Point Buy System

Recently I've had the desire to have a better understanding of what it means to be an average / above average character. Stats can be quite difficult to compare directly: Is a character with three 3s and three 18s equal to a character with three 10s and three 11s? They both average 10.5, but to say they're of equivalent power would be wrong. I've put together a point buy system that lets us compare character stats more directly and more objectively (Note: A character is far more than their stats. Let us not equate value or strength of a character with just their stat block.). This system is based on a combination of intuition and testing, but much like any D&D system, it's imperfect. That said, let us look at some example characters:

Character 1: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8

Character 2: 18, 17, 16, 8, 7, 6

These two characters are hard to compare. If we add the value of their stats together, both characters come out with a score of 