Before I go any further, let us be very clear on one idea: dice rolls in D&D represent all those elements of life that are beyond the control of any one person. I don’t think that anybody would argue this, even those knaves who advocate reduced usage of those most hallowed of polyhedrons. What seems to escape some is that dice rolling does not make the entire game random or arbitrary, it merely adds that uncontrolled element into the mix. Any relevant factor that will produce a reliable result (i.e. training, proper equipment) is factored into the equation as a static modifier, and the sum of all modifiers is added to the result of the random elements. As the elements that are within a character’s control improve (through continued training or use of better quality equipment), the static modifiers begin to overwhelm the random elements, until chance of failure at any given task becomes very low. Likewise, as a character develops himself through dedication and training, his abilities (both stats and skills) grow appropriately.
I also don’t think that any gamer (dice or diceless) will argue with the statement that the essence of RPGs is creative gameplay. However, the diceless or even dice-lite phenomena aim to recklessly disregard this most fundamental of concepts. I think this is most easily demonstrated by bringing to mind a dilemma that every GM, both novice and veteran, has experienced.
Consider the following situation: we have a party of PCs fighting their BBEG. The BBEG is about to complete a ritual that will empower an evil artifact of unimaginable power, and should the PCs fail to stop him, the artifact will enable the BBEG to crush the armies of every good nation on the continent and rule over them with an iron fist.
In the midst of the fight, none of the rolls seem to be going our players’ way, and they soon find themselves overwhelmed by their enemy. With a collective HP total in the single-digits and rapidly depleting supplies of prepared spells or power points, the PCs face certain defeat. We, as GMs, need to make a decision: do we “fudge” or even completely ignore dice rolls, furthering a heroic story at the expense of game mechanics, or do we stay true to the capabilities of the PCs and force them to confront the dreaded prospect of a TPK and the subsequent consequences of their failures?
A lesser GM will generally choose the former path. After all, he tells himself, the dice rolls are what caused the players to lose the battle, and there’s no reason that we should allow a little bad luck to kill off a few perfectly good characters and ruin a well-prepared story. This kind of reasoning is attractive, I’ll grant you that. Certainly, it makes life easier for both the GM and the PCs. You don’t have to think on the fly or come up with tactical solutions to your problem. You don’t have to do anything, really – just let the good guys win.
A skilled and experienced GM, however, can see the problem in that reasoning. First and foremost, a victory for the players that was gained through cheating (or “reality manipulation”, if you’re too afraid to use the C-word) robs the players of any real sense of achievement. All the time they spent developing their characters was meaningless, as was any attachment they developed to those characters, because the battle was not won by them, but rather by a little beast by the name of Deus Ex Machina.
On the other hand, if you allow the dice to fall where they may, some PCs will die. The players will feel deeply for the loss of a beloved character, and (if you’ve even remotely done a good job as GM) will seek to avenge the deaths of their PCs. So what does the skilled GM do? He lets the PC die. He lets the BBEG conquer the known world, and in that terrifying new domain of evil he places a new set of characters – characters who knew, or were related to, or were inspired by the brave PCs who met their deaths at the hand of the BBEG. The new PCs will work nonstop to thwart the BBEG, and hopefully succeed where their predecessors failed.
The above example deals with the results of unlucky dice rolls in combat situations. What about those pesky players who want to pick their own stats? Surely that falls under a different category, right?
Wrong.
When you toss the bones to determine your character’s ability scores, you may not like the results. Maybe they’ll all be too low, or too high, or too mediocre. You’ll thrown your hands up in the air, lamenting your fate and dreading the prospect that you might have to play a character with only average ability scores. Any GM worth his salt has heard the war-cries before:
“He’s a wuss – how is he supposed to inspire fear on the battlefield when he isn’t a total badass?”
“But…but…but…I can’t give him a 6 in any ability. He needs them all. If I put it in INT, he’s a moron. If I put it in WIS, he’ll never be an effective ruler. If I put it in CHA, he’ll never be able to do the wenches at the taverns!”
