2: If you use point buy, or similar system, this is not a power game, so don't worry about optimization, if anything being mid maxed is going to hurt your game play. And I will set traps to kill power player characters in these games.
You intentionally go out of your way to deliberately kill of your player’s characters? Wow that is some toxic DM’ing.
2: If you use point buy, or similar system, this is not a power game, so don't worry about optimization, if anything being mid maxed is going to hurt your game play. And I will set traps to kill power player characters in these games.
You intentionally go out of your way to deliberately kill of your player’s characters? Wow that is some toxic DM’ing.
I don't intentionally go out of my way to do anything. I set traps. Player choice can easily kill someone, and I will often set traps if someone is disruptive at the table. In my 12 years of DMing, the trap has only been sprung once, and the player didn't loose their character, although, it did cause a situation that caused them to realize they were trans. They also stopped leaping before looking in game.
2: If you use point buy, or similar system, this is not a power game, so don't worry about optimization, if anything being mid maxed is going to hurt your game play. And I will set traps to kill power player characters in these games.
You intentionally go out of your way to deliberately kill of your player’s characters? Wow that is some toxic DM’ing.
I don't intentionally go out of my way to do anything. I set traps. Player choice can easily kill someone, and I will often set traps if someone is disruptive at the table. In my 12 years of DMing, the trap has only been sprung once, and the player didn't loose their character, although, it did cause a situation that caused them to realize they were trans. They also stopped leaping before looking in game.
I wouldn't call it being a toxic DM if players at the table are having fun with it. Some people like the min-max power gaming style and some don't. Some DMs like to challenge their players and some don't. Again it is about having fun.
Back to the OP's topic (and subsequent responses) about there being a stat imbalance between characters and how that can lead to resentment or just someone at the table not having fun. I had a personal experience recently that was just that, and it caused me to not enjoy the game. As a player, I have learned to try to adjust my style and expectations to the person running the game. As long as I am having fun, I just go with it. Even if as a DM in any given situation would do it differently. When I run games, I'm there to have fun as well. As long as I am having a good time, I will adapt to the players at my table to ensure they are having fun also.
2: If you use point buy, or similar system, this is not a power game, so don't worry about optimization, if anything being mid maxed is going to hurt your game play. And I will set traps to kill power player characters in these games.
You intentionally go out of your way to deliberately kill of your player’s characters? Wow that is some toxic DM’ing.
I don't intentionally go out of my way to do anything. I set traps. Player choice can easily kill someone, and I will often set traps if someone is disruptive at the table. In my 12 years of DMing, the trap has only been sprung once, and the player didn't loose their character, although, it did cause a situation that caused them to realize they were trans. They also stopped leaping before looking in game.
I wouldn't call it being a toxic DM if players at the table are having fun with it. Some people like the min-max power gaming style and some don't. Some DMs like to challenge their players and some don't. Again it is about having fun.
Back to the OP's topic (and subsequent responses) about there being a stat imbalance between characters and how that can lead to resentment or just someone at the table not having fun. I had a personal experience recently that was just that, and it caused me to not enjoy the game. As a player, I have learned to try to adjust my style and expectations to the person running the game. As long as I am having fun, I just go with it. Even if as a DM in any given situation would do it differently. When I run games, I'm there to have fun as well. As long as I am having a good time, I will adapt to the players at my table to ensure they are having fun also.
I agree with that too. And ya not sure if I would go as far as "resentment", if so it certainly wouldn't be toward any person, maybe just the situation. But more so I was just worried about some people feeling inferior or feeling like they don't contribute the same as others which could lead to a lesser or bad experience. But definitely I agree I should probably concentrate on my own fun and what I can do and hopefully others will as well and it should still be an enjoyable game (hopefully lol)
The only way to be fair to everyone is for everyone to use the same method for ability score generation. Either everyone uses point buy, or everyone rolls. And if everyone rolls, then everyone has to roll out in the open with everyone else watching them.
That depends on the group. If the group is fine playing an unbalanced game, go ahead. If not, you should make the characters with standard array (or point buy).
I always play with standard array. And that's what most of the people I've played with during these 8 years of 5e do. But if a group wants to roll stats, it should be clear that this is going to result in an unbalanced party. In that case, you shouldn't try to artificially balance with magic items and the like as it can easily get out of hand.
