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I think something like this could be fun if the campaign was designed around this and the players understood that there would be a high character turn-over rate. At that point, it would be less about story and more about "how long can I make this character live". There is a place for this type of game, but it has to be the right place.Sounds like Dwarf Fortress.
Or DayZ.
the campaign would have to be altered to account for the lack of wealthWhy is it that WBL slaves seem so incapable of understanding that not using WBL does NOT necessarily mean LESS treasure?Well, one reason is that having too much wealth tends to break campaigns hard, in a way that too little wealth doesn't.
To use one of two extremes, a 20th level fighter with the wealth of a 1st level character is still a very effective fighter. vs
On the other extreme, a 1st level fighter with the wealth of a 20th level fighterMost experimental game masters are smart/experienced enough to know this; if they're going to abandon WBL, it usually means they're trying to run a low-equipment game, because that provides a different kind of fun that will last more than an hour or two.
Your comparison is flawed.
Crafting at best can give double WBL. And that is with a GM that only grants treasure that is easy to convert to crafting supplies; coins only. So truly your level one fighter will have too little money for even a simple magic item. And by 20th your power increase by ignoring WBL will be less than a full CR point in all but the most extreme cases.
PS: your point is valid even if your reasoning doesn't hold. BUT how can you know if the GM intends to give too much or too little treasure, that is a huge assumption.
Your comparison is flawed.Crafting at best can give double WBL.
Who said anything about crafting? We were discussing a campaign in which WBL rules don't apply, which simply means that the GM doesn't intend to follow the guidelines. My level 1 fighter might have won a million gp in the Publisher's Castinghouse Giveaway, money that he spent on a +10 sword and a belt of physical omnipotence.
BUT how can you know if the GM intends to give too much or too little treasure, that is a huge assumption.
I don't. I simply point out that it is much, much easier for a GM to break a campaign by giving out too much treasure than too little. Most experienced GMs know this already, which by itself justifies an assumption that a GM who intends to ignore the WBL guidelines is either looking for a Monty Hall game that he knows will be fun-but-extremely-short, or is intending to play out a low-wealth game --- and most GMs find the Monty Hall scenarios less fun than their players do, because they're difficult to run.
Reversing this observation turns it into a word of advice -- if you're going to ignore WBL, you still want to stay on the low side as if you inflate the wealth level, it's very likely to break the game. An experienced GM probably already knows this.
Your comparison is flawed.Crafting at best can give double WBL.
Who said anything about crafting? We were discussing a campaign in which WBL rules don't apply, which simply means that the GM doesn't intend to follow the guidelines. My level 1 fighter might have won a million gp in the Publisher's Castinghouse Giveaway, money that he spent on a +10 sword and a belt of physical omnipotence.
BUT how can you know if the GM intends to give too much or too little treasure, that is a huge assumption.I don't. I simply point out that it is much, much easier for a GM to break a campaign by giving out too much treasure than too little. Most experienced GMs know this already, which by itself justifies an assumption that a GM who intends to ignore the WBL guidelines is either looking for a Monty Hall game that he knows will be fun-but-extremely-short, or is intending to play out a low-wealth game --- and most GMs find the Monty Hall scenarios less fun than their players do, because they're difficult to run.
Reversing this observation turns it into a word of advice -- if you're going to ignore WBL, you still want to stay on the low side as if you inflate the wealth level, it's very likely to break the game. An experienced GM probably already knows this.
I disagree with that assumption... if x2 WBL isn't worth a CR adjustment then you would have to go to absurd extremes in generosity to break the game... oh wait you DID have to go to absurd extremes to try to prove your point. If you are using a standard adventure path then it breaks if you go too far in either direction. HOWEVER if you are generating customized adventures then WBL can't break your game because you are hopefully keeping the rewards and challenges balanced yourself.
I disagree with that assumption... if x2 WBL isn't worth a CR adjustment then you would have to go to absurd extremes in generosity to break the game... oh wait you DID have to go to absurd extremes to try to prove your point.
Well, I disagree with your assumption that x2 WBL isn't worth a CR adjustment, and there are several reasons for that.
*) the x2 WBL is largely unachievable (partly for the reasons that you note in terms of exchange rates and so forth)
*) the developers specifically recommend that crafters not be allowed to achieve x2 WBL by restricting the amount you're allowed to spend on crafted items. For example, if you're allowed to spend only 20% of your wealth on crafted arms and armor, you can get up to 120% WBL, but not 200%. The reason for this is because the developers know that too much wealth breaks the game.
