expect maybe 1-2 more deaths, but I'd not count those, with 9th level spells, death is nearly guaranteed) - but the point is 6 over the course of a campaign is slightly worse than average I'd guess (our other full campaigns have had like 2 and 4 respectively, IIRC), but still not devastating. Once the party gets access to resurrection, death is merely a setback. This campaign has loads of wealth (including several scrolls of raise dead, resurrection and even a couple scrolls of true resurrection), so the party should be able to afford it easily.
|
I prefer point buy systems, only because it places everyone on an even playing field. Inevitably, you have one person whose dice are hot, and that one guy who always rolls bad. While that's not that big of a deal on a day-to-day basis, stat rolls are a different beast. You're locked into these numbers for the life of the character!
The most creative random generation method I came up with was towards the end of 2nd Edition, when I was getting ready to run some friends through Return to the Tomb of Horrors. 5d4+6, drop the lowest two. That gave you an average roll of about 15 or so, and had a damn good shot of giving you a much higher roll than that. It's a bit overpowered, but hey, they were heading into a meat grinder. Superheroes only, please!
The best part of that? One of my friends - naturally, the one who always rolled badly - got a 9 on his very first roll with this system. It's not astronomical odds that this would happen, but still...
I had a new player for the tabletop game roll three sets of stats. Three, because the first two were rolling really low. After I took her dice and rolled them a bit, I noticed two of them kept rolling 2s. Every. Single. Time. So I put them aside and pulled out dice from further down... told them to roll nicely, and she ended up with a character that would have been a 32 point build. (Interestingly, she didn't go for uber-high stats with the +2 to one stat. Instead, she increased one of the lower stats. End result was a character without a single stat above 17... or below 14.)
Due to the vagaries of die-rolling, I'm going to have all future characters built on 25 points. It's an epic-level character stat run (which works for the campaigns as I run them through APs instead of one-shot adventures) but it works, and ensures some level of equality between the characters. Whether they're the type to have a couple high stats and many lower stats... or 14s almost down the line. ;)
When I let my players roll their stats, I use a method I picked up from one of the 3.x DMGs called "Organic". This one starts as the usual 4d6, best of 3, but you take all the stats rolled in order (so the first roll goes to Strength, etc.). After rolling all six stats, you're allowed to reroll one result (but you have to take the new roll), and you can make a single swap. Except for that one swap, you don't get to rearrange the results.
The reroll and swap allows players to get the type of character they were wanting to get (so you don't have to play, say, a cleric with a 13 Wisdom), but you also get atypical results that encourage characterization (like having a wizard with a 16 Strength).
In my current campaign, we're using 2d4+10, 2d4+9, 2d4+8, 2d4+7, 2d4+6, 2d4+5, arrange as desired. It should average 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 but be a bit more organic and allow MAD classes to compete. Seems OK so far.