Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 PetardoMauriti Aug 12, 2014 14:15:46	You can determine Ability scores point buy or randomly. But now that 15 is the limit looks quite low compared what you can get if you roll dice, it's not that hard reaching 15 since you discard the lowest one when rolling 4d6. So there is chance you can hit that 20 limit already at 1st level (include racial bonus). Is there an upper (and lower) limit for a random score? On the other hand you can end with an intelligence of a horse hitting quadruple 1.
#2 Sorxores Aug 12, 2014 14:35:45	technically the minimum you can get is 3 not 1 (since you take 3 dice roll) a caracter with 4 3s wont' survive long, so you can safely reroll a new caracter   If you play house game then you can have you stats done as you want (with my friend we like to play heros game so we usually play roll 4d6 reroll the 1 and take the 3 best. If you want to play in organize game you have to use the point buy system allowing you a maximum of 17 (15+2 racial)
#3 h347h50 Aug 12, 2014 14:51:37	Sorxores wrote:
#4 aljergensen Aug 12, 2014 17:11:38	I was curious about how the roll 4d6 stacked up against the point buy so I wrote a quick program to simulate rolling for a million characters and I found that it was pretty close (given some caveats).   Since we don't have a point buy cost for anything over 15, I assumed that a 16 cost 12, 17 cost 16 and 18 cost 20.  Rolls of 8 or less cost 0.   I then did some analysis of what percentage had rolls that had stats that were under 8 or over 15 and averaged everything.   My results: 1 or more stat too low:            144,709,380 (14%)       average 21  1 or more stat too high:           415,083,970 (42%)      average 40   Both Too High and Too Low: 152,526,720 (15%) stats just right:                          287,679,930 (29%)     average 26  All:                                               1,000,000,000              average 27   So other than proving that I probably have too much time on my hands, the point buy is a pretty close approximation.   Personally I like the point buy system because I've played campaigns where we rolled for stats and one person rolled multiple 18s and another rolled bad and had a high stat of 14 with several stats below 10.
#5 Chimerasame Aug 13, 2014 6:26:22	Using 4d6-drop-lowest, the chances you'll get at least one 16-or-higher is more than 50%. (I think it's about 58%, specifically.) I find the point-buy restriction to 15 to be quite unusual for this reason. I like point-buy, on the whole (system-agnostically), because of the fairness involved, but it's unfortunate that it seems to produce worse scores than a typical die roll, most of the time, in 5e.   I can see not allowing 18s. But I probably would've made the max 17 (and made it very expensive), and made 16 relatively reasonable to get. I'm hoping they provide for alternate point-buy schemas in the DMG.   http://catlikecoding.com/blog/post:4d6_drop_lowest is a useful page which breaks down a lot of the data related to 4d6-drop-lowest into understandable graphs.