*) most importantly, the x2 WBL isn't free. It costs you at least a feat, if not several. The effect becomes, for example, that you're trading a +1 to hit for a cheaper enchanted weapon for a +1 to hit that you could get through an appropriate feat like Weapon Focus (or another set of actions from Leadership). So crafting doesn't power you up as much as it's another direction in which you can take your power.
Now, you're of course right that a first level character with the WBL of a 20th level demigod is a thought-experiment designed to show what the issues are. But that's the point of an illustrative example, to illustrate.
HOWEVER if you are generating customized adventures then WBL can't break your game because you are hopefully keeping the rewards and challenges balanced yourself.
... except that you can't keep the challenges balanced unless you also keep the rewards balanced, which basically sneaks the WBL guidelines in through the back door. If the rewards are not limited, then there's nothing wrong with the amulet of physical omnipotence in the hands of a first level fighter. Nothing, that is, except that there's few if any challenges you can present to that character. Any standard monster from the bestiary that can take the kind of hit that character will dish out will turn around and kill him. Any creature other than a pure bruiser with that kind of combat ability will probably also have obscenely high magic abilities which he cannot resist. Essentially, the character is balanced on the edge of a razor blade between boring and dead.
Now, you can keep this from happening by controlling the level of the rewards. The more tightly you restrict what the character can get, the wider the blade gets. But this is basically just getting back to WBL: a set of guidelines describing that "these monsters that we list as CR 8 expect that you'll be able to hit <this> hard, deal <this> much damage, take <this> much damage, and have a fifty/fifty shot of making a saving throw of <this> DC, which you can get with <this> level of money."
I disagree with that assumption... if x2 WBL isn't worth a CR adjustment then you would have to go to absurd extremes in generosity to break the game...
Oh, and by the way, the developers also point out that increased wealth is worth a CR adjustment.
Specifically, there are two different wealth by level tables, the NPC WBL table and the PC WBL table. An NPC with only NPC class levels (e.g. warrior, adept) is CR level-2. An NPC with PC class levels is CR level - 1. But an NPC with PC class levels and equipped to the PC WBL table has a CR equal to his level, reflecting the additional power her toys grant.
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OK if mr GM isn't using WBL and gives out a bit too much... lets say the 3rd level fighter acquires a shiney +3 sword. The point I am making is the no-WBL GM doesn't have to craft 101 ways to have that sword stolen... he can simply adjust the challenge up a little by for example adjusting upward all the monster ACs to remove the edge till the PC is a higher level. Simple elegant and the player gets to keep having fun with his cool sword while the game remains challenging. WBL quickly becomes the problem rather than the solution in GM balanced games.
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OK if mr GM isn't using WBL and gives out a bit too much... lets say the 3rd level fighter acquires a shiney +3 sword. The point I am making is the no-WBL GM doesn't have to craft 101 ways to have that sword stolen... he can simply adjust the challenge up a little by for example adjusting upward all the monster ACs to remove the edge till the PC is a higher level. Simple elegant and the player gets to keep having fun with his cool sword while the game remains challenging. WBL quickly becomes the problem rather than the solution in GM balanced games.
I can't +1 this hard enough.
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OK if mr GM isn't using WBL and gives out a bit too much... lets say the 3rd level fighter acquires a shiney +3 sword. The point I am making is the no-WBL GM doesn't have to craft 101 ways to have that sword stolen... he can simply adjust the challenge up a little by for example adjusting upward all the monster ACs to remove the edge till the PC is a higher level. Simple elegant and the player gets to keep having fun with his cool sword while the game remains challenging. WBL quickly becomes the problem rather than the solution in GM balanced games.
Er,...
The game master in a WBL games doesn't have to craft ways to have the sword stolen, either. He can simply change the amount of treasure that the monsters "drop," for a while to bring the party back in line with the guidelines, more simply still, change the monsters themselves. Some monster types tend to be quite valuable (dragons and NPC humanoids), while others (animals, constructs, vermin, mindless undead) tend not to have treasure at all. So simply sending the party to play for a while in the Castle of Zombies in the middle of Spider Gorge is an easy way of dealing with too much money.
Upping the monsters stats is a poor way of handling it, because it's much harder to balance. If all you do is take a standard CR3 monster and add two points of AC to it, you're just making it that much more difficult on the rogue and the cleric. And if the cleric has +4 armor instead of a +3 sword, for party balance reasons, you now have to add several points to the monster's attack bonus, which comes back to hurt the fighter.
