Rolling for stats

[Ursus the Grim]

You guys, we are rapidly approaching the realm of "Let's play therapist" here. And frankly I'm not certified.

Psh. Speak for yourself. I've got a PHD in Not Knowing What the Frell I'm Talking About. Spent 21 years of my life working towards it, too.

My issue is that the argument is becoming more "my DM throws things at us that we can't easily thrash!" rather than "I think its fair to keep rerolling until I'm better than everyone else!"

[Salanmander]

You guys, we are rapidly approaching the realm of "Let's play therapist" here. And frankly I'm not certified.

That's a fair point.

Scaliburn: You know our opinion. We think that you need to keep a level playing field, even if your fellow players claim to be fine with it. You are unlikely to persuade us that it's justifiable by being not a big deal.

SlashRunner: You've gotten all that you can out of this forum conversation. At this point if you and Scaliburn aren't in agreement, it's a conversation you need to have with each other, and possibly the rest of your group. Our opinions no longer matter.

[Lord Loss]

Hello Playground!
I have a dispute that I need to solve.
For generating stats, I tend to use 4d6 drop lowest, with all the stats rerolled if they turn out really badly. I'm currently pushing to start using point buy, but that's besides the point.
One of my players seems to think it's fair to repeatedly roll his stats until he gets the results he wants. He sees no problem with this.

Is he right?

No. Hell no. He's basically ensuring that he gains an immense advantage over the others. For instance, Player One rolls normally and gets a sixteen as his best stat and a fourteen as his secondary stat.

Player two, on the other hand uses the above method. He rolls repeatedly and winds up with two eighteens.

Both players roll a fighter. One of them gets two extra HP per level (putting his first 18 in CON) and the equivalent of an extra point of BAB (18 in Strength) when compared to the other character. This is acheived not through optimization, but rather by bending rules set up by the DM. This is not fair to the other players.

I had a player who did the same with his characters. Because one player is a dice god (seriously, if he doesn't wind up with 1/3 or 1/4 of his rolls as 20s and at least half his ability scores over fifteen he's been having a bad day for rolls), he seems to think that any stat under fifteen is horrible and that characters without an abundance of over 15 rolls sucks. He would spend a long time contantly rerolling his character and people would be done their characters before he finished rolling. Apart from that, though he was an amazing player.

Last time, I clearly stated: You roll your characters with four dice, remove the lowest die. If you don't like your stats, you can reroll them all. If you reroll them again, and I catch you, I'm giving you five eights and a ten. (I didn't use the same wording, but that was the gist of things).

[SlashRunner]

Ok, I'm just going to address everything that's been said and hope that this brings an end to it.

We've decided to just use point buy, with 40 points. High-powered, but since everyone's using it, it's fair.

The other two players ARE that bad and seriously don't care. The rogue cares more about RP than any kind of effectiveness in combat, and the other player is a Cleric (though he's playing it terribly, I think that a higher-level cleric will trounce a higher-level soulknife, no matter how badly the cleric is played.).

There seriously aren't any bad dynamics in our group (well, there might be, but those are totally unrelated to the issue at hand) and I'm not mad at Scaliburn. This whole thread was just an attempt to prove that he's wrong. Also, he's not a bad player, he's probably the best in my group and we'd be WAY worse off without him.

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

Scaliburn: You have the causality backwards. You don't need to get more powerful because the encounters are challenging. The encounters are more challenging because you're getting more powerful. And if there's a sudden sharp increase in a single character's power, that increase in encounter power is now much more deadly to the other players in the group. Perhaps they don't care because they don't realize this.

I mean, if there was a TPK and the DM was laughing maniacally, I could see trying to squeeze out a few ways to get a more powerful character, but even then I'd get the other players to shape up as well.

All that said, I think we're overreacting a little bit. If Scaliburn really wanted to gain an immense edge over the other players, he could just play a Druid with the frackin' nonelite array. It's not going to ruin the game due to balance, although allowing may seriously undermine the DM in other ways.

Which reminds me, Slashrunner, what keeps you from implementing point buy? Player aversion? Scaliburn aversion?

Agh, epic ninja'd

[Morph Bark]

Hi, I am the player Slashrunner is talking about. Our group is pretty laid back, with several of the party not fully understanding the rules. Although the stats I eventually rolled are very good,(17,17,17,15,15,12) I dont think the game will be effected at all, and personally think that as I put more time into my characters than anyone else in the group, It isn't unreasonable if my character has high stats. I dont min/max, I just do whatever feels cool, so the stats arent being used for any cheese.

If they aren't being used for cheese and the game isn't affected at all in your opinion, why won't you play with average or low stats?

[DiBastet]

I dont think the game will be effected at all, and personally think that as I put more time into my characters than anyone else in the group, It isn't unreasonable if my character has high stats

*Shakes head*

Now, really...

Edit: My gf, who rarely has something to say, just wanted me to post here that her opinion is more or less something that would give me a infraction warning even if I used symbols as "#$%$#!" to say it. Se says to the DM that he's right in using point buy, and that next time he should use a hard method of re-rolling, like "everyone get to roll two times max, except when stats are too low based on this standart: [insert standart, or use phb's one]".

[Anderlith]

Our group has the rule of if your total bonuses equal +5 or greater, you can't reroll anymore.

[Curmudgeon]

I had a Rogue character built using a generous rolling method, for a previous game. The DM said I could keep that character because the others were making spellcasters, but I chose to start over with the same point buy as everyone else. I really enjoy the challenge of making a character which suits my preferred style and is still effective; playing fair is part of that challenge.

If you really care about playing a character effectively, you won't need to cheat.

