Veeky Forums do you prefer rolling or point buy

That's pretty cool, though the number of dice is a bit crazy. You should start out attributes with a base of 3 though, if only to reduce the number of dice you need to roll by 25%.

I have done it by hand it's o.k. if you can do it in 3 blocks of 24 and as a filthy ex tau player i have the d6's for that.

Rolling for one-shots, high-lethality campaigns, or otherwise any game with many characters per player or minimal play time per character. Point buy for games with fewer characters per player or longer play time per character.

Not even this, because it just means the best way to play is to meat-grind your characters to death until you get all good stat rolls.

Rolling for stats is an instant red flag that your DM has no idea how to run a fun game.

2d6+6

End up with lowest stat of 8 and highest of 18. Nobody is useless and nobody (if you assume average rolls on the d6) is OP.

Pointbuy was a little boring for my taste, but rolling led to some fucking stupid characters, so my group settled for 2d6+6

I have something somewhat similar: for an overly-complicated system I'm not satisfied with designed to link attribute scores in Castles and Crusades with the primary/second attribute designations.

>Not even this, because it just means the best way to play is to meat-grind your characters to death until you get all good stat rolls.

Quite wrong, because the guy with all good stat rolls will be only slightly less likely to die himself.

for high lethality campaigns I like to roll an array of 6x6 3d6

They pick a starting spot and direction and follow the line, assigning stats in order. (STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA)

For example if someone wants to play a an eldritch knight they can pick the rightmost 18 and then assign from left to right, giving
18 str
14 dex
8 con
15 int
10 wis
7 cha

Someone else can want that 18 for Charisma, so he would pick the 11 above as starting point, going top to bottom, looping around when he reaches the top, giving

11 str
11 dex
13 con
8 int
15 wis
18 cha

somewhat convoluted, but it works for us

Rolling, with some leniency if your scores come out crap.

Point buy is fine, I just like the random element.

Some different methods for stat generation and the averages they produce. Numbers with asterisks are calculated, while the others are derived from a bunch of simulations (meaning they're close, but not necessarily exact right).

Point buy is better in games where ability scores really and genuinely make or break your character - 3rd edition and later. Before that, you might as well roll and get a bit of an additional random element to the game, some more unpredictability to work your way around.

It's quite fun, even if the stats end up being shit: you'll just be playing medium-hard mode.

Rolling for stats only makes sense where such deviations aren't that significant overall, like the 40K RPGs.

Pretty much every other RPG I play though requires points buy or point allocation. So really, yeah. Fuck rolling.

I lean towards point-buy because it lets me play the character I have in mind before I come to the table, which is how most games are run.

However, if everyone's going to roll stats, I'm going to also roll for race and THEN pick a class and distribute stats.

>not rolling stats
>playing whatever you want to play
Millenials are at it again.

Most boring.

>Not rolling for stats, getting shitty strength, and playing a fighter anyway - he'll just be a slightly weaker fighter that compensates with smarts and cunning
Unimaginitive plebs.

>Still playing games where a character can have low stats without being instantly wrecked
>Submitting to not being allowed to play what they want

Face it, old man - your time is over. No one wants to deal with your shit anymore.

Rolling is great if you balance it properly.
>3d8, anything below 8 set to 8. Anything above 16 set to 16.

Needlessly convoluted, but for alot of people that's half the fun, so who am I to deny you that. Afterall, it still sounds like something fun to try out at least once.

Are you an actual retard?

I meant 3d6. Applicable to 5e DnD. For other games, this type of rolling for stats may not work very well.

2d6+4 gives you a pretty nice curve in a similar range.

If you want to roll, you might as well go the whole hog and roll with 3d6s. Otherwise everyone's just going to get the middle stats and they end up right back to the boredom you were trying to escape from in the first place.

Eh, it's not that different. Your chance of getting in the 9-12 range on 3d6 is 48.1%. Your chance of getting in that range on 2d6+4 is 55.6%. And preventing scores over 16 or under 6 makes your stats more appropriate from direct d20 checks.

You're not supposed to have stats below 8 or above (normally 15, I chose to stretch it to 16) before racial modifier in 5e. Otherwise you're risking the balance of the game.

Rolling is nice because it gives you more organic characteristics, instead of
>15
>15
>15
>8
>8
>8
or maybe 15 15 12 with the last points spent as 'fluff'.

No no, you must roll a single 1d6 for each stat. 1, 2, and 3 become 4, 5, and 6 - while 4, 5, and 6 on the roll become 15, 16, and 17.

That way there are no middle stats anywhere and everyone can be a colossal minmaxed fuck-up!

>one fighter has 14 strength
>another fighter has 15 strength
>wow, it's like they're completely different people! cant do that with pointbuy

The poll is pretty interesting, the results have been a solid 70/30 in favour of pointbuy since I started monitoring the results.