The fact of the matter is, low ability scores don’t cripple a character. They make him a challenge to play. More often than not, the most memorable characters are the ones that you initially hesitated to play. I still fondly remember Valerraen, my Gnome fighter with 10 STR and minimal HP, and an absolutely disastrous DEX. When I first rolled those scores, I begged my GM to let me pick my own, or even to re-roll those accursed dice…but he wouldn’t relent. Reluctantly, I settled down and had to figure out just who Valerraen was – after all, he wasn’t the brash, arrogant, heavily-muscled Dwarven bruiser that I had initially envisioned. Still, something about him screamed “fighter”, so I did what any good player does – I got creative. Instead of being a Dwarven battle-tank, he was a Gnome exile determined to make his mark as a warrior despite his lack of experience and talent. Session after session went by, and he began to feel a little like Don Quixote de la Mancha, constantly blundering into situations that he just couldn’t possibly handle, even if he could understand just what was going on (Valerraen wasn’t very bright, either). But while his better-qualified comrades fell around him on the battlefield, he always managed to blunder through to save the day.
Now that I’ve ranted, let me finish things off with a Jerry Springer-esque little contrived final thought:
Creativity requires adaptability. Not everyone is going to be able to think quickly enough to enjoy themselves even as the dice roll poorly time and again. If you’re not up to the task of adapting your game to fit the roll of the dice, maybe you need a less demanding hobby. I hear that knitting can be fun.
Not that I completely agree, but it is good to read these things. Things not quoted I generally agree with. Especially the fudging.It will come as little surprise to many members of this board that there exists a group of wanna-be gamers who seem intent on destroying one of the fundamental aspects of RPGs – dice rolling.
A factual error: there are diceless RPGs. Rolling dice is not fundamental to roleplaying.
At first, this insidious plot seemed limited to LARP players who insisted that story should dictate skill check outcomes, instead of the other way around.
I say, let them do so if it pleases them. I prefer to not do stories.
Before I go any further, let us be very clear on one idea: dice rolls in D&D represent all those elements of life that are beyond the control of any one person. I don’t think that anybody would argue this, even those knaves who advocate reduced usage of those most hallowed of polyhedrons.
For the sake of arguing, you are wrong. Rather, the description is not complete. Dice represent a way of selecting one outcome of many that are available in given situation. But, that is also what the GM does. The GM selects one option of many (perhaps infinite) applicable outcomes to an event. For example, what do the PCs encounter in the woods? GM decides it. Sometimes, GM uses a chart, but he approved of the chart before using it, and could have used another, different chart instead. So, dice rolls represent those elements of life the GM has given control of to them.
I also don’t think that any gamer (dice or diceless) will argue with the statement that the essence of RPGs is creative gameplay. However, the diceless or even dice-lite phenomena aim to recklessly disregard this most fundamental of concepts.
I am really not seeing this. Could you articulate an explanation that is not only drawn from examples?
The fact of the matter is, low ability scores don’t cripple a character.
They do, in one sense. With low ability scores it is hard to survive and achieve things. The players who have performance in battle at high priority suffer greatly from crippled characters, by the loss of limbs or bad attributes.
If you’re not up to the task of adapting your game to fit the roll of the dice, maybe you need a less demanding hobby.
Or, one might just not want to adapt to mere dice. Which means that they should get a different hobby, or system at least.
I must be one of those "bad DMs;" I fudge rolls. Only to a point, of course, not a "Wow! You beat his AC AGAIN!" kind of way. But certainly, in a life or death encounter, I tend to add a couple point's to the attack roll. To each his own, I guess.
