Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Point buy v. Rolling

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.

What you say about build diversity does make sense; the 27 points doesn’t leave too much room for experimentation, but I personally do still see variation. I know some players who hate having any stat below 12, so they will pump up their main stat, and spread out the rest a bit, and i think trying to determine how much you are willing to compromise with certain stats like this is an interesting strategic choice that gets lost the more points you have to play with.

Cool, feels like we can see eachothers points, both of which are valid. I do like a good even handed discussion online

Yeah, you are right, this does feel fat too amicable for the internet in 2020. Wait, I’ll get my Shakespeare insult generator (a must have for bard players).

You are a ... puny full-gorged minnow, an errant hedge-born hugger-mugger, and an infectious crook-pated giglet.

There. Much better.

i wish there was a like button, know you have one in spirit

I prefer point buy, particularly for multiplayer.

There seem to be artificial restriction to the point buy mechanics in this game too. I tried to make a half-elf fighter a few sessions ago and I couldn't get her strength past 16. Dumped Int to 8, had 4 stat points free, no chance. 16 strength max.

Why would anyone not want to roll for their stats? It's fun, just like a one-armed bandit in Atlantic City. Keep playing until you win!

The initial character statistics in D&D were meant to follow the bell curve, so that 3's and 18's were equally rare. It was very possible to roll a mage with only 12 INT, for example, which creates anxiety because you need 18 INT to cast 9th level spells, and who wants to start out with a limitation like that? But that is not really a problem at level 1, and to solve this problem for later levels, D&D offered many methods for character to increase stat scores through adventuring ... magic pools, wish spells, tomes, artifacts, belts of giant strength, etc. In other words, obtaining high level ability scores was meant to be part of the D&D reward system during play. I think that should have been explained better in the character creation section of the books.

I haven't actually checked if they follow the point buy rules for 14 and 15 (2p cost per ability score increase) but that would be the system used by Larian. Abilities can't be lower that 8 and not higher than 15. The only way to get higher scores at character creation is to have a racial bonus in that stat, so the max is 17.

Thanks for clearing that up, I wasn't aware of that. My thinking was that stats above a certain threshold just cost more points but that "hard cap" is news to me.

Rolling a lot of dice as the game goes along: awesome. The more rolls, the more things average out and are fair.

Rolling dice at the beginning that can effectively give some players +3 or +4 to everything and others permanent negatives .... eh, that can be fun for one shots, but not a campaign, and I don't think it makes sense in a campaign-like CRPG either.

Since there is a coop option, I think it´s fair that everybody would point buy, so all have the same amount of points you can assign at your ablities.

Let´s be honest, roll would make 90% of the players rolling +20 times just to have good scores, and that could take a lot of time of waiting to start playing.

Rolls are awesome. I don't know much about dnd, so I assumed that it's something only the BG dnd version had. I would be very much in favour of implementing it if possible

One solution for multiplayer would be the host rolls the abilities, and everyone has access to the same pool, so you don't have multiple 18's for some, and nothing higher than a 13 for others.

This would of course be standard 5e rules, where you roll 4d6, dropping the lowest each time, and doing that 6 times, and players get to freely assign the scores where they want. Not "roll 3d6, in order".

BG 1-2 had multiplayer

Rolls sound like fun until you are stuck with a character that is so weak, stupid, unappealing, and foolish that you struggle to create an interesting PC. Rolling makes random characters and, if that's your thing then it is for you. If you have an idea of the character you wish to create, however, point-buy or standard array are the ways forward.

Rolling should be limited just like in real DND not the roll as long as you want crap in BG1/2

Nope.

Then use a cheat/hack/trainer/edit your savegame all of which give you the same result just without having to waste your time.