I only support point buy when you complete the scale: that is, you can buy up AND down, using the same scaling increase of cost, all the way to 3 and 18, just as you could theoretically get for dice.
This means, from base 8, buying down gets you one point back per rank down to 4, and two back for the rank from 4 to 3, while above 15 it costs three points for 16 and 17, and four points for 18.
This would means that buying a single 18 is permissible, but will cost you 19 of your 27 points and is largely impractical unless you leave the character very lacklustre elsewhere, and it does allow characters to buy down weak stats that they want to have lower than an 8 for character purposes. You get far less for buying back low scores than buying in high ones, so it's not practical to use it to force your numbers.
This is the only form of Point Buy I feel is really worth actually using.
I think the accusation that rolling leads to broken high scores is silly, really. A player having one 17 or 18 starting out isn't going to break the game or end the world, or even really change things over much, other than make them feel a little bit more confident in the first four levels of play (after which the difference is effectively nullified by the potentials of player choice). Even a character that rolls one 18, puts it in their racial ability bonus ability score, and starts with a 20, is only going to have a relatively small buff to their specific by-class capabilities for the first four levels or so, after which the difference goes away. I've had a character that has started with a 20 in her core offence state, and she didn't overshadow the group or obliterate encounters or break the game. She was *competent*, and generally hit what she shot at, early game. Past level 4 there was really nothing to report. I've also had characters that started with a 15 in their core offence stat, no racial bonus, but who has, by level 11 now, had quite a lot of occasions where her actions have unwittingly overshadowed the attempts of others, and I've been trying to let it happen less by making different choices. Ultimately, it's not a big deal, beyond the first few levels, and it's not much of a big deal even then.
The accusation that it will mean players starting out with super high stats across the board is ridiculous - in reality, no-one is going to sit at their computer hitting re-roll for the literal hours on end it would take to get three 18s... and if they want to waste hours and hours and hours of their life doing that instead of actually playing the game, that's on them.
Aside for the fact that I agree that the default "point buy" system feels a bit too restrictive, I disagree with basically any other sentence or assumption in this post, but the last one in particular is spectacularly disingenuous. "No one is going to sit at its computer rerolling for hours" is bullshit. You don't need "hours". In merely few intense(ly tedious) minutes you can have HUNDREDS of unsupervised rerolls.
Many of us did it with BG2, after all. And that game had a "the worst of both worlds": dice rolling and still freedom to move points around from a stat to another.
That aside, honestly when I say I don't like roll systems it's not even just a matter of not liking the potential for "overpowered characters. I genuinely don't like the extreme unpredictability/unfairness of the system overall, included how much your outcome can SUCK to comical degree if you try to put some reasonable restriction to the infinite reroll.
Even sticking with rolling for character generations, I always imagined that a better system would have been a hybrid one. Something like "roll 3D6 10 times, keep the six highest results out of ten, and have a FREE PASS to replace the lowest value among them with a 18 by default".
Unlimited reroll in a computer game UNSUPERVISED by a DM is BULLSHIT. May as well give people a free pass to type down their own stats. And many will anyway, in some way or another through cheating.
Except CHEATING is an outside influence and it shouldn't be confused with a game FORMALLY giving you license to whatever the fuck you want and expecting restrain on your part.
Anyway, as we said one hundred times already, rolling is coming regardless of what I think of it, so there's that.
