Comments on: What are the Best 4e Ability Score Arrays?

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 05:30:40 +0000

@ Scott: Rolling is still my favorite way to generate truly epic PCs. Rolling d20 six times. Arrange the scores however you see fit. Yes, sometimes clerics roll 5′s and drop it on charisma and people call them the Spanish Inquisition. Of course i’ve never met a DM that was standing over my shoulder while i was rolling either. I DM sometimes so even if i rolled a character with natural 20′s i would call bullshit, put that d20 in a glass case on the mantle and re-roll.
Using arrays keeps people honest, but one of the things I’ve always known is that even hero’s aren’t good at everything. Look at He-man; He’s really strong and good with swords and has epic mount:green dire tiger, but he’s to stupid to put pants on. Everybody else is wearing pants, but not He-man. That dumb motherfucker’s just runnin’ around in his fuzzy man panties like it’s normal.

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:31:44 +0000

@Brett: Rolling is still an option in 4e (and 3e). They’re designed with certain assumptions in mind, though — mainly the one about having at least a +3 modifier, after racials, in the primary stat. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t play without meeting those assumptions. Greywulf had a couple of posts about that, a few months back, IIRC.

Personally, I moved away from rolling when it started to interfere with character concepts. Even something as basic as “I want to play a cleric” could be thwarted by, say, a roll of 5 Wisdom. The later roll methods, especially “4d6, best 3, arrange as desired”, did a lot to mitigate that, but I still prefer to make the character I envision.

By: Brett

Brett — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:48:16 +0000

Great information. I admit disliking this aspect of the modern game, having a wide spread of stats really did help with the roleplay back in the day, but since it is part of the game now it is nice to have a good handle on some of the math involved.