I don't know if it's that interesting: rolling your stats generally requires a very specific type of a game, of system and play style, both of which are kind of niche - and worse than that, go against both the feelings of power, wish fulfillment, and fairness ("He rolled really high while I got shit!"), that a lot of people here like.

The results are entirely unsurprising.

I'm more surprised that rolling is still so high.

Fair enough. Maybe it's the Dark Heresy fanbase.

>Not just using point buy because "muh sacred cows"
>Risking an imbalanced party just to spite people who you'll never meet.
Fighters literally get no compensation for having high INT, even the skill points they receive will still make up less than most other classes in the game.

If you roll up a high INT character, just play a fucking wizard you pleb.

Depends on the system. In my experience, advocating rolling stats instead of point-buy comes with the unspoken addition that you're playing a system from before 3rd edition - especially if we're also talking about doing them in order, as the fighter example clearly did.

I'm all for rolling stats because I like those games, but what kind of a retard would make his players roll for stats IN ORDER in 5e or Pathfinder?

The kind of retard who starts shrieking when mechanics are brought up in any context other than blind jerking to them.

I really like the 5e stat array the 15,14,13,12,10,8 it forces everyone to be bad at at least something to allow other members in the group fill in the gaps, I've found the games where we used this tend to be the most balanced and fun

I am honestly a bit baffled with this result. You're playing a roleplaying game where by it's nature you're not always going to get what you want, if just for the fact that you're playing with at least 1 other dude.

I mean come on. Why does every character has to be a special snowflake? Why would enforcing a rule make you the antichrist? Seriously. You're playing a tabletop RPG. A game that relies on imagination, so why not strain yours a little and adapt to the fact that your character is not exactly 100% what you want it to be.

I mean what's next we stop rolling for actions because it's too random?

Rolling/randomized I prefer, however, it sucks when you roll three eighteen and a pair of fourteens, and another player doesn't roll above 12.

Point buy for crunchy and heavily mechanical games. Also the ones in which I want a deep character with a developed backstory
Rolling for more narrative based and lighthearted games

its closer to 45/55 now
so its actually fairly even

I've seen the issue from both sides of the fence, and I can say that if the entire party acknowledges the problem from the start and agrees to go for it anyway, it's still quite fun.

It's a bit like gambling. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. In point-buy, meanwhile, everyone wins. Sometimes you want everyone to win.

>Here is my retarded opinion guys!
>"End of discussion." Because my opinion is superior and anyone who thinks otherwise is a retard.

This is why I'm really starting to hate Veeky Forums. The amount of vocal retards is too much.

I mean I sort of agree with him yet I feel ashamed to.

Welcome to anonymity.

It's not about anonymity, it's about having a discussion instead of a shitflinging contest.

I don't go for roll for stats for any D&D beyond 2e.

Even if not for the fact that WotC editions are basically designed around having good stats in the right spots, I also find a lot of DMs simply don't know how to deal with it, or just want players with garbage stats they can kill at any time.

>Ok guys we're rolling for stats
>Just 3d6, none of that drop the lowest horse shit.
>If you can't handle a little party imbalance, maybe you should leave.
>No rollbacks, you roll it, thats your number, no changes
>Wow wait wait, hold the fuck up
>Did you just roll 3 18s?
>Nope, sorry, you're gonna have to reroll that, you'll be too overpowered
>I don't care what I said earlier, I can't have you outshining everyone else
>I'm revoking the no rollbacks rule then
>Wait you guys stop rolling again, I'm just revoking it for him
>Why are you guys leaving?

I'm simplifying this a bit. This ended up eating 2 hours of what was supposed to be a 3 hour session because he couldn't handle that someone actually rolled good stats. Dude even offered to just play a Monk, which set the DM off even more because he thinks Monks are busted in 3.PF (which was another red flag that made us all wary).

>Dated. Only persists for nostalgia. Still fun at times.

OSR games are "dated," they are still good fuckwit. Stop getting mad just because your DM is shit and won't let you reroll when you got all 7s, the fucking book says you are supposed to reroll if your stats are too low.

First day on Veeky Forums?

>It serves absolutely no purpose except barring you from playing characters you're actually interested in roleplaying, due purely to luck.

No, it serves the purpose of giving you a unique set of stats (or, at least one of 34012224 possible sets assuming 3-20 range including racial mods). Stop strawmanning rolling for stats as 3d6 straight down, you can roll 4d6 to get six numbers then assign them. There's a slim chance you might not get what you want, but it's unlikely. I personally always offer both as an option when I DM. Characters almost always pick rolling.