Standard array is terrible, the characters are meant to be heroes, larger than life, stronger, smarter, faster, wittier than the average village pleb. The array just means all players are the same. Might as well get rid of all races and classes and just make a single option available to players, human commoner with either sailor, soldier, or farmer as a background.
It's your opinion, of course. But honestly I don't see where to grab it. I have played several dozen campaigns, 90% with standard array, and I have seen hundreds of different characters. Both as a player and as a DM. And many of them 100% optimized. I honestly don't understand why you say that all characters are the same with standard array. Your comment puzzles me. Are we really talking about the same game?
It is common for GMs to say Roll and if you don"T like it, use Standard Array. It gives a fallback for the times when somebody rolls multiple 9- stats.
I usually use Standard Array because half of my campaigns are onLIne so I can"T witness rolls.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I must respectfully disagree with Beardsinger's assessment that, "Standard array is terrible, the characters are meant to be heroes, larger than life, stronger, smarter, faster, wittier than the average village pleb."
Yes. The characters are meant to be heroes. And that is exactly what the standard array gives you! Remember the "average person" has ability scores of 10. So their 6 ability scores would add up to 60. Standard array, plus the usual +2 and +1 modifiers give you a total of 75. That is considerably better than "the average village pleb."
And no one ever said that heroes have to be heroic in literally every single facet of their entire being! A great heroic warrior would clearly have a higher Strength and Constitution than any town guard. But that same warrior would very likely have a lower Intelligence than the local librarian.
Playing a character with all high scores is no fun. Characters need to be three dimensional. For every strength they must have a weakness. Otherwise, nothing they do will ever truly feel heroic. Embrace your faults. They make for such amazing role playing opportunities.
Also regarding "the characters are meant to be heroes", it's worth remembering that the standard array only limits them up to level 4, at which point they get an ASI or a Feat, if you're using them.
Level 1 is supposed to be where you're noticably more powerful than a normal citizen, but not that you're super-saiyen! having 15 stat-points on top of a normal person is going to make you stand out. By level 19, you've gained another 10 stat-points, or some Feats if you prefer abilities, and on top of that yo uhave all your class abilities to boot.
a level 1 barbarian with S15 is still so much stronger than a commoner with S10. Not only are you already 1.5x stronger than them, you can become angry to get advantage (mathematically averaging to another +5), to be come twice as strong as them. You can also be punched hard in the face without just dying, because at level 1 you have over 3x the HP of a commoner, and you can get angry to effectively double it.
By level 10, you're so far beyond the normal commoner that you are a shining hero. You've added +4 to your stats, have a plethora of abilities, and your health makes you seem damn near magical to a commoner with only 4 HP.
Frankly, if you made a character with 10 for each stat, they would already be head and shoulders above a commoner, simply by virtue of being level 1, and having a bunch of proficiencies. Even a level 1 wizard has more HP than a commoner!
Each character creation system has its advantages and disadvantages. I don't think you can be sure that one is better than another. Most people I know use Standard Array because it produces balanced characters, and still leaves room for optimization. There are also many people who prefer the point buy because they prefer to play with max/min characters. Very few people I've played with prefer roll the stats. It's basically too random, and many gaming groups find it unfair. I've usually seen it in uncompetitive games, or humorous. But that doesn't mean you have to play like that. What should not be done, in my opinion, is to allow creation systems to be mixed. The whole group should use the same system. But that's just an opinion. And in no case are all the characters the same or not very heroic with a standard array as someone else said above. I don't know where that absurd idea came from.
The default method in the books is to roll. The default method in the Beyond builder is standard array. Adventurers' League also uses standard array by default, but allows point buy also.
I really don't get why we're still talking about this. It goes without saying that different groups have different preferences, and that for some players their preference is a make-or-break thing, whereas for some it's just a small thing. It doesn't go without saying that some players don't *know* their preference, or the strength thereof, but it has already been said, so...
Idk. I just think we're going in circles at this point.
For my part, I've been playing with "one roll, everyone shares." That gives you a bit of the randomness without sacrificing any particular player on the altar of bad luck. Really, it's hardly any different from point buy, but it maintains the sense of discovery that I kind of value, where you can't fully know what you're playing until you roll. It does somewhat reduce variety of course -- if you roll 3 great scores you'll probably see a lot of MAD classes and not a lot of SAD classes, etc, but there's still plenty of room in the system for variety within that.
If everyone uses the same generation system that does help immensely. The solution I have come up with for rolling stats is that you don't roll your own stats.
