Spolier Alert

WARNING: Posts addressing individual campaigns contain spoilers, including: Lost Mine of Phandelver, Horde of the Dragon Queen, The Rise of Tiamat, Yawning Portal, Princes of the Apocalypse, and home-brew content.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Creating Characters: Point Buy vs Rolls

One of the longest lasting element of any character are his opening stats.  It feels great to roll those dice and get monster stats.  It feels a lot less great to come up with middling numbers. Often times a DM will allow a reroll, but their is a tendency for some people to just accept what they have rolled and possibly be unhappy with it for a long time. 

I've always favored point-buy or similar approaches as they result in the same resources for all players.  This starts everyone off on an even playing field and pretty much assures that class abilities will matter.

I ran across an article that discusses the benefits of point buy on the web, and want to share the link here: Dungeon Solvers: Why You Should Use Point Buy for D&D 5e Character Creation

Another approach that allows rolling stats, is a collective pool.  All the participants roll up their set of stats and then the numbers are put into a common pool. The players then take turns taking the number of their choice from the pool.  Most likely in an order determined by high rolls, reversing in the next round, so that the person who picks first in round one picks last in round two.  The next two sets of rounds can retain the same order or determine new orders.

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