New Stat Role Technique?

[LegitName]

Imagine this scenario that you might find somewhat relatable:

A father gets his family together to play Pathfinder.
Little Timmy wants to play an half orc barbarian. Dad explains he'll want really high strength to hit things harder, constitution for the health, and dexterity for the initiative and armor. Timmy rolls and ends up with the rolls 13, 14, 12, 13, 14, 12
Timmy is now sad because his physical stats are low for a martial character. Dad tries to make him happier by telling him that with point buy, those are worth a lot of points, but Timmy is still sad.
Timmy's big brother, Charlie, is now up. Charlie had planned to play a magic-focused cleric, but seeing Timmy would need help on the martial side, decides to play a human war cleric. He knows he needs high physical stats for the melee, as well as wisdom for his cleric abilities and charisma for channel energy. He rolls 16, 15, 15, 10, 9 8. Once again decent rolls, however Charlie has a problem. He cannot efficiently cover melee, spellcasting, and healing with those rolls. He now has to decide to focus on, and what the two of them will have to do without.

You yourself may have had a similar experience to this before - skills too spread out or consolidated. But what if I told you there was a way to generate stats that fit your character build more? Well there is... and it's called point buy.

Forgetting everything I am about to write, point buy does solve this problem - you can decide between a consolidated array or a spread out one. But this thread is not about point buy. No, it is about a crazy idea that popped into my head one day. After testing the math, I found it to be only slightly broken. I call it Flexible Stat Rolling, or Flex Rolls.

The process is simple.
Generate a set of 4 stats using the typical 4d6 drop lowest. Do that three times, so you have three sets of 4 stat rolls each. Then, from a set of you choice, take the top two stats. From a different set of your choice, choose the middle two stats. From the last set, choose the lowest two stats.

This is relatively balanced because by taking a high score from one set, you are forced to take medium and low stats from the other sets. I made a computer program that generated the four sets, found all 6 possible selections of stats, and then calculated the one with the highest point buy value (I made up point buys for the numbers below 6 that roughly followed the pattern of increase for going up from 10). Then I had the program do that 10,000 times and calculate the average max point buy value. It was always almost always 23.8 to 24.2, or at least super close to that (I never saw it lower than 23 or higher than 25). I then checked if instead of doing 2 highest - 2 middle - 2 lowest resulted the same average max point buy as 1 high - 2 middle - 3 low or 3 high - 2 middle - 1 low. They were the same. Then I checked all three selection patterns but with rolling 3d6 instead of 4d6 drop lowest, and it was an average of 9 for all of them.

The nice thing about this is that from one collection of rolls, you can select scores in a way that aims for some higher scores by taking a few lower scores as well, or you can select a more balanced selection.

Any comments?

[Nyerkh]

What issue(s) are you trying to solve ?

It's a good enough method, if quite high power according to your averages, but I'm not convinced it solves much.

Taste wise, nothing you can do : some don't like the predictability of point-buys, other dislike the randomness of rolling - especially when it comes to disparity within the group, which your method tempers but doesn't remove. And that's the big issue, in my experience.

As a filthy point-buyer myself, in a vacuum I'd still prefer some of the semi-random methods out there, the d10+7s, the "reroll if your average mod is under x" and similar. Rolls with a safety net. And yours is certainly an alternative.
But those methods ultimately tend to fully satisfy neither rollers nor buyers, so to speak.
I'd stick with "pick one and embrace it" but again, this is one part of rpgs that is entirely dependent on a given table tastes and dynamic.

[Melkiador]

The simplest way to do rolling and make almost everyone happy is collective rolling. So in session 0, everyone rolls a stat array. And then anyone is free to use any of those arrays for their character. It's random, but with choice. And no one should feel like their character doesn't measure up.

[LegitName]

Nyerkh wrote:

What issue(s) are you trying to solve ?

I just wanted to make stat rolling more versatile, but as you both have pointed out, there are many ways of accomplishing that without making it so complicated.

[MidsouthGuy]

Or you could just roll 3D6, put the results where you want them, add or subtract racial modifiers, and not be a whiny little twerp because you didn't end up with nothing but 18's in every ability score.

[PodTrooper]

MidsouthGuy wrote:

Or you could just roll 3D6, put the results where you want them, add or subtract racial modifiers, and not be a whiny little twerp because you didn't end up with nothing but 18's in every ability score.

Amen brother.

I sense another long-in-the-tooth gamer, who remembers when the game could be brutal.

I was talking D&D with a younger player a little while back, who went white as a sheet, when I informed them that vampires and some monsters used to take levels!
Yes-plural.
Yes-permanent.
No-not 'negative level' modifiers - Start erasing XP off your sheet there buddy.
**It was fun to watch the panic on his face at the thought.

But seriously. I tend towards point-buy. For no other reason than to avoid large disparities between players.

One of the alternatives a friend had that I liked, was 2d6+6 for each stat.
It gives a range of 8-18; with a bell-curve average of 13.

[Melkiador]

MidsouthGuy wrote:

Or you could just roll 3D6, put the results where you want them, add or subtract racial modifiers, and not be a whiny little twerp because you didn't end up with nothing but 18's in every ability score.

Meh. That kind of thing can be fun every once in a while, but it’s too limiting for a lot of legitimate character concepts.

[Darigaaz the Igniter]

1d12+6 three times, then take each of those scores and subtract them from 25 to generate the other 3 scores. Gives 6 scores with a range of 7-18 and every low roll guarantees a high result as well (and vice versa).

[Tarik Blackhands]

Melkiador wrote:

MidsouthGuy wrote:

Or you could just roll 3D6, put the results where you want them, add or subtract racial modifiers, and not be a whiny little twerp because you didn't end up with nothing but 18's in every ability score.

Meh. That kind of thing can be fun every once in a while, but it’s too limiting for a lot of legitimate character concepts.

Might want to try a more systematic and reliable way of generating stats then. Maybe some sort of system where ability scores are assigned a certain value (say a certain number of "points") and players are assigned a varying number of "points" and they can "buy" the spread they want. Someone should look into making that.

[blahpers]

MidsouthGuy wrote:

Or you could just roll 3D6, put the results where you want them, add or subtract racial modifiers, and not be a whiny little twerp because you didn't end up with nothing but 18's in every ability score.

Where you want them? Sure, if you want to play with training wheels. Real grognards play 'em in order.

[Reksew_Trebla]

Just roll stats like normal, then calculate what number of points in point buy you’d have and use that for point buy. 1d12+6 is the method to make sure you only get 7-18. This averages at a 15 point buy, but includes the randomness of rolling.