Alternatively, you could simply say that the third level party with 5th level equipment is now equivalent to a 4th level party. The problem is : they're not. Even with the additional toys, they're under hit points for 4th level party, so an encounter that would knock the party down 1/4 of their hit points is likely to do the same amount of damage, but that would be 1/3 of their hit points instead. The combat will be much swingier (larger dice, thrown more often), and the chance of death or a TPK is much greater.
Which is basically what I've been saying.
The game master in a WBL games doesn't have to craft ways to have the sword stolen, either. He can simply change the amount of treasure that the monsters "drop," for a while to bring the party back in line with the guidelines, more simply still, change the monsters themselves. Some monster types tend to be quite valuable (dragons and NPC humanoids), while others (animals, constructs, vermin, mindless undead) tend not to have treasure at all. So simply sending the party to play for a while in the Castle of Zombies in the middle of Spider Gorge is an easy way of dealing with too much money.
Upping the monsters stats is a poor way of handling it, because it's much harder to balance. If all you do is take a standard CR3 monster and add two points of AC to it, you're just making it that much more difficult on the rogue and the cleric. And if the cleric has +4 armor instead of a +3 sword, for party balance reasons, you now have to add several points to the monster's attack bonus, which comes back to hurt the fighter.
Alternatively, you could simply say that the third level party with 5th level equipment is now equivalent to a 4th level party. The problem is : they're not. Even with the additional toys, they're under hit points for 4th level party, so an encounter that would knock the party down 1/4 of their hit points is likely to do the same amount of damage, but that would be 1/3 of their hit points instead. The combat will be much swingier (larger dice, thrown more often), and the chance of death or a TPK is much greater.
Which is basically what I've been saying.
Ok so your idea of a better solution is to stick fanatically to WBL and frustrate your players with no treasure while NOT solving the problem of increased character effectiveness at all till the level equals out?! I fail to see how that is in ANY WAY better than a small mirco adjustment to monster stats for a few levels. WBL becomes the coffin in which many unskilled GMs bury themselves.
Also... parties usually split treasure equally. If yours doesn't which SEEMS to be what you are implying then NO method will work to balance things for your group. You don't have to stomp on any advantage your PCs get as you seem to think I am suggesting... if the fighter has two better hit chance then up the monster AC by one keep things to a balance NOT make the monsters always better! Or was that your attempt at a strawman?
Also you are right a 3rd level party with 5th level gear is NOT a 4th level party which is WHY micro adjustments work SO much better than tossing an entire CR increase at them.
Ok so your idea of a better solution is to stick fanatically to WBL and frustrate your players with no treasure while NOT solving the problem of increased character effectiveness at all till the level equals out?! I fail to see how that is in ANY WAY better than a small mirco adjustment to monster stats for a few levels. WBL becomes the coffin in which many unskilled GMs bury themselves.
Shrug. If you want to misinterpret what I wrote that way, go ahead.
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Also... parties usually split treasure equally. If yours doesn't which SEEMS to be what you are implying then NO method will work to balance things for your group. You don't have to stomp on any advantage your PCs get as you seem to think I am suggesting... if the fighter has two better hit chance then up the monster AC by one keep things to a balance NOT make the monsters always better!
Evidently you weren't reading very closely. You suggested that the fighter had an (overpowered) +3 sword. I'm not sure how a four person party is supposed to split a single sword evenly, but perhaps the wizard will keep the cross-guard?
What I assume, instead, is that the fighter has a +3 sword, and everyone else has someone equally overpowered; I singled out the idea that the cleric had +4 armor, which is approximately balanced against a +3 sword. And I specifically suggested that you add 2 points of AC to the monster, because the fighter has 3 points better to hit chance. If you don't like those numbers, you can adjust them as you see fit; the point is that these microadjustments will not be balanced across the party, and that's true no matter what number you actually pick,
For example, the fighter will be able to hit the monster more effectively, so you adjust the AC. But this makes the rogue, the cleric, and the mage all less able to hit the monster. The cleric is more likely to defend himself against the monster's onslaught, so you up the monster's attack bonus. Now he's hitting the fighter, rogue, and mage more often (and hence for more damage). Make any adjustment you like to allow for the mage's powerup, perhaps granting him betters save to make up for the headband of intellect -- now he can more easily resist the cleric's spells as well. Because the increase in power is not well-balanced, the party members as individuals and the party as a whole are less balanced, and therefore more fragile.