>rule of cool crapshit
>session zero shilling
>reddit spacing

Damn.

lol no. The longest campaigns I've run have been D&D campaigns, and they rolled for stats. Rolling for stats has NO EFFECT ON LETHALITY OF THE GAME. THAT IS BASED ON THE SYSTEM YOU ARE USING.

If you roll for stats in 4e and do point buy in fucking AD&D, the 4e campaign will "last longer" because characters are more durable in 4e. Stop using this shitty "argument."

That's because while his point is fine he made it like an asshat.

As for my 2 cents, it depends on the system. If attributes are so powerful a few points shifted one way or the other can make or break a character then rolling is just asking for somebody to have a bad time.

>I don't like a certain mechanic because I played with a shit DM once.

I don't get it what you're trying to say, user.

>Hahaha he wants to actually discuss something in Veeky Forums instead of just shitposting and "my opinion>your opinion" discussions! Must be a newfag!

Not a newfag. And no Veeky Forums wasn't a cesspool of retards since time immemorial. Not outside of /b/.

This. People who insist on point-buy are entitled cunts who want to play THEIR character EXACTLY as they imagined him (read: copied him from the char-op forums). They are spoiled infants who tend to play the same self-insert character over and over. When I DM I always try to kill point buy characters first. Meanwhile they have shitty stats because a lot of the players who rolled tend to either roll shit (entitling them to a reroll AS PER THE RULES) or roll really good stats. So, point buy niggers lose either way.

>I intentionally make the game shittier for players

Both have their places.

If you run a game of desperate individuals cobbling together a life, rolling is great. You get rich characters with deep flaws, and the desperation comes out in the mechanics of the game and the build of the characters.

If you play a fantasy setting where the heroes are expected to do great things, do point buy. They're supposed to be good at the things they do.

No, I just don't baby them. You want to point buy? Then you are trying to optimize your character the best you can so you can be MAD or SAD or whatever the fuck for your obscure build. Guess what fuck cunt, you're going the fuck down hard.

Stop it, I like rolling too but you're making us look bad.

Leave the angry bitter trolling to the young'uns.

No, you're definitely making the game shittier.

>I don't get it what you're trying to say, user.

Mostly roll for stats is bad for D&D outside of OSR editions because the new D&D editions(3.PF, 4e, and 5e) aren't designed in a way to handle Rolling for Stats well. That and most people who want the party to roll for stats don't seem to understand it very well. What I posted was the worst I've bumped into, but it's far from the only time I've seen it happen, to the point where "Roll for Stats" is on my red flag, stay away from list.

Because that's not the game I want to play?

Your point doesn't really makes sense. I create a character while having complete control over them, because that's my role as a player- To control my character. For their internal and pre-game stuff, I have as much authority as the GM does over the game as a whole.

Rolling for actions creates tension and uncertainty in how their story plays out, which is fun and enjoyable. But when I have a specific character concept I wish to play, uncertainty is pointless, unnecessary and adds nothing.

I'm not against randomgen entirely, and I'll play with it on occasion if I don't have any other ideas, but wanting to play a specific character is not 'special snowflake', unless you wish to completely destroy the definition of the term.

>reddit spacing in his response
damn

Except this argument is bullshit.

Pointbuy doesn't enable minmaxing, it allows you not to. If I can select stats suitable to my concept, I'm more free to take non-optimal options and flavour stuff with the knowledge that I'm not screwing myself over by doing so.

With rolled chargen, if I get bad or even average results my choices are significantly more limited, if I want to pull my weight I have to be efficient with any choices I have to make, rather than being free to choose something flavourful and interesting, or the system will punish me for it.

When did clean formatting become 'reddit spacing'?

Well, if people know if from reddit (because they come from there) they'll of course call it that

>Pointbuy doesn't enable minmaxing, it allows you not to.

In theory, maybe, but in practice I've never seen anyone do this. Meanwhile, it's point-buy where people tend to not care for the numbers or efficiency, still going on as a fighter even if their strength ended up as mediocre and their charisma or wisdom higher.

Also, what system are you talking about exactly? I remember the last time this talk came up, less than a week ago, and even back then no one ever brought up the system - they just sperged on without any common ground whatsoever.

It's just weird. People have been posting like that for donkeys years, but only recently people have started to call it out, as though wanting your post to be easily read and understood is some kind of treachery? Confuses the hell out of me.

Which is why I always adopt the policy of "If your stats are shit you can reroll if you want".

I've had players decline that option.

I usually roll or use the stat array if I'm feeling lazy. When my group rolls stats we roll 4d6 and you discard the lowest of the four.

Lol you do realize rolling for stats is still a really huge thing, right? Unplug your xbone, man. There's a whole world right outside the door.

I've only ever been in one 2e D&D game, and that used point buy too, but I've been in rolled stat games of Dark Heresy, Traveller, Anima: Beyond Fantasy... I think a couple of others.