The DM can roll or the person to the player's left can roll for the player. This minimizes the cheating aspect. It also involves the table in the character creation of a teammate.
If there are still hard feelings with this method then the DM can adjust as they see fit.
If everyone uses the same generation system that does help immensely. The solution I have come up with for rolling stats is that you don't roll your own stats.
The DM can roll or the person to the player's left can roll for the player. This minimizes the cheating aspect. It also involves the table in the character creation of a teammate.
If there are still hard feelings with this method then the DM can adjust as they see fit.
I agree that if everyone uses the same system it helps.
I don't think I would care for someone else having anything to do with my dice scores, even if it is just rolling them.
As for the cheating aspect, if there is cheating at the table, it's not a table I want to be at.
I am starting a game soon where we had a session zero and discussed everyone do point buy or everyone roll for stats(4d6 drop lowest). I always take point buy. We chose roll for stats. I rolled a 14, 12, 10, 9, 5, 6 (note roll20 visable to all). I rolled first and didn't use the group macro. I was going to play with those stats. (there are certain builds that can work). Then everyone said I had to re-roll DM and players alike. They practically begged me. So I rolled again and got a 15, 14, 12, 10, 8, and 5 . those are the stats I was stuck with. I thought about making a druid, But the party had no "face" role.(and no cha casters) so I am building a bard at least no one should be able to step on my place in the party. I will just have to play smart/tactically and the party knows I am weaker than them. The dm does sometimes tailor encounters and equipment for party balance but he doesn't do much and frankly tailoring too much can be no fun. But I expect threats bards are particularly weak to will be limited early on but not removed. I don't believe I should expect any more treatment than that.
I kind of agree with the previous point "rolling is a form of gambling" to remove the limits kind of removes its purpose. but the goal of the game is to have fun and I will probably have other chances to make up for it. And at least its not IRL money.
So I made a spreadsheet with a formula to calculate the dice rolls =(A3+B3+C3+D3)-SMALL(A3:D3,1) with A-D being =(INT(RAND()*6)+1). I then repeated this process across the spreadsheet 6 times to make the 6 skill rolls, and 10000 times down the page to see what kind of numbers happened.
The average total number of skill points is 73.48, and no matter now many times I repeated this, it would rarely stray more than 0.1 from there.
The lowest I saw was 36 (I found this by getting the tables to refresh a few times and using the MIN and MATCH functions - and refreshing quite a few times - this is a one in a million occurrence). I think their rolls were 9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3. Imagine?!?
The highest I spotted was 103 (again pretty much a one in a million, with no skill below 16!).
Your player who got good rolls managed 86, and the bad rolling player got 60, so they're both deviating from the norm by about 13. The chances of that happening one way or the other are around 1/26 (in 10000 results, there are usually around 380 that are 86 or higher), so player one is in the top 5 percentile and player 2 is in the bottom 5%. Now, I'm not saying they're cheating, but for the roll to be both unsupervised and unusually high is... suspicious, and it's generous DMing to let that slide. You're not the DM though, so I guess we have to see how it pans out. It's their job to make sure it's fun for both players.
So I made a spreadsheet with a formula to calculate the dice rolls =(A3+IB+C3+D3)-SMALL(A3:D3,1) with A-D being =(INT(RAND()*6)+1). I then repeated this process across the spreadsheet 6 times to make the 6 skill rolls, and 10000 times down the page to see what kind of numbers happened.
The average total number of skill points is 73.48, and no matter now many times I repeated this, it would rarely stray more than 0.1 from there.
The lowest I saw was 36 (I found this by getting the tables to refresh a few times and using the MIN and MATCH functions - and refreshing quite a few times - this is a one in a million occurrence). I think their rolls were 9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3. Imagine?!?
The highest I spotted was 103 (again pretty much a one in a million, with no skill below 16!).
Your player who got good rolls managed 86, and the bad rolling player got 60, so they're both deviating from the norm by about 13. The chances of that happening one way or the other are around 1/26 (in 10000 results, there are usually around 380 that are 86 or higher), so player one is in the top 5 percentile and player 2 is in the bottom 5%. Now, I'm not saying they're cheating, but for the roll to be both unsupervised and unusually high is... suspicious, and it's generous DMing to let that slide. You're not the DM though, so I guess we have to see how it pans out. It's their job to make sure it's fun for both players.