Assume that the monster gets lucky, and rolls a critical hit on the cleric, not an unreasonable assumption over several fights. At this point, the monster is now overpowered for everyone still standing, as he's set up to be a challenge to a character with AC higher than anyone else in the group. We can even put some numbers to this if you like. Assuming armor four points higher than WBL, a +2 attack bonus would be appropriate.
That +2 bonus would essentially let the monster Power Attack "for free," giving him a net +4 to every hit he makes in combat. If the monster doesn't have power attack, it still enhances his damage bonus by 10%, which I estimate as 1-2 points per round, against foes that are not built to take the extra damage. It also make the chances of another critical hit 10% more likely, et cetera, et cetera. Damage in Pathfinder is already swingy, by design. This upgrade makes it much more so.
And swings kill characters. Once one character goes down, the rest tend to fall like bowling pins.
This, in my experience, is what causes problems for unskilled GMs. Most GMs don't realize that average DR isn't what kills characters and parties, but the long tails. Increasing WBL makes characters more powerful on average, but also more random. Higher level, by contrast, tends to increase character's staying power and therefore makes them less random. The WBL level guidelines are written to keep the variations large enough to be exciting but small enough to be manageable.
Increasing wealth past the guidelines, then, makes it much more likely that a conspiracy by the dice will kill everyone in the party. Which isn't fun. Decreasing wealth below the guidelines, in contrast, makes the combats much more predictable, possibly to the point of boring.
And my solution? My primary suggestion is that you understand the implications of what you're doing. Yes, it's possible to make adjustments to the monsters, making them more powerful, to challenge the more-powerful party. It's also a bad idea unless you have an idea how you're going to deal with the increased variance (to use the technical term). If you think it would be more fun for your group to have them face ever-more-powerful monsters until the dice give you a TPK, it's your group. But don't pretend that the increased variance isn't an issue, because the dice don't care what you think.
No no no... I see part of our disconnect. It looked to me like you were suggesting that ONLY the fighter has an attack bonus and ONLY the cleric has better armor. When I was trying to say that it is far more likely they have a mix of bonuses divided by the group. Perhaps the rogue has a +1 and a +2 short sword? The cleric a +1 mace? What I am saying it if the party is dividing loot like most do then these bonuses usually aren't wildly different. I am also saying you don't need to make the monster better than the party... that would be foolish. If the party has on average 1 point better to hit and 2 points better armor the perhaps only a 1 point bump to attack OR AC would be needed to keep things properly challenging. This works FAR better than withholding treasure till the problem goes away on it's own. In that case your dreaded variance is MUCH higher, I wonder that you can't see that.
I see part of our disconnect. It looked to me like you were suggesting that ONLY the fighter has an attack bonus and ONLY the cleric has better armor. When I was trying to say that it is far more likely they have a mix of bonuses divided by the group.
Most parties, in my experience, don't do it that way. They hoard magic items, instead. Which makes sense; if you should get a +5 sword, it's much more valuable as a +5 sword than it is as 25,000gp worth of miscellaneous magic items and coins. If nothing else saving and using the sword as a sword saves you the 50% haircut that you would take from selling it.
So that may indeed be our disconnect. In my experience, the party would have killed the Black Baron of Binding-on-the-Crotch and split his equipment: the +3 sword to the fighter, the +4 armor to the cleric, the Codpiece of Allure to the sorcerer, and the Ring of Unending Pain to the rogue.
Even if you gave them the equivalent in cash, though, they still tend to specialize. The fighter wants a magic weapon to optimize his damage-dealing, but the cleric wants magic armor to protect him, and of course the sorcerer neither needs nor wants armor, and in fact wouldn't take it if you gave it to him.
I am also saying you don't need to make the monster better than the party... that would be foolish. If the party has on average 1 point better to hit and 2 points better armor the perhaps only a 1 point bump to attack OR AC would be needed to keep things properly challenging.
But that's assuming that the party average is a meaningful number. It isn't. (E.g., the average person has almost exactly one testicle.) Unless the party has been scrupulously spending money to cover their weaknesses instead of improving their strengths (which they usually won't), the extra money goes to make people farther from the average, not nearer. The fighter, who is already good at melee combat, gets even better. By extension, the sorcerer gets comparatively worse, because he's spending his money on other items.
As an illustrative if unrealistic example, if the fighter gets a +12 to hit, then the party average attack bonus went up by +3. In practical terms, though, it means that anything that the fighter might realistically miss, no one else can realistically hit. You get the same effect with the overpowered +3 sword, but it just takes more combats to make the effect blatantly obvious.
