This phrase. I don't think it means what you think it means.
I SPECIFICALLY DISLIKE ROLLING BECAUSE IT ENFORCES AND CREATES POWER CREEP.player's get more and more powerful as the ones that live are the most powerful, so the ones that have higher stats live, the lower ones die, and then they roll again they have another chance at rolling high, if they do, then the over all party strength goes up. I have to up my ante, making the rest more likely to die. by campaign end everyone is used to playing with much higher stats than is norm and thus they want better rolling methods as their rolls don't roll well as their memorable character did.
did that fit your definition?
Usually in gaming, power creep is when increasingly more powerful content is introduced into the system by designers or developers, so that characters made with original content can not hold a candle to characters made with latter content.
This is what I've always understood it to mean, anyway.
power creep is the slow increase in power that is generated over time through a multitude of methods. generally it is additional content, but current content can make it worse.
For instance in bloodborne you have to rely on RNG to get good gems, this means slowly the average power level of people increases making it harder for new people entering to "hold a candle" to the new entries.
They made an attempt with the Arcanist, but then they made all of the stuff that depends on charisma suck.
Charisma, throughout 3.5, has always been the crappiest stat, that does the least for almost everyone except bards, paladins, and sorcerers. The way things are, I'd almost rather that all of its functions were given to Wisdom, and it was eliminated altogether.
For instance in bloodborne you have to rely on RNG to get good gems, this means slowly the average power level of people increases making it harder for new people entering to "hold a candle" to the new entries.
Which is a system put in by the game designers?
Isn't the bigger problem here the SAD classes, rather than the point buy? If SAD classes didn't exist, what would everyone's opinion be on rolling vs. point buy?That's exactly what I'm saying -- but, unfortunately, Paizo is determined to keep some classes SAD, and others MAD, and they're not going to change that.
I actually don't see how SAD vs MAD is relevent to point buy versus rolling.
rolling can give you a SAD array it can give you a flat ARRAY, it can give you horrible stats, this along with other people greatly alters the power level of even a single class.
PB is consistent and regardless of what you SAY, removes the issue of differing power levels in a party, with regard to stats.
For instance in bloodborne you have to rely on RNG to get good gems, this means slowly the average power level of people increases making it harder for new people entering to "hold a candle" to the new entries.Which is a system put in by the game designers?
yes, just as much as rolling is a possible decision put in by me designing my campaign. it has unintended consequences of making PvP only playable after several hours of grind.
Given one of these two choices or rolling, why would you want to roll.That's the thing -- there are more than two choices.
I never said rolling is fair. I will say, however, that rolling methods that minimize the standard deviation are better than those that don't -- 9d2, for example, as opposed to 3d6.
I also said that point-buy isn't fair, either -- the only time it tries to be is at the uppermost registers, where stat imbalances are minimized.
I said an array is most fair when the total point spread is the least. An array of 6, 8, 10, 10, 12, 20 is totally unfair, whereas an array of 14,14,14,14,14,14 does exactly what we want it to.
I am going to dispute this.
The high deviation array favors SAD classes, while the low deviation array favors MAD classes. Neither of them are any more "fair" from that point of view. One forces a heavy investment in a stat for classes that benefit from a wide spread, and the other forces investment into stats that some classes don't care about. In both cases, you are forcing some classes to have high stats that they don't want that high, and other stats to be low that they don't want low.
What you are actually trying to do is create an array that is biased towards benefiting weaker classes more than stronger classes to counteract the inherent imbalance between the classes. I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing, but it's what you are doing. I wouldn't describe that as a "fair" ability score selection method, by any means. Unless you take into account the power of the classes as part of the metric, but bear in mind that if you use that as a metric giving the monk 16x6 and the wizard 14,10x5 is still heavily biased towards the wizard, because the wizard is just that good. It would just be a little less biased towards the wizard than something like the elite array.