However, I am not sure fudging rolls is always bad (forgive me if that wasn't your implication). I find that in many fights I end up fudging a roll or two. I do this for two reasons:
One is that I know pretty accurately exactly how much punishment my PCs can take, and how long they will last in any encounter. I don't mind seeing them scrap with bad situations, but that troll rolling a critical against the cleric when he's only got a few HP left and the rest of the party is unconscious is not fun for anyone most of the time. So I agree that in some situations "tactical thinking" can be a better solution than killing everyone off. But I am not quite sadistic enough to let my players die every time the rolls go against them. After all, they are subject to hundreds more rolls than any given foe. Raw statistics dictates that after awhile even the best party will be wiped out by something that probably shouldn't have killed them. But i digress.
My other reason for 'cheating', and this gets to a dirty secret of all tabletop gamers, is that even the most honest and upright player will occasionally try to fudge his own rolls, given the chance. Most players are pretty good about this, and there are ways to cut back on "creative rolling". However, it appeases my sense of moral justice if I cheat too a little.
But overall, I think fudging rolls definitely should be avoided, for all the reasons thomps1d mentioned and more.
A brief example of why not to fudge:
I ran a campaign recently where the party had FINALLY hunted down a Yuan-Ti firemage who fancied himself a demigod. This was THE encounter of the campaign. The characters had seen the guy dispatch multiple celestials single-handedly, so they were well-prepared for the battle.
It was a grueling fight, lasting well over 10 rounds, and in the end the baddie won. The players had a real shot at winning, but the dice just didn't fall their way. The solution: I "cut scened" some of the relevant summary of what happened after they fell, and decided that their failure made a great segue to a campaign where their characters return as undead secondary characters who work secretly among mortals to continue the struggle against the ever-increasing power of the Yuanti baddie.
See, failure can be fun - and I had even *planned* for the campaign to end when they won...
1. A gamer, who owns and studies the books.
2. An experimenter, who wants to try a new thing.
3. A friend of a gamer (or sibling / spouse / whatever)
If you are playing with gamers, you should roll dice. That means anyone that would actually read in this forum. Otherwise you are just all telling ghost stories, and you wasted your money on all those shiny books. That strategy can backfire with people who aren't really gamers yet. You have to ease them into it. After a few sessions, you can teach them more. Do the combat part. And then skills. And eventually start teaching them about spells and saving throws, grabbling and counterspelling.
Because you don't really learn enough to play the whole game in one evening. And some people just like the storytelling aspect better, and that is O.K. too.
Dice, in order to work, requires the law of averages. In most cases this is assured, you make a number of attack rolls, saving throws, skill checks, and so forth in the course of a battle or even a campaign. A second feature, not always obvious, is the inability to ignore the dice. This is easier to understand in the course of game play because you have to make a specific roll at a specific time.
Attribute rolling breaks both of these assumptions because in the first place 6 rolls is not enough to ensure that the law averages will apply fairly and secondly character creation occurs for the most part outside regular game play and the checks and balances that game play imposes on dice rolls in general.
Modern D&D relies on balance to an extent undreamed of in the original AD&D edition. The goal of the balanced system is to be able to know ahead of time how characters will on the average deal with various encounters. Radical ability variations above the average shifts this balance in one direction or the other and can even add or subtract a virtual level to the effective level of the character. I saw this effect firsthand back in the days of 2E when liberal character creation literally had me raising the encounters by one or two levels because they were able to defeat encounters that should have been a challenge with ease.
So on the one hand, pure random determination can lead to imbalance because the law of averages cannot be effectively employed. On the other hand, player determination can lead to min/max behavior or worse uniformity and mediocrity. There is a happy medium here in that one can generate a series of balanced attribute sets and randomly pick from among them. This eliminates the rare unbalanced character and still leaves an element of randomness to character creation.
That’s it.
Nothing about roleplaying in any way insists on classes, or dice, or anything else. The neighborhood kids playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians or whatever are doing a form of a roleplaying game. Roleplaying is also used as a psychiatric/counciling technique (although it’s not a game at that point).
No part of roleplaying says you need dice.
No part of "game" says that dice are needed (unless you think that chess or poker aren't games).
