I got that the 4d6 drop 1s was a separate thing, but I was just saying that is too lenient for me.
Again, when I DM the rule is 3D6 with 1 reroll of only 1 dice. If you roll utter crap you do point buy.
Since I’m clearly a bit on the stricter side, the lower point buy total seems more balanced to me. If hits a pretty sweet spot with characters being strong enough to be satisfying to play without being too OP right out the gate.
makes sense, in the nearly 23 years I've played/GMd (which i know is rookie numbers for many), I don't think I've had a GM do 3d6
so I guess I got lucky, and as a GM I've always done 4d6 myself, IMO the issue with 3d6/27 points is players tend to optimise for their classes primary stat to the exclusion of just about all else. Whereas 4d6 drop lowest, or a higher points buy (with limitations in place) tends to result in more interesting and diverse characters.
Hard to explain, but especially with games like Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e, the classes are very keyed to their primary attributes, if a player doesn't invest relatively heavily in whatever those attributes are, they end up struggling to pull their weight/feeling frustrated because of how far they lag behind their companions, so in 27 point builds, fighters are almost always stupid/uncharismatic and often not very wise either, wizards are always scrawny and often uncharismatic too etc. Which sucks because the more interesting characters who had a few extra points and could place them where they wanted to without resulting in a character that falls too far behind the systems bounded accuracy.
e.g. my wizard in our current game has a decent charisma score, he's still not as high on that as the party rogue, but he doesn't suck at it, and I took persuasion as a skill on top so he can be eloquent and talk his way through things sometimes, whilst actually being the party wizard didn't suffer for the fun character option.
All the above being said, I've recently been running RuneQuest, and in that, you roll for a specific stat, no swapping them around. Even with that I allowed 4d6 drop lowest (or 3d6+6 drop lowest in the case of Size and Intelligence, because their baselines are 2d6+6 in that game), but i didn't allow the players to swap attributes around. I did let each player roll two sets of attributes (in order) and decide which spread would suit the idea they were building up better though. So yeah, I'm a fairly lenient GM but I believe there are ways as a GM to ensure players are happy and don't break the game at the same time.