The net effect is, as I pointed out, is greater variance. When the fighter goes down, possibly from his failed will save that the sword does not boost, no one else can touch the BBEG.
This works FAR better than withholding treasure till the problem goes away on it's own. In that case your dreaded variance is MUCH higher, I wonder that you can't see that.
Well, I try very hard not to see things that aren't there. If there's some reason that fighting spiders and zombies will enhance the variance of combat that fighting dragons will not, I invite you to be more explicit.
But given the ways costs are structured, if you gave the cash equivalent of a +3 sword (18,000gp), the fighter probably won't buy a +3 sword. He'll get a +2 sword(8,000gp), +3 armor(9,000gp) or (+2 armor & +2 shield(8000gp) and still have some cash left for consumables or trinkets.
And the sorcerer will take none of them.
The others will do similar things. Then they'll all be closer to each other.
No, the sorcerer will do entirely different things. As will the cleric. And they'll be farther apart from each other. Do you really think the sorcerer needs a +3 sword, a +2 shield, and a suit of enchanted armor? Is the sorcerer going to push his attack rolls?
The effect is to push the entire party further into their specialized niches when they don't have the secondary abilities to provide survivability. The result is that when the fighter is trying to face something appropriate for him and is taken down by the variance, nothing else can stand in the gap.
At more balanced WBL -- meaning, at a higher level where the +3 sword is appropriate -- the sorcerer has a better variety of defensive abilities that came automatically in the process of levelling up. He's got better skills, better saves, a broader spell base, and so forth. He'll still not be able to go toe-to-to with whatever bruiser took out the fighter, but he's got a lot more abilities at his disposal that he can use to save himself and the rest of the party.
And guess what? You'll still have fun, and once you are used to it, you may even love them more than Optimised Wizard number 352.
Or not. A friend of mine, for example, insists on playing a caster in any fantasy RPG he plays. His not-unreasonable argument is that he's into the FRPGs for the fantasy stuff, and he gets enough mundane realism at his job.
Telling him roll-stats-in-order-and-learn-to-love-your-fighter is not especially helpful. Or fun. Or advice I would myself accept. Or anything except, in my opinon, the indicia of a power-crazed and unskilled Game Master who neither knows nor cares about his players.
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My current campaign was 4d6 (discard one) but rolled in order (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha) - players suddenly had to play characters with weaknesses, which some moaned about. But they are now 6-7th level and having a great time.
I'll be blunt, I hate point buy systems because they encourage bland character design and dump stats.
Interesting. Characters with weaknesses are good, but dump stats are bad.
Also, have them pick their class and race BEFORE they roll stats.
Older versions of D&D had prime requisites (and thus had you pick class after rolling) or a reason... some classes really can't be played if you roll certain stats.
In Pathfinder, while this may be less the case in general, it can be doubly true for spellcasters... since you need an ability score of 10 + spell level to cast spells, and thus a minimum of 10 to cast cantrips, 11 to cast 1st level spells, etc. If you picked a spellcaster and then rolled a 3 for your primary stat, you'd have very little you could do.
I think the OP's proposal could be interesting as a method of character gen, but as others note one would have to design the campaign carefully to make it pay off in a desirable and fun fashion.
My current campaign was 4d6 (discard one) but rolled in order (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha) - players suddenly had to play characters with weaknesses, which some moaned about. But they are now 6-7th level and having a great time.
I'll be blunt, I hate point buy systems because they encourage bland character design and dump stats.
Interesting. Characters with weaknesses are good, but dump stats are bad.
Well said.
Also, I usually run games point buy. Interestingly enough, people tend to give themselves strengths and weaknesses but seldom minmax. If I ran a game where everyone maxed out one stat and dropped the others to bare minumum, I'd be concerned about point buy, but I've never seen that happen in the games I play.
Interesting. Characters with weaknesses are good, but dump stats are bad.
Yes that is correct.
Since you must not have been reading I will explain it again.People don't care about your low stats, they DO care about your high stats. So when you get a low stat that doesn't have a pile of free points to add to your highest stat suddenly it isn't note worthy. It wasn't because of the low stat at all. They are keeping an eye on your high stats and the min/maxing being done to gain them.
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People evolve their behaviour to gain an advantage in whatever environment they find themselves. For this, the environment is whatever system you are using to generate stats.
If you roll, you exercise control by choosing where to assign those rolls, and it shouldn't surprise anyone if you put your best rolls in the primary stats for the class(es) you plan. You may even choose your class after seeing what you've rolled, bearing in mind the SAD/MAD divide.