Heck, by the way you're trying to define things, I wonder if you would call even 2e D&D a roleplaying game. It would be very "dice-lite" by the stuff you are saying, as much of what happened had nothing to do with dice rolling. You wanted to bluff your way past a guard, you had to roleplay it, there were no rolls to make. 2e pretty much didn't make you roll dice on anything but combat, and left you to roleplay everything else.
But bottom line, the dice are just an arbitrary way to resolve the old "I shot you!" "No you didn't!" argument from when we were 6. More dice does not mean the game is more fun, and less dice does not mean it is any less fun. They are *ONLY* ways to fairly resolve disputes. As long as you trust the group you are gaming with, they're not needed all the time.
I trust my good players to be able to make up their own ability scores when creating a character. I trust that they will make their character fairly, and will not abuse my trust. That is why they are my "good players".
I'd say it depends. When one has gamers at the table who think of D&D as a challenge (and this game certainly is quite good at being that) you are correct. Yet there are other kinds of people in the world who also qualify as roleplayers, especially if you just take the word literally. Look into just about every core book of every system at that "What is a RPG?" section. It usually says stuff about people who try to spin a tale, to live adventures, to tell a story without all those bits they didn't like in the books or movies.
So this tale goes: "The brave adventurers who set out against all odds to slay the evil overlord encountered a patrol of said overlord. Bravely, they unsheathed their swords and... were completely wiped out since the dice said so, in an irrelevant battle without any further meaning."
Satisfying for a gamist, the one who likes a challenging contest? Possibly, as you explained. For a narrativist, the one who wishes to tell a story? Certainly not. He would feel more cheated than if the DM had fudged the rolls, since he thought up a character whose story is never going to be finished now.
I do know of satisfying deaths, the kind where you manage to achieve something by dying and I absolutely like them at the end of a campaign. In another system, our party in the end battle died one by one, finally taking the archenemy with them and everyone agreed it was a perfect ending for the game, especially since the DM also added a little "and that happened about twenty years after" speech, telling about the children of the characters and what they did manage.
Next: The practice of rolling up characters. I personally absolutely hate it. It may be fine to people who like a "challenge", as your example of the gnome has shown, yet if I wanted to play Isiriel Lightborne, champion of Justice, bringer of Law, the guy with that tooth-paste-advertising smile, there is a reason behind that, since I usually think about character traits and what the essence of that character should be, before I pick up the pen.
This reason also means that I do not want to play and see the story of Isiriel Lightborne, that scruffy guy with the charisma-8 who was unable to give that stat any better value 'cause of the dice. When I want to play the aforementioned shiny guy, I don't want any dice to tell me whether I'm allowed to do that or not.
There may come the time when I would like to play a guy who is maybe a bit dim or just physically weak (and it did already happen several times), but again, at that time I will not need the dice to tell me that I'm allowed to do it, since it will be my wish to spin the tale of Eric Millerson, who thought to be the greatest warrior of ages and made it through his adventures with more luck than intellect or strength while admiring his idol Isiriel Lightborne.
More specifically, I would argue that the reason we buy the books and the dice is to have a common framework. If you happen to be part of a group that trusts their GM/DM implicitly, and who can avoid argument, or resolve it easily, then you may very well not need dice. You are also not really playing D&D. You may be using the archetype, the monsters, etc...you may even be roleplaying yourselves in a premade module or world setting (though this is probably unlikely). But, despite all this, if you are not using the common frame of reference, which is D&D, then you are not playing D&D. You are playing "cops and robbers".
This is not to demean low-dice or dice-free roleplaying. But collective storytelling becomes D&D when you use the dice-based, turn-based system called "Dungeons & Dragons" as the "rules", if you will. People still argue about dice, and rules - just look at these forums, or play for a couple sessions. But within the rules, there are answers to be found that work on a common framework called D&D.
So D&D is not D&D unless it is D&D. You'll have to forgive the tautology there, but it's appropriate. "dice lite" or "dice free" D&D may be fun, but there comes a point when you aren't really playing the same game. It'd be like Monopoly without money, or Trivial Pursuit without questions...