[NecroRick]

From a mechanical point of view the 59 point buy is almost exactly the same as as 46 point buy which is just those same stats rounded down to the nearest even number. (Of course, it jumps to 52 as soon as he puts his bonus point from 4th level into one of those 17s, but the other players also move up in power at that point, so their equivalent may also jump up by 6 points).

So I think a lot of people in this thread over-reacted.

Additionally I think the "so long as we're all having fun who cares?" point is perfectly valid.

Yeah, it's not 'RAW', but I've seen some perfectly respected members of this community do things to RAW (and then claim they've done nothing wrong) that if they did them in the real world to a small animal would get them locked up.

Apart from constitution (which scales with level) high stats make a proportionately bigger impact in the early game.

Reducing strength from say +3 to +1 can mean (at low levels) that you hit ~20-30% less often, and you deal ~20-30% less damage when you hit.

Note that represents a ~44 - 69% decrease in offensive power right there. (Because the effect is cumulative, not additive)

Increasing your chance of being hit by ~20-30% and simultaneously reducing your hit points by 20-30% makes you a lot more fragile.

Anyway - before people use a swift action to activate their bracers of panty-twisting, I just want to point out that I *do* know that each +1 translates to 5% on a d20 - but in turn point out that the numbers get wonky when they're around 20. If you need a 20 to hit, then an additional +2 bonus to hit triples your hits, not increases them by 10%.

Whereas at higher levels you might have a BAB of 10, a weapon enhancement bonus of +3, +2 from your buddy Sir Robin's cohort (a bard, of course), have an additional +2 from feats, and be under the effect of a +2 bonus from some spell. So on top of the +19 you already have, the difference between +1 and +3 to hit from 'high' or 'low' Strength is unlikely to make much difference.

It doesn't matter if you're a Monk or not, any kind of melee character (unless you burn a bunch of feats) is going to be very much a sufferer of multiple attribute disorder. High strength helps your offense, high dex and con help you tank more (and your saves), high wis helps with will saves (etc).

Having an attribute of 8 doesn't make you a 'good roleplayer'. Having an attribute of 18 doesn't make you a 'bad roleplayer'. Stormwind fallacy much?

[satorian]

Rick, I assume what you are getting at is that higher stats are more balanced, since it helps melee more than spellcasters. I agree. But that argument only works when everyone generates stats by the same method. Which these guys are now doing.

So, um. /derail of thread that should be done, I guess. Still, the discussion of high stats being more balanced (and fun, so you can play Roy-like fighters), while certainly discussed before, does still merit some banter.

[Kittenwolf]

**Commends removed by me as no longer necessary** :)

[satorian]

They already worked it out to their satisfaction. Nothing more to say.

[Vangor]

Hi, I am the player Slashrunner is talking about. Our group is pretty laid back, with several of the party not fully understanding the rules. Although the stats I eventually rolled are very good,(17,17,17,15,15,12) I dont think the game will be effected at all, and personally think that as I put more time into my characters than anyone else in the group, It isn't unreasonable if my character has high stats. I dont min/max, I just do whatever feels cool, so the stats arent being used for any cheese.

If you don't think the game will be affected at all by changing your stats...why did you?

[NikitaDarkstar]

Hello Playground!
I have a dispute that I need to solve.
For generating stats, I tend to use 4d6 drop lowest, with all the stats rerolled if they turn out really badly. I'm currently pushing to start using point buy, but that's besides the point.
One of my players seems to think it's fair to repeatedly roll his stats until he gets the results he wants. He sees no problem with this.

Is he right?

I haven't read the entire thread so sorry if I repeat anything.

Most DM's I've played with that roll for stats often offer a 32 or 36 points buy option if you don't like what you rolled, or let you roll a full set of stats 3-5 times and then pick the array you like best. In those cases you can get more rerolls if your dice are trying to seriously kill you. (like one memorable session when my d6's refused to roll anything but 1-2's... the highest number in any array I managed to get was a 6.. the DM took pity.)

But infinite amounts of rerolls? Take away his dice and point him to the point buy rules since he obviously won't settle with anything less than what he wants anyway.

[VinceColo]

Personally I've found my players completely hating their characters unless they had good stats, so we have EVERYONE take 18, 18, 16, 16, 14, 14. It's fair, and we don't waste an hour and a half rolling stats and someone always, ALWAYS gets hosed with a crappy roll, and end up pissed off and resentful over it...

[SlashRunner]

Personally I've found my players completely hating their characters unless they had good stats, so we have EVERYONE take 18, 18, 16, 16, 14, 14. It's fair, and we don't waste an hour and a half rolling stats and someone always, ALWAYS gets hosed with a crappy roll, and end up pissed off and resentful over it...

It's already over. We've worked out the issue a month ago. Please, no one else necro this thread.

In fact, how the heck did you find this thread? It would be like 10 pages back or more...

[big teej]

Hello Playground!
I have a dispute that I need to solve.
For generating stats, I tend to use 4d6 drop lowest, with all the stats rerolled if they turn out really badly. I'm currently pushing to start using point buy, but that's besides the point.
One of my players seems to think it's fair to repeatedly roll his stats until he gets the results he wants. He sees no problem with this.

Is he right?

in my group
individual numbers? no
stat blocks are typically okay

for instance, lets say I roll 4d6 drop lowest and end up with
11, 4, 12, 15, 9, 12
this gets a reroll (without consulting the DM) because the total modifiers are less than + 1

another statblock
11, 12, 10, 13, 10, 9,
this gets a reroll (without consulting the DM) because the highest number is 13.

my group is also okay with rolling statblocks in advance, but you can't pick and choose, you must use a statblock in it's entireity.

for instance, if you rolled 18, 15, 15, 4, 6, 8
you'd have to use that whole block, not keep the highs and reroll the lows.