Point-buy gives a lot more control. You can lower one stat to increase another, not possible with rolled stats. Since you can do that, don't be surprised, shocked or disgusted when they do!
I've only used point-buy twice in my 35ish-year D&D/PF history: my two PFS characters. My first (Malachi Silverclaw!) was built on 17/16/13/12/7/7, since I wanted a paladin and needed two great stats and two that were okay. (I added my +2 human mod to the 16 Str to make 18)
My other character only needed two great stats and could afford to dump four. So I did! My halfling Dawnflower Dervish is built on 18/18/8/7/7/7, and works fine!
Contrast this with the last character I rolled: my new paladin for Kingmaker rolled 18/17/15/15/13/5. Yes, five! I could've wasted my +2 human bonus raising it to 7, but if I put the 5 on Int then raising it to 7 wouldn't get me any more skill points, and I'm not wasting my skill points on Int based skills, so I raised my 18 Str to 20.
The obvious advantage of point-buy is that it's fair to everyone. Really? It doesn't seem so fair to the guy trying to make a monk when the wizard's player is laughing at him!
The drawback with point-buy is that it allows you to completely control where you put the points, meaning that there is suddenly a 'correct' optimised stat array for any given PC, and variety can go to Heck! At least with rolling you might have to deal with some surprises, and set your imagination working like mad to work out how your Int 5 paladin lives his life!
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I am a mage, I make strength my dump stat. I won't be carrying very much and later I have other ways of carrying a large amount. Also I don't foresee getting into hand to hand combat so I overall benefit from 'dumping' strength and probably charisma too.
It is the cynical weighing up of advantages/disadvantages that means that if you were to take a poll of the starting stats of 1st level characters in pathfinder you would probably find that character design is about creating a set of optimised statistics rather than a role playing character.
The problem is that you may be reversing cause and effect. Why would a person with strength 7 want to be a fighter, knowing that he can't even carry the weight of his armor?
In real life, teachers and counsellors spend lots of time trying to steer people into finding and developing their aptitudes. If my son in Golarion had low Dex but high wisdom, am I going to apprentice him to a juggler?
Everyone has a dump stat. Smart people fins niches where a lack of whatever is not an issue.
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Picture a magical college. The students would be much like any other students, but they would all have a degree of magical talent and half would be desperately trying to research a hangover cure cantrip.
Although all would have a better than average Int, there is no correlation between intelligence and weakness! There is no reason to suppose that they would be universally weak. The normal ranges of strength scores would be distributed among them; the graph representing this would be the usual 3d6 bell curve. The same would be true of every other stat (apart from Int).
But picture the same college populated by wizards generated by point-buy! Can you see the difference? What a bunch of obnoxious weaklings, every single one of them!
Point-buy doesn't result in a realistic student body!
Rolled stats is still skewed, but much less so.
I'm intrigued by the suggestion on the first page that says use a 15-point buy, then make your character as normal. Then, at the end, roll 3d6 six times in order. If this new roll is better than the one you originally assigned to that stat, take the new score. If it's worse, leave it as it was. The exception is for stats you assigned as less than 10 to get bonus points; in this case take the average between the original score and the new roll, round down.
I like it! It would result in a wizard student body which is still more intelligent than average but is much closer to a realistic representation.
If I were to tweak it, I'd roll the stats after class is chosen but before skills and feats etc are assigned.
People don't care about your low stats, they DO care about your high stats.
I'm not sure what what you're suggesting here. "People" in general tend not to care about the stats of my characters at all, and they do care deeply about my personal weaknesses -- there's a reason that asking about weaknesses is one of the standard questions asked at a job interview, or that confidential referees are asked to address in letters of recommendation. If my weakness is that I'm tone-deaf, that's a killer if I'm applying to be a trombonist, but not an issue if I want to be a lawyer. Having graduated last in my class in law school is the reverse; it might actually be a plus for the trombonist but is more probably irrelevant.
If I (or my character) wants to "get a job" as a wizard in an adventuring party, the rest of the group will care very deeply about both what she can do, and what she can't. But there are some things that are not considered part of the role she'd be asked to fulfil in a traditional party -- typically she needs to be able to supply high-powered arcane spells and a variety of knowledge skills, but it's not a big issue that she can't stand in the front lines and take blows from an orcish sword.
So they care about the character's low stats exactly to the extent that it impacts her fitness for the "job." If the job duties don't include "lift weights," then they don't care about strength at all, low or high.