What's up with the LARP thing? I've LARPed on several occasions, and there is a random way of determining events (old way was rock/paper/scissors; the new one, which uses cards or holding up fingers for White Wolf LARP works much better IMO). I just don't like dice in those situations because they don't work very well without a table.
For the dice rolling with the plot, I think that something in the middle works better. Players see the dice rolls, and sometimes, you just get shafted in ways that would probably never happen, and killing the party in stupid ways (like when you are starting a plot arch with some lower CR bandits who happen to get great rolls while the party gets utterly stupid ones) is generally a bad idea, but when you are presenting them with a real challenge, fudging things is a bad thing.
With the second part, I disagree completely. The creation of a PC is the creation of an alter ego that I am going to be investing a lot in, and there is just no point in coming up with something that I don't want to play. Everyone has different tastes: I don't enjoy playing low Int or low Cha characters. Everyone has different skills; I am, I'm told, not very good at playing high Wis characters :D . I don't come to D&D to uphold some sort of RPG Honor; I come to have fun. And that means playing the characters I enjoy playing.
Of course, some limits are necessary; you can't have people dominating the game. But if you are playing with a person who would make either of your quoted objections to a bad set of stats, you have far deeper problems than character creation issues!
If you’re not up to the task of adapting your game to fit the roll of the dice, maybe you need a less demanding hobby. I hear that knitting can be fun.
Indeed it can. Roleplaying can be quite fun too. If I develop a character conception of a personable diplomat, why should I have to dump it because of a few cubes of plastic?
I have seen many diceless roleplaying games. Many things are simply swept under the rug of "Let the GM decide this." The problem with this is that, unless you have a benevolent GM, you will die. Also, sweeping things like combat and magic under the GM's rug leads to a very stressed out and grumpy GM.
Another option is not focusing on combat and magic. Also, diceless does not mean freeform or ruleless.
In essence, the bottom line is: D&D gives options, and one of those is whether or not you like to use dice a lot. From Cifer, on this topic:
So this tale goes: "The brave adventurers who set out against all odds to slay the evil overlord encountered a patrol of said overlord. Bravely, they unsheathed their swords and... were completely wiped out since the dice said so, in an irrelevant battle without any further meaning."
Satisfying for a gamist, the one who likes a challenging contest? Possibly, as you explained. For a narrativist, the one who wishes to tell a story? Certainly not. He would feel more cheated than if the DM had fudged the rolls, since he thought up a character whose story is never going to be finished now. Lightborne.
To answer this argument, and defending my interpretation of the OP: why does this combat need to be meaningless? It is only meaningless if you, as the story teller, had a pre-conceived idea of how the outcome should be resolved, i.e. a great, flamboyant final battle against the evil overlord.
From my standpoint, if “conventional" minions (I try to have *no* conventional minion in my games, each orc or man-at-arms has a distinguishing mark) manage to wipe out the entire party then I’ll promote them to "non-conventional minions"
What I mean is, once the PCs are dead, I would assuredly get the minions to become known in some way, so that the PCs' successors would know about them.Anyway, as far as the game mechanics are concerned, I think any battle ending up in a TPK would have to be somewhat memorable, even against goblins or a pack of wolves, I cannot see it otherwise. Tension builds up during tough battles.
In summary, there is always a way to spin tale around dice results, or to spin it. I don't think it's better or worse to rely more heavily on dice results - it's a question of taste. Myself, I prefer relying on dice a lot, for the suspense it creates.
I *do* disagree with rolling for stats *after* race and class are chosen. That's just idiotic.