And I guess it also depends on the players intentions. If someone wants to optimise, nothing you can do will stop them (save for perhaps sitting down and talking it through with the group to establish a common ground). Pointbuy might let them get closer to a perfect character, but they'll still do the best they can to make the best use of any stats they roll, good or bad.

But in cases where I roll bad stats, I feel forced to optimise. An RPG is a cooperative experience and it's designed around the idea of everyone being able to contribute. If I end up with a bad or very specific statline, even if it's less fun for me it's better for the group if I use it efficiently. Meanwhile, people who roll well are more free to split their focus or choose less optimal options because they won't let the side down (and perhaps be less than optimised intentionally in order to not outshine other people.)

In general I just find the disadvantages aren't worth it, outside of very specific systems/playstyles or systems with balanced lifepath and randomgen, which randomises what you get while ensuring everyone still ends up at roughly the same level of general competence.

Maybe there's still old folks doing that, but that won't last - I'll just need to wait a few years until your grandson finally decides to pull the plug off you, oh ancient one.

>With rolled chargen, if I get bad or even average results my choices are significantly more limited, if I want to pull my weight I have to be efficient with any choices I have to make, rather than being free to choose something flavourful and interesting, or the system will punish me for it.
Christ, I was wondering how much would I have needed to scroll down before seeing this post. I don't get how people fail to realize this, really. Rolling stats points you toward minmaxing way more than point buy does.

And these are all fair points. It's just that the majority of the point buy camp makes out rolling to mean that you'll always get a completely random character that is nothing like you want, and the only good way of playing is to get EXACTLY what you want.

Which to me suggest that saying no you can't to these people leads to arguments as I had with a guy once (TPK due to player stupidity, rerolling characters, not getting as perfect stats that were still above average by a mile, flips his shit out).

Well, in essence that's true, but that's more a conflict of playstyle and system than anything else.

If someone comes into a game wanting or expecting player driven character creation, and is told to roll stats, they will not be happy. Rolling stats requires an entirely different mindset when it comes to character creation, and someone not expecting that or someone who simply doesn't enjoy that will probably be unhappy no matter what they roll.

This doesn't mean either side is implicitly wrong, just that being aware of your own preferences and the traits of a system or group you're joining are important, and that if they don't line up in a few important ways you're likely better off not playing at all.

>all these risk averse pussies

Go home and fiddle your little diddle.

Standard array. Saves time, saves effort.

I currently dm a second edition game and a 5th edition game and roll stats in both. 4d6 drop lowest. If a player doesn't get the prereqs stats for a second edition class I will gladly bump up .

I would gladly do Point buy if it was a high-level game though.

140 to 151 in favor of point buy.

That's really about what you'd expect. There's a slight lean towards balance and control over the system, and all things being fair, but again, given two options, Veeky Forums will almost always be split down the middle, usually complain that there's not four more listed.

That's really why we have such heated arguments, we're passionate about Shit we like, to the point that we've approached Siskel and Ebert in the way that we argue.

I notice the point-buy folks tend to be a lot angrier and more passionate on average. They're the ones that go on about how rolling for stats is inherently terrible and shouldn't ever work on anything. On the other side you get a couple guys that claim they're big coddled babies, but most of the rolling ones seem to perfectly acknowledge that sometimes point-buy is quite fine even if they themselves wouldn't prefer it.

Given that my experience is the reverse, how about we assume that the asshole to decent people ration roughly evens out on both 'sides'?

Probably about two or three out of those hundred-and-half that voted for each side, yeah.

I prefer rolling but I realize it's partially nostalgia and flawed because nobody ever plays flawed characters as flawed.

Arrays are too Harrison Bergeron so I have to go with point buy, even though I like rolling as an idea much more.

Because rolling for stats can fuck up a game and a lot of the DMs who are rolling purists are fucking idiots, like the rare retard who makes you roll 3d6 for anything after 2E.

3d6 straight down, in order
then pick class and play to your strengths
when you die (and you will) repeat for new character

it's fucking evolution. and no dorthy, you don't get to decide to play a bard and then stack charisma. that's where rolling, point buy and arrays get it wrong.

>Because rolling for stats can fuck up a game and

bad players fuck up a game
mediocre players can't handle rolling

Both playstyles are equally valid. People having a different preference to you is not a bad thing.

Clearly disagrees.

Nope. Dicerolls can, in and of themselves, fuck up a game.

If you're in an edition where stats are more significant (post 2e), rolled stats can dramatically increase any potential imbalance in the party to the point that it's even more of a chore for the GM to deal with.

No? They specify that pre-2e it's okay, because those games assume a different playstyle.

The problem is that they're the most vocal, and the ones most likely to stay in the thread and argue about it.