D&D5e Characters-What has worked for you?

[2097]

Yeah the organized play still forces you to point buy T_T
I love rolled stats

[sjard]

I must be one of those odd ducks then. I haven't used rolled stats since AD&D2.

Mainly as a way of preventing the people who insist that the only viable way to roll is 5d6 drop the lowest 2, reroll anything 3 or less, 10 times drop the lowest 4 rolls.

This tends to result in the dump stat having a 16 or 17, with at least 4 18+.

[Anthony]

Pretty sure rolled stats are one of those holy war things.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by sjard

Mainly as a way of preventing the people who insist that the only viable way to roll is 5d6 drop the lowest 2, reroll anything 3 or less, 10 times drop the lowest 4 rolls.

There are some weird rolling schemes out there. The weirdest I've experienced used the normal 4d6 drop one, but tacked on the choice to re-roll 1s, 2s, and pairs before choosing the die to remove. Assuming you had any idea what you were doing, the minimum possible roll becomes 15, and the chances of that were fairly small.

Sure, big numbers are good, but it just seemed so weird to push all stats up that high. In games with other DMs, we just did the standard roll method.

[tanksoldier]

Randomly rolled stats are fine, unless you’re playing a tournament or something like Adventurers League, but all the “I broke the system” post proves is high stats are better than low stats... especially if you also don’t actually follow the rules.

[2097]

Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon

There are some weird rolling schemes out there. The weirdest I've experienced used the normal 4d6 drop one, but tacked on the choice to re-roll 1s, 2s, and pairs before choosing the die to remove. Assuming you had any idea what you were doing, the minimum possible roll becomes 15, and the chances of that were fairly small.

Sure, big numbers are good, but it just seemed so weird to push all stats up that high. In games with other DMs, we just did the standard roll method.

Yeah, I agree. A lot of these systems are weirdly "compromise-generous".

The existance of the standard array (assign 15,14,13,12,10,8 as you wish) has actually been a great boon. Because now the protocol is this:

First, choose whether to use the standard array, or to risk it, rolling the dice. If you choose to roll, roll in front of a witness (4d6 drop lowest, arrange in any order) and then you are stuck with those stats. That's your character.

What makes this so good is that if it's just 4d6 drop the lowest arrange in order, and that's the only choice, and then when the character sucks, the player is like "uh please can I reroll this" or "please can I reroll the ones and twos" etc. And you end up with more and more cockamamie schemes and wonky numbers. But if you're offered the standard array first (and the standard array is low in 5e), but then chose to roll, you are more likely to accept the roll. It was your choice to gamble, after all.

What's interesting is that this is a way to make 4d6-etc-etc feel better without actually messing with the math. The fact that you choose before you roll is key there. If the rule was 4d6-etc-etc and if you're not satisfied, you can switch over to the standard array, that would significantly change the average characters because the floor to rolled characters would jump way up. I'm so glad they didn't do that.

When I first heard of the 4d6 drop lowest, I thought it was dumb. It sounded like a compromise from someone who hadn't been happy with their 3d6 stats. Why couldn't the design just use 3d6 and then scale the rest of the game around that? But... I've reconsidered, and here's some of the advantages of 4d6 drop lowest:

• It's got some history, being present in the 1e DMG as option one.
• Since the modern versions of the game give you a bonus based on half your score (after you've subtracted ten), it's good that they look centered around ten, which makes for easier conversion between score and mod, but actually (because of the slightly higher curve) are centered aroud +1. This is perfect! If it had been centered around 0 you'd get a bunch of -2, -3 scores and doing that kinda subtraction at the game table is annoying. Now, you usually get a few -1, a couple of ±0, some +1 and +2 and one +3. It gives you a 26% chance of a +1, a 20% of a +0, and only a six percent chance of -2 or lower. As someone who hates subtraction, that's perfect. And then the game is scaled around that, the typical DCs and ACs etc.

If the average is 15 that means you need to add three or four or five all the time, too. The entire game is shifted upward and that's also annoying. Lagom size of the mod is what you want, i.e. centered around 1 but skewed so that it's more likely to err higher than lower. I.e. 4d6 drop lowest is perfect♥

Edit: this is just the thinking at my home table, all other groups are ofc free to do as they wish ♥

[DocRailgun]

I can't see that high stats are all that important in 5th edition anyway, even at low levels. The game gives everyone considerable stat boosts anyway (most every race gets at +2 to a stat and then +1 for their sub-race) and gives them +2 to stats every 4 levels (or a feat, of course). A +4 or even +6 attribute bonus isn't likely to break the game, even at 1st level.

It might be more important if 5th edition was encouraging the classic "go to a dungeon, fight one monster, everyone with one hp left (except the wizard, who lost her one hp in the fight against the fire beetle) and limp back to town" game. But that's not what 5th edition is - everyone gets functional gear for free, some cash, good stats, are competent at their jobs even at first level, have buckets of hit points, and have ways to heal themselves outside of combat.

Since the system encourages heroic, cinematic RP, having high stats is just part of the deal. It's a lot less important in 5th edition than in 3.5, when one had to scounge for every bonus to get at those juicy prestige class abilities.

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

Randomly rolled stats are fine, unless you’re playing a tournament or something like Adventurers League, but all the “I broke the system” post proves is high stats are better than low stats... especially if you also don’t actually follow the rules.

[mlangsdorf]

My group - which rolled stats and then I got crazy lucky with nothing below a 14 - never felt like our low level characters had buckets of hit points. Until about 5th level, we were one good area attack away from a TPK, and after 5th level, it was more like two good area attacks.

I'd agree that 4e characters were very robust, but 5e characters always felt like glass cannons at best. In any combat against significant foes, people went below 0 HP - sometimes multiple people and multiple times.

[Anthony]

How much characters drop below 0 depends mostly on balancing; it happened routinely when I was running 4th edition, but I tended to use about 200% of the encounter budget (but also not run multiple fights per day, so people had dailies); on the other hand, it doesn't really happen that much in the current 5e game I'm in (though I'm not running it so...).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

, it doesn't really happen that much in the current 5e game I'm in (though I'm not running it so...).

It's already happend once in just two sessions of the 5e game that spawned this thread. High damage roll hit from an Ogre on a 1st level PC. Would have worked the same in any version of the system I've played.

Now, in the previous 5e game the only character to never go to zero was my Half-Orc Barbarian (Krak) who had a Racial Ability that would have let him bounce back to 1 HP the first time that happened that day.

We would have had a TPK if Krak hadn't grabbed the fallen Dwarf Cleric and the Rogue hadn't done the same for the Gnome Warlock and Dashed for their lives.

Krak used to hold the healing potions for his friends for when they went zero. All of them did indeed go zero more than once.