Unless you're doing it just as a challenge -- just to see how well you can salvage a somewhat hideously unbelievable situation as a player and as a storyteller -- it makes life unnecessarily hard for the player and encourages her to make the same old conservative, boring choices to avoid the struggle of having to die all the time. It means that those exciting character concepts and just-out-of-reach PrCs simply aren't going to happen. It means that only a suicidal idiot will even consider *touching* spellcasting classes, assuming you give them the choice. (A fighter with Str 8 can muddle through with a lot of luck. What the hell is a wizard with Int 8 going to do?)
And even if you want to force the player to pretend she woke up as an infant trapped in the role life handed her, which takes away 90% of the fun of the whole *idea* of role-playing in the first place -- IT MAKES NO SENSE.
We real-life people don't have perfect control over our stats but we do have *some* control -- whether you spend your life exercising and training regularly or not makes a very big, appreciable difference in your physical stats, just like whether you choose to pursue education will at least partly influence your intelligence. And we usually pick our professions -- our classes -- based on what we consider our own native ability to be and how we've trained ourselves in life. People don't just randomly wake up one day realizing they're Special Forces soldiers even though they've been weaklings since childhood and have neglected their health since (which is what that Str 8 score basically means) or, worse, wake up one day in a physics Ph.D. program even though they've never been very smart and haven't studied a day in their life (that Int 8 wizard).
At the very least the realistic thing to do is offer the player some *control* over his stats, if not his race -- give him his race, give him his stat adjustments, roll up some base stats and give him at least a few rerolls, a drop lowest, some extra points to buy off the weak stats, or *something* -- the equivalent of having the chance, through your childhood and education, to identify what your weaknesses are and work on them. Sure, not all people do this, but the sort of person who could reasonably expected to have an adventuring career probably would. That gnome who desperately wants to make it as a warrior? Wouldn't he have spent at least some time, y'know, working out? Boosting that Str score at least a little? And he should most certainly be allowed to pick his *class*, for cripes' sake, unless we're living in an imaginary world where people make a random lottery draw to join the government-sponsored rogue program or something.
The fact of the matter is, low ability scores don’t cripple a character. They make him a challenge to play. More often than not, the most memorable characters are the ones that you initially hesitated to play.
Ever tried really, well, making up a character? No dice, no books, no character sheet, just you and some paper to write or draw on. Name, appearance, a bit of backstory, a lot of personality, maybe some ideas for what kind of situations you'd like for him to get into in the future. And then, when all of that's done, you actually whip out the books and the dice and transform that finished idea into a set of attributes and rules. Taking the character you initially envisioned and actually creating it rather than throwing it out halfway through because the dice said so... isn't there something actually satisfying about that, too?
("Where's the organic factor!?" you might say. Ah, that's easy: the wonderful character you've created is still growing and changing as he actually lives in the world. Arbitrariness isn't really any more "organic" than creating a character that feels "organic" to you, anyway, I would say.)
What you're saying is that it's good to settle. It toughens you up, builds character, makes you a better gamer, etc. I think that's all hooey. Now, it's certainly important that everyone at the gaming table be able to cooperate and deal with the occasional failure, because the game won't really run otherwise. But, ultimately, this is just a fancy game of make-believe we're playing, I don't think limiting your imagination at every turn will somehow make it better.
Games are about fun. What's wrong with actually getting what you want?
Creativity requires adaptability. Not everyone is going to be able to think quickly enough to enjoy themselves even as the dice roll poorly time and again.
What it boils down to, I think, is that your entire definition of "creativity" seems to be "problem solving": you consider getting something done within a more restrictive framework to be, ultimately, a more creative and somehow superior act. But there's other ways to be creative. People have them in different proportions and like exercising them in different proportions. Just kind of creating things from a vacuum is a very important kind of creativity, too, and one that you just don't seem to appreciate very much.
Creating a good character when you actually have a lot of control over the process is by no means an easy task. You say copious arbitrary limitations (dice are arbitrary, that's why we use them) add to the challenge. I say they're a crutch. I think creating a playable, functional, reasonable, and interesting character with no limits other than "Start at this level and use this many attribute points, stick to the general setting flavor and theme we talked about, and talk to me before using something not already on the 'In' list." is just as challenging as letting the dice pigeonhole you into something and then trying to wiggle around to figure out how to make the best of a situation. More importantly, I think it's just plainly more satisfying.