Wow man, thats impressive, thanks very much for those numbers! Thats good to know, I figured the likelyhood of him rolling that well was high but interesting to know its top 5%. Ya its a pretty laid back group and DM is very accommodating so no one would try to accuse anyone of cheating, its almost so laid back most the group would think "meh, if they want to cheat to feel better, then they can do what they want". We won't know this time if it was true rolling or cheating but I think i'll certainly keep an eye on them next time if we start over.
Pretty much just a deal with it scenario in a way. DM allowed rolling you hit the two ends of the spectrum most of us that don't like rolling argue about, someone very over average and someone really below average.
But at the end of it the DM allowed it and they both picked rolls. Hopefully under roller provides some good RP or has the luck of the dice gods to not just basically sit there watching everyone play, at least they have a 15 which is standard array, just gonna have a lot of dump stats
I'd not be to worried about high roller he just won the lotto, I'd be more upset if low roller set out to get his character killed to reroll.. like come on
I tend to really like the stat gen method we use in our WM game as it combines the uncertainty of rolls and cheers if someone rolls really good stats, while also keeping a baseline to not have badly statted chars.
First, we use rolling in order so you can't switch the rolled stats around, this can generate interesting character concepts (But one has to be open to explore those) The rolling isn't just one roll though. It's roll 4d6 drop lowest in order for all 6 stats, reroll the whole set until you get at least 2 stats of 15 or higher or a stat you like.
Then in addition to that, we also offer the use of the heroic array (16, 15, 13, 12, 10, 8) which stats can be placed as one likes.
The thing that fuses those things together is, that you can first roll and if you end up with a set of stats you don't like, be it while they are rather low overall or you want to play a certain char and the order of the roll does not fit that idea. You can after rolling still choose to forgo the roll and use the heroic array.
By this everyone can try their luck or get inspiration for character ideas from rolling and has the safety net of the heroic array.
You intentionally go out of your way to deliberately kill of your player’s characters? Wow that is some toxic DM’ing.
I don't intentionally go out of my way to do anything. I set traps. Player choice can easily kill someone, and I will often set traps if someone is disruptive at the table. In my 12 years of DMing, the trap has only been sprung once, and the player didn't loose their character, although, it did cause a situation that caused them to realize they were trans. They also stopped leaping before looking in game.
I wouldn't call it being a toxic DM if players at the table are having fun with it. Some people like the min-max power gaming style and some don't. Some DMs like to challenge their players and some don't. Again it is about having fun.
Back to the OP's topic (and subsequent responses) about there being a stat imbalance between characters and how that can lead to resentment or just someone at the table not having fun. I had a personal experience recently that was just that, and it caused me to not enjoy the game. As a player, I have learned to try to adjust my style and expectations to the person running the game. As long as I am having fun, I just go with it. Even if as a DM in any given situation would do it differently. When I run games, I'm there to have fun as well. As long as I am having a good time, I will adapt to the players at my table to ensure they are having fun also.
I agree with that too. And ya not sure if I would go as far as "resentment", if so it certainly wouldn't be toward any person, maybe just the situation. But more so I was just worried about some people feeling inferior or feeling like they don't contribute the same as others which could lead to a lesser or bad experience. But definitely I agree I should probably concentrate on my own fun and what I can do and hopefully others will as well and it should still be an enjoyable game (hopefully lol)
The only way to be fair to everyone is for everyone to use the same method for ability score generation. Either everyone uses point buy, or everyone rolls. And if everyone rolls, then everyone has to roll out in the open with everyone else watching them.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
That depends on the group. If the group is fine playing an unbalanced game, go ahead. If not, you should make the characters with standard array (or point buy).
I always play with standard array. And that's what most of the people I've played with during these 8 years of 5e do. But if a group wants to roll stats, it should be clear that this is going to result in an unbalanced party. In that case, you shouldn't try to artificially balance with magic items and the like as it can easily get out of hand.
Standard array is terrible, the characters are meant to be heroes, larger than life, stronger, smarter, faster, wittier than the average village pleb. The array just means all players are the same. Might as well get rid of all races and classes and just make a single option available to players, human commoner with either sailor, soldier, or farmer as a background.
It's your opinion, of course. But honestly I don't see where to grab it. I have played several dozen campaigns, 90% with standard array, and I have seen hundreds of different characters. Both as a player and as a DM. And many of them 100% optimized. I honestly don't understand why you say that all characters are the same with standard array. Your comment puzzles me.