Would you hire a wizard with Strength 16, Intelligence 8? Probably not. He's good at something that's not needed and bad at something that is. And raising Strength to 18 would not suddenly make him more employable. But a wizard with Strength 14, Intelligence 14 would probably be marginally employable.
Even this wizard, though, is probably not "the best candidate for the job" and only marginally employable. I'd rather hire the Strength 8, Intelligence 16 wizard; she has more of what I need (powerful spells, high save DCs, and skills) at the expense of what I don't need.
And the people who are going to be successful wizards are precisely the people who are good at what wizards are supposed to do, just as the people who are successful trombonists are the ones who are good at playing the trombone.
Randomly generated stats violate verisimiltude, especially in a bunch of mercenaries for hire. Why should the rest of the party hang out, risking life and limb, with someone who isn't very good at what he's supposed to do? Why not fire him instead and look for a wizard who is simply better at, well, being a wizard?
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Picture a magical college. The students would be much like any other students... The normal ranges of strength scores would be distributed among them; the graph representing this would be the usual 3d6 bell curve. The same would be true of every other stat (apart from Int).
Clearly, you've never attended a graduate-level math class.
Picture a magical college. The students would be much like any other students, but they would all have a degree of magical talent and half would be desperately trying to research a hangover cure cantrip.
Although all would have a better than average Int, there is no correlation between intelligence and weakness! There is no reason to suppose that they would be universally weak. The normal ranges of strength scores would be distributed among them; the graph representing this would be the usual 3d6 bell curve. The same would be true of every other stat (apart from Int).
You've obviously never seen the MIT football team in action. They do not show the normal range of strength scores.
Why? Several reasons why. Students who are actually interested in football and have talents for it tend to pick other colleges than MIT. Very few people are recruited to MIT on athletic scholarships, and the ones who are recruited by multiple schools are more likely to pick Texas or Clemson than MIT.
Secondly, you don't get the strength of a college athlete by accident. The football team is expected to spend long hours on the field, in the weight room, on the track, and so forth, building up physical attributes. With only twenty-four hours in the day, the hours in the weight room are hours one isn't spending on other activities, such as studying. Stats are not fixed and immutable in the real world or in Pathfinder.
This applies even before the students got to MIT. The way to get into MIT is by spending lots of time in the library or the science lab, not the weight room. A student with a mediocre scholarly record, but an excellent history on the athletic field will not even be offered one of the highly competitive matriculation slots.
The students who self-selected their way into that magic college are not "much like any other students". They're the ones who had the aptitude (high intelligence) for magic and who developed that aptitude over their pre-collegiate life. The ones who wanted to become magi instead split their time between the library and the gym, and they're probably training at the mage academy down the street.
The simple fact is that there is a correlation in the real world between "intelligence" and "weakness," with some abuse of language. This can be clearly seen in the Wonderlic norms that are given to every NFL (American football) player as part of the draft evaluation process. Wikipedia lists average scores for a variety of professions as well as the averages for football players by position and for the NFL as a whole. The average score for a football player is 20, lower than almost every other profession listed. That's the result of opportunity cost; time on the football field instead of the geometry classroom.
I'm intrigued by the suggestion on the first page that says use a 15-point buy, then make your character as normal. Then, at the end, roll 3d6 six times in order. If this new roll is better than the one you originally assigned to that stat, take the new score. If it's worse, leave it as it was. The exception is for stats you assigned as less than 10 to get bonus points; in this case take the average between the original score and the new roll, round down.
This could be argued as a semi-realistic way of handling the issue. The point buy represents the character's devotion of time, energy, training, &c. A player who spends enough points to get a 16 in intelligence gets the expected return from the long hours in the library, and conversely the jock can spend enough time in the weight room to get his strength up. He may also have hit the genetic lottery and inherited an IQ of 180 from his Aunt Prunella, or he may have skipped class altogether a few too many times and ends up as dumb as a post.
But even this doesn't account for party selection. There's a reason that quarterbacks average higher IQs than receivers. If I'm going to hire a quarterback, I want normal athletic attributes plus a fair amount of intelligence (and if someone's "too dumb" to play QB, his high school coach will probably notice and change his position), but all I want for a reciever is running speed and good hands.
If the wizard has a sufficiently low dump stat that it would actually hinder the party as a whole, I won't hire him. This "let's punish people who pick dump stats" will actually punish the party as a whole by making a substantial likelihood of making someone play an actually unplayable character. Or we go back to the "well, I'll just have the computer roll up 200 characters and I'll play -- we'll hire -- the one who has good enough stats to be the best candidate for the job."