And this is one of the few aspects of the game in which the players really do get to make things up out of whole cloth (whereas the GM's doing it all the time, arguably), so why not let them actually do it? Give a good player a lot of room to create and play a PC he really, really loves and he'll make your game world a richer and better place, which will ultimately make the game better for everyone.
It's this statement that convinces me I probably wouldn't like a game you GMed or a system you designed (this is not to say that I think you'd be bad at it, just that our tastes differ):
If you’re not up to the task of adapting your game to fit the roll of the dice, maybe you need a less demanding hobby. I hear that knitting can be fun.
Games are mostly about fun, yes? Well, just like how there's more to creativity than reacting to limiting situations, there's more to fun than just difficulty. For some people, "hard" means "fun". Others think "story-oriented" or "realistic" or "humorous" or "fair" means "fun". Others have a hierarchy of 20 different things they look for, all of which must be present for something to be "fun". It's shortsighted to assume that your way to have fun is the way to have fun, which is what you're doing. A good GM doesn't just make the game hard for everyone; he has to actually figure out what every person at the table considers "fun" and giving them that.
Is your hobby "demanding"? Who cares! "Fulfilling" should be the key word here, and it's important to realize that the two aren't always the same.
I think a good example would be an attempt to enter an ancient temple. The players must first find someone who knows how to enter, must get permission from the local guard, all without using the dice, and then when they enter they use the dice in combat. I think an excess or absence of dice is a mistake, frankly.
I don't disagree with rolling for stats.
I *do* disagree with rolling for stats *after* race and class are chosen. That's just idiotic.
Unless you're doing it just as a challenge -- just to see how well you can salvage a somewhat hideously unbelievable situation as a player and as a storyteller -- it makes life unnecessarily hard for the player and encourages her to make the same old conservative, boring choices to avoid the struggle of having to die all the time. It means that those exciting character concepts and just-out-of-reach PrCs simply aren't going to happen.
Good points, similar to what I was going to write.
Rolling ability stats is fine as long as I haven't already developed a clear vision of what my character will be. Once in the past, I knew exactly what stats my character needed to have, and I remember the extreme frustration of feeling shackled to the array I rolled for him, having to force-fit him into what I rolled. It didn't matter that the array had a decent +8 total in ability modifiers; the profile was all wrong. My vision for him, along with an experimental combination of two incompatible classes, required a specific profile of values in his array (in this case 2 low, 1 middle, 3 high).
My frustration with my rolls led me to invent a whole new race to compensate for his stats (a sort of diluted aasimar which my DM approved). He turned out to be a fun character to play.
On the other hand, if I roll an array before conceiving my character, I'll hunt around for races and classes that could apply to that array, and develop a fun playable character from that.
If I develop a clear vision for my character first, I'd rather use a point-buy system or simply assign whatever abilities fit my vision.
I believe that among a mature, responsible group of roleplayers, simply assigning stats to fit your character can work as well as designing a character around pre-rolled stats. That is, I think it's unlikely that anyone will abusively assign 18 to all abilities. At least, I wouldn't have in the instance described above; I needed a specific profile, not just high abilities everywhere. Some DMs may be bothered by allowing this (mine was, but he understood my problem and allowed me to compensate with a modified race). However, some guidelines be set in this case; e.g. "for every ability 15, 16 ,17, or 18, you must have one at 10, 9, 8, or 6, respectively."
The OP of this thread makes some excellent points but misses the mark in implying that rolling dice make for a good RPG. I would argue that rolling dice during gameplay is necessary to follow the rules for RPGs like D&D which emphasize combat and have many mechanics designed around rolling dice. Rolling dice aren't required for creating characters, as I argue above. And for games that concentrate more on role-playing than combat, "roll" playing may not be as important.
-Alex