Rolling or pointbuy

[the David]

I was bored so I rolled 432 d6 and made some calculations.

Now the Shackled City hardcover suggests a 28 pointbuy or rolling 4d6 dropping the lowest 18 times to make 3 sets of 6, then picking the best set for your character's ability scores. I found that rolling was a lot better than pointbuy in most cases. The average would be 35 for D&D 3.5 and 25 for Pathfinder. The problem I have with rolling however is that it creates such large differences between the players. In this case 25 vs 55 points in D&D or 13 vs 42 points in Pathfinder.

So what do you guys prefer?

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

The group rolls a single array.

So if you have 4 players, the GM rolls the remaining two stats.

5 players, then the GM rolls the remaining 1 stat.

6 players and the players roll all the stats.

Then they can just arrange them to taste.

[the David]

That's an interesting way to do it, but that means all the player characters would either be strong or weak. I'd guess pointbuy is the way to go.

[leftkeh]

Well, just to add my two pence on the subject,
I recently started the campaign (in D&D 3.5), and what my players and I decided upon for character creation was this:
The player rolls 1 set of attributes, using the roll-5d6-drop-2-lowest method, then a single d6 (that indicates the reroll), then a final 5d6-drop-2-lowest for the possible substitution of the stat. Attributes are assigned the way they are rolled, i.e. the first one goes to Str, the second one to Dex etc.
This method provided us with some tough character choices, given that there were moments we were really begging for the dice to provide a high INT or CHA score so that we get some kind of arcane caster.
This system is a bit strenuous for the players, since one's preferred class may not be a realistic choice for the rolled stats. On the other hand, rolling 5d6's is a very very good deal, guaranteed to provide with a couple of very high ability scores at the very least.