So, you wanna start a campaign? Gather some players, make some characters? Well, you’ll need stats – or your players will. But how will you get them?
The current rules for stats
The current fifth edition rulebook (2014/2024) suggests 3 different approaches. Options 1 and 3 give everyone similar stats, strong compared to the average NPC, but not to the extreme. Option 2 gives players the chance of having a really strong and unbalanced character.
- Use a standard array and place the stats where you want them.
- Roll 4d6, drop the lowest, 6 times
- Point Buy – you follow the table in the book to buy your points.
All of these are much “nicer” than the original thought of rolling 3d6, 6 times, and using the stats in the order you rolled them. Especially since that made you want to choose your class from what stats you rolled, instead of what you would like to actually play. Cause if you wanted to play a Magic-User, but rolled a 3 for intelligence, you knew they would suck to play, so you would choose whatever class matched your highest stat instead. Back in the day, when I started with D&D, I let people roll up 3 character stat rolls, then pick the best one. However, today I’ll give a handful of other options.
Other rolling options
Those standard options dealt with, I’ll suggest some alternatives for your table below. To some of those you can add the extra rule of letting people re-roll 1s, or total rolls under 6 (or whatever you like), or roll a new character if the total stats are below 70 (or what you enjoy depending on the power level of the campaign).
Adjusted point buy
From the rules you get 27 points to buy your stats with. Every stat begins at 8, and you use points to raise them to a max of 15 before bonuses from your origin. To challenge the party, lower the amount of points they get, to make the party stronger, give them more points to buy their stats with. You might even allow buys up to 16 instead of 15 to get more players to 18 in their prime stat.
7 rolls
This one has a slight advantage over the one mentioned above. You roll 4d6 seven times, drop the lowest die on each roll, and drop the lowest of the seven stats you rolled up, so you end with the six you need. Thus, you get one more chance for making a higher roll than standard.
Weighted
If you want the general stats to be high for the character across the board, you can use a weighted roll model. Roll 2d6+6 for each stat. As the average roll of 2d6 is 7, you’ll end up with 13 as the average stat for the characters, and with a minimum of 8 for a stat.
Above average
Roll 1d8+10 for every stat. Also a weighted roll, but this time you only roll one die per stat. With the +10 you minimum is now 11 for a stat, so no below average stats at all.
Grid
A lot of rolling for this one, to give you lots of chances to pick the perfect character. You roll six 4d6, drop the lowest, six times. Put it in a 6×6 grid, then choose any row or column after you’re done.
Wild
For some crazy results go wild! Roll 1d20 for each stat. Remember that a stat can’t go above 20, even with origin bonuses.
Pool
With pool you roll all the dice at once, then distribute as you like after. So roll 18d6, assign 3 dice to each stat as you like. That way you can get high and low stats by grouping the high dice with high, and low with low. Or you can average your stats out more, by putting high and low together.
Pool+
Roll 24d6, assign 3 dice to each stat as you like, drop the leftovers. Works as pool above, but with extra dice, so you can throw away the lowest results.
Shared Pool+
Roll 24d6 together as a group, leave them out on the table. Let every player build their character from the same dice.
Either you just divide the 24 dice between the players for them to roll, or
You go around the table letting each player roll 4d6, dropping the lowest until you have 6 stats in total (might mean someone rolls more than once if you’re less than 6 players). The advantage of this is that it – like point buy, and standard array – puts all players at the same ‘level’ for stats.
If you have other ways you roll/choose stats, please comment with your method below.