Are we really talking about the same game?
It is common for GMs to say Roll and if you don"T like it, use Standard Array. It gives a fallback for the times when somebody rolls multiple 9- stats.
I usually use Standard Array because half of my campaigns are onLIne so I can"T witness rolls.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I must respectfully disagree with Beardsinger's assessment that, "Standard array is terrible, the characters are meant to be heroes, larger than life, stronger, smarter, faster, wittier than the average village pleb."
Yes. The characters are meant to be heroes. And that is exactly what the standard array gives you! Remember the "average person" has ability scores of 10. So their 6 ability scores would add up to 60. Standard array, plus the usual +2 and +1 modifiers give you a total of 75. That is considerably better than "the average village pleb."
And no one ever said that heroes have to be heroic in literally every single facet of their entire being! A great heroic warrior would clearly have a higher Strength and Constitution than any town guard. But that same warrior would very likely have a lower Intelligence than the local librarian.
Playing a character with all high scores is no fun. Characters need to be three dimensional. For every strength they must have a weakness. Otherwise, nothing they do will ever truly feel heroic. Embrace your faults. They make for such amazing role playing opportunities.
EMBRACE YOUR FAULTS!
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Also regarding "the characters are meant to be heroes", it's worth remembering that the standard array only limits them up to level 4, at which point they get an ASI or a Feat, if you're using them.
Level 1 is supposed to be where you're noticably more powerful than a normal citizen, but not that you're super-saiyen! having 15 stat-points on top of a normal person is going to make you stand out. By level 19, you've gained another 10 stat-points, or some Feats if you prefer abilities, and on top of that yo uhave all your class abilities to boot.
a level 1 barbarian with S15 is still so much stronger than a commoner with S10. Not only are you already 1.5x stronger than them, you can become angry to get advantage (mathematically averaging to another +5), to be come twice as strong as them. You can also be punched hard in the face without just dying, because at level 1 you have over 3x the HP of a commoner, and you can get angry to effectively double it.
By level 10, you're so far beyond the normal commoner that you are a shining hero. You've added +4 to your stats, have a plethora of abilities, and your health makes you seem damn near magical to a commoner with only 4 HP.
Frankly, if you made a character with 10 for each stat, they would already be head and shoulders above a commoner, simply by virtue of being level 1, and having a bunch of proficiencies. Even a level 1 wizard has more HP than a commoner!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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Each character creation system has its advantages and disadvantages. I don't think you can be sure that one is better than another.
Most people I know use Standard Array because it produces balanced characters, and still leaves room for optimization.
There are also many people who prefer the point buy because they prefer to play with max/min characters.
Very few people I've played with prefer roll the stats. It's basically too random, and many gaming groups find it unfair. I've usually seen it in uncompetitive games, or humorous. But that doesn't mean you have to play like that.
What should not be done, in my opinion, is to allow creation systems to be mixed. The whole group should use the same system. But that's just an opinion.
And in no case are all the characters the same or not very heroic with a standard array as someone else said above. I don't know where that absurd idea came from.
The default method in the books is to roll. The default method in the Beyond builder is standard array. Adventurers' League also uses standard array by default, but allows point buy also.
I really don't get why we're still talking about this. It goes without saying that different groups have different preferences, and that for some players their preference is a make-or-break thing, whereas for some it's just a small thing. It doesn't go without saying that some players don't *know* their preference, or the strength thereof, but it has already been said, so...
Idk. I just think we're going in circles at this point.
For my part, I've been playing with "one roll, everyone shares." That gives you a bit of the randomness without sacrificing any particular player on the altar of bad luck. Really, it's hardly any different from point buy, but it maintains the sense of discovery that I kind of value, where you can't fully know what you're playing until you roll. It does somewhat reduce variety of course -- if you roll 3 great scores you'll probably see a lot of MAD classes and not a lot of SAD classes, etc, but there's still plenty of room in the system for variety within that.
If everyone uses the same generation system that does help immensely. The solution I have come up with for rolling stats is that you don't roll your own stats.
The DM can roll or the person to the player's left can roll for the player. This minimizes the cheating aspect. It also involves the table in the character creation of a teammate.
If there are still hard feelings with this method then the DM can adjust as they see fit.
I agree that if everyone uses the same system it helps.