And if they had a 12 wis instead of their 8 wis they would have a 10% greater chance of not getting removed from combat or turning on the party.That's true only if we're within the nice spread of the random number generator. Unfortunately, at 18th level you've got a +/- 5-point variance on base saves alone, plus increasing discrepancies for magic defenses and so on, so you're often in the territory of can't save/can't fail, and that -2 is diluted to the point of being irrelevant.
For my part, I'd be happier if all saves were +1/2 level, and the only difference between a good or bad save was the initial +2.
But that's a subject for a different thread!
The -2 is only irrelevant if the wizard is falling off the RNG. At level 20, you are looking at DC29 saves according to the monster creation table. 12 base+5 resist -1 wis +5 wis+int boosting headband+inherent wisdom bonus, +5 in misc buffs(like luckstone) is a total of +26. Upping wisdom to 12 brings that to 28. These are really good saves at level 20, too. Bumping wisdom to 12 brings your total to 28, which puts you just at the edge of the RNG. You went from a 15% chance to a 5% chance to fail.
This is not irrelevant by any means.
If that character didn't spend 150k gp on wisdom boosts, they instead would have gone from +21 to +23, which is a 40% chance to a 30% chance.
Still not irrelevant.
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Isn't the bigger problem here the SAD classes, rather than the point buy? If SAD classes didn't exist, what would everyone's opinion be on rolling vs. point buy?
It probably wouldn't change my preference much. Point buy works for some games like Mutants and Masterminds and Champions since everything in those games must be by design. But there's plenty of space in the RPG world for games in which you discover your character. Plus, the impact of imbalanced stats isn't a game breaker by any means.
yes, just as much as rolling is a possible decision put in by me designing my campaign. it has unintended consequences of making PvP only playable after several hours of grind.For instance in bloodborne you have to rely on RNG to get good gems, this means slowly the average power level of people increases making it harder for new people entering to "hold a candle" to the new entries.Which is a system put in by the game designers?
Ugh, nevermind.
I am going to dispute this.The high deviation array favors SAD classes, while the low deviation array favors MAD classes. Neither of them are any more "fair" from that point of view. One forces a heavy investment in a stat for classes that benefit from a wide spread, and the other forces investment into stats that some classes don't care about. In both cases, you are forcing some classes to have high stats that they don't want that high, and other stats to be low that they don't want low.
I'm going to disagree with much of this. An all 14 (or all anything) spread works reasonably well for both MAD and SAD classes because each class's competencies are equally fueled by their stats. Usually, the MAD class has multiple competencies or ones that are divided among stats rather than concentrated on one. There aren't too many places where they get to stack on multiple stats in a way that would compare to a SAD class investing heavier in their single prime stat.
I'm going to disagree with much of this. An all 14 (or all anything) spread works reasonably well for both MAD and SAD classes because each class's competencies are equally fueled by their stats. Usually, the MAD class has multiple competencies or ones that are divided among stats rather than concentrated on one. There aren't too many places where they get to stack on multiple stats in a way that would compare to a SAD class investing heavier in their single prime stat.
I am going to dispute this.The high deviation array favors SAD classes, while the low deviation array favors MAD classes. Neither of them are any more "fair" from that point of view. One forces a heavy investment in a stat for classes that benefit from a wide spread, and the other forces investment into stats that some classes don't care about. In both cases, you are forcing some classes to have high stats that they don't want that high, and other stats to be low that they don't want low.
except the only SAD classes are casters... and their SAD because of casting... Casting blows everything else out of proportion.
Casting blows everything else out of proportion.
That's the elephant in the room, for sure... but it's one we're not allowed to talk about, or we're "theorycrafters" with an "agenda." (Shakes head sadly)
There's a couple of ways my group does stats. The one I just did for my group was come up with 3-4 different arrays using point buy. This let everyone decide if they wanted a more rounded character or wanted a dump stat while keeping the power even.
The other way that one of our GM's came up with was he rolled out 2 arrays with dice and gave us the option of which one to choose. Comes out with more points than if using point buy, but keeps everyone on par.
For HP, we actually roll a d4 for all classes and then add 2-8 based on the class HD (so a fighter rolls 1d4+6+con mod)