Playing in a sandbox game that is intended to be gritty? I think you could be surprised.
I'm usually surprised when things happen that are contrary to my expectations. That's what those words mean.
By the same token, though, I'm usually pretty good at expecting things. So while I could be surprised, I'm not very likely to be.
A good game master (and players) can make anything fun, and one doesn't need to tweak the rules to do it. One doesn't need rules at all to do it, which is why diceless roleplaying works in the first place. But by the same token, if a game master that needs to tweak the rules because it's not fun otherwise is probably not brilliantly good.
A hundred posts into this thread, and I'm still not sure what these complex alternate methods of character generation are supposed to accomplish. There's a reason that the industry as a whole has moved away from the Gygaxian randomness; more people found it more fun more of the time to have a certain degree of control over your character, in order to be able to play the character that you wanted to be able to play instead of the character that the dice gave you. House rules to give players what they wanted date at least to 1977 if not earlier, and many of those rules graduated to official procedures, because people wanted them. A lot of Gygax's unpopular rules -- paying gold to level up, xp bonuses for people with high stats, varying xp costs for difference classes levelling, weapon speed, armor class modifications by type and weapon -- got left on the cutting room floor because most people didn't think they were fun and didn't use them anyway.
The only real justification I've seen for this thread is "I want my players" -- I note that this is something the GM wants to impose on his group, not something a player wants to use -- "I want my players to be published for their moral impurity of picking weaknesses that aren't crippling." I'm not sure whether he wants his players to play paragons of virtue, sans peur et sans reproche, or wants them to be dysfunctional basketcases.
And it doesn't really matter, since either way the bathwater-to-baby ratio seems uncomfortably low.
That by in large most characters are just a variation of a very, very similar theme. For a game that espouses the virtues of having a good imagination, I find that depressing. The more the rules have developed for D&D, the further the role-playing element seems to retreat.
But similar starting stats wouldn't mean that the characters are all the same. If you take a somewhat 'normal' wizard stat array (Str 8, Dex 12, Con 12, Int 18, Wis 14, Cha 10, not sure what these add up to in point-buy, ) you can have various characters, even with the same feats, wizard school, and so on. You might be Talric, the vengeful wizard hunting down his brother, a necromancer. You might be Brandy, the softspoken female Wizard who merely wants to study the arcane workings of the universe, but is forced to track down a thief who stole a powerful artifact.
Same stats and everything, but the roleplaying aspects are different--one wizard is a fast-thinking, loud, vicious wizard raining down fireballs on his enemies, the other is a careful, quiet wizard who only fights when neccesary, and prefers using less destructive offensive spells.
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I find that a balance between randomness and control works best for character creation.
I'll use superhero RPGs as my example, but it applies to other games too.
There are some SHRPGs that are entirely point-buy. Champions is the iconic point-buy system. You knew what you want, and with enough system mastery you could get it. So I could make the most optimised flight/strength/invulnerability type hero for any budget. But they eventually seem soulless maths exercises in DPR. No new or surprising ideas after a while.
Other games have entirely random hero generation: Villains&Vigilantes was nearly all random. Explaining how you have all these weird powers in the same hero can lead to abominations like 'NightFlea', with his shrinking and jumping...and archery?
I always used to combine some randomness with some choice, both as GM and as player. The way this worked was simple at heart: every time you rolled that d100 on 2d10, record the results of each way of reading those 2d10 as a 1d100 result. For example, if you roll 2d10 to generate a random number between 1 and 100, the usual way is to designate one d10 as the 'tens' and the other d10 as the 'units', with a result of 00 being 100. With my method, instead of designating which d10 is the tens and which the units, roll 2d10 and read them both ways! If you rolled, say, a 5 and an 8, then write down the power that you get for rolling a 58 AND the power you get for an 85, as a pair. Do this as many times as you have power rolls, then go down the list eliminating one from each pair of powers. This gives you some control, so you should be able to prevent useless or absurd combinations, but you are usually left with a combination you would never have thought of without the random element generating it. This really gets your creative juices flowing, without saddling you with a ridiculous hero.
Since the abilities of a PF PC are tied up in classes, random generation of these wouldn't work. However, some randomness combined with some control when generating stats is better than no randomness (all your PCs having a 'correct' optimisation of stats for each class) and better than complete randomness (having to roll 3d6 in order and having to live with the result, making it unlikely to be able to make a viable PC in the class you want to play).