I don't think I would care for someone else having anything to do with my dice scores, even if it is just rolling them.
As for the cheating aspect, if there is cheating at the table, it's not a table I want to be at.
I am starting a game soon where we had a session zero and discussed everyone do point buy or everyone roll for stats(4d6 drop lowest). I always take point buy. We chose roll for stats. I rolled a 14, 12, 10, 9, 5, 6 (note roll20 visable to all). I rolled first and didn't use the group macro. I was going to play with those stats. (there are certain builds that can work). Then everyone said I had to re-roll DM and players alike. They practically begged me. So I rolled again and got a 15, 14, 12, 10, 8, and 5 . those are the stats I was stuck with. I thought about making a druid, But the party had no "face" role.(and no cha casters) so I am building a bard at least no one should be able to step on my place in the party. I will just have to play smart/tactically and the party knows I am weaker than them. The dm does sometimes tailor encounters and equipment for party balance but he doesn't do much and frankly tailoring too much can be no fun. But I expect threats bards are particularly weak to will be limited early on but not removed. I don't believe I should expect any more treatment than that.
I kind of agree with the previous point "rolling is a form of gambling" to remove the limits kind of removes its purpose. but the goal of the game is to have fun and I will probably have other chances to make up for it. And at least its not IRL money.
So I made a spreadsheet with a formula to calculate the dice rolls =(A3+B3+C3+D3)-SMALL(A3:D3,1) with A-D being =(INT(RAND()*6)+1). I then repeated this process across the spreadsheet 6 times to make the 6 skill rolls, and 10000 times down the page to see what kind of numbers happened.
The average total number of skill points is 73.48, and no matter now many times I repeated this, it would rarely stray more than 0.1 from there.
The lowest I saw was 36 (I found this by getting the tables to refresh a few times and using the MIN and MATCH functions - and refreshing quite a few times - this is a one in a million occurrence). I think their rolls were 9, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3. Imagine?!?
The highest I spotted was 103 (again pretty much a one in a million, with no skill below 16!).
Your player who got good rolls managed 86, and the bad rolling player got 60, so they're both deviating from the norm by about 13. The chances of that happening one way or the other are around 1/26 (in 10000 results, there are usually around 380 that are 86 or higher), so player one is in the top 5 percentile and player 2 is in the bottom 5%. Now, I'm not saying they're cheating, but for the roll to be both unsupervised and unusually high is... suspicious, and it's generous DMing to let that slide. You're not the DM though, so I guess we have to see how it pans out. It's their job to make sure it's fun for both players.
Wow man, thats impressive, thanks very much for those numbers! Thats good to know, I figured the likelyhood of him rolling that well was high but interesting to know its top 5%. Ya its a pretty laid back group and DM is very accommodating so no one would try to accuse anyone of cheating, its almost so laid back most the group would think "meh, if they want to cheat to feel better, then they can do what they want". We won't know this time if it was true rolling or cheating but I think i'll certainly keep an eye on them next time if we start over.
Pretty much just a deal with it scenario in a way. DM allowed rolling you hit the two ends of the spectrum most of us that don't like rolling argue about, someone very over average and someone really below average.
But at the end of it the DM allowed it and they both picked rolls. Hopefully under roller provides some good RP or has the luck of the dice gods to not just basically sit there watching everyone play, at least they have a 15 which is standard array, just gonna have a lot of dump stats
I'd not be to worried about high roller he just won the lotto, I'd be more upset if low roller set out to get his character killed to reroll.. like come on
I tend to really like the stat gen method we use in our WM game
as it combines the uncertainty of rolls and cheers if someone rolls really good stats, while also keeping a baseline to not have badly statted chars.
First, we use rolling in order so you can't switch the rolled stats around, this can generate interesting character concepts (But one has to be open to explore those)
The rolling isn't just one roll though. It's roll 4d6 drop lowest in order for all 6 stats, reroll the whole set until you get at least 2 stats of 15 or higher or a stat you like.
Then in addition to that, we also offer the use of the heroic array (16, 15, 13, 12, 10, 8) which stats can be placed as one likes.
The thing that fuses those things together is, that you can first roll and if you end up with a set of stats you don't like, be it while they are rather low overall or you want to play a certain char and the order of the roll does not fit that idea. You can after rolling still choose to forgo the roll and use the heroic array.
By this everyone can try their luck or get inspiration for character ideas from rolling and has the safety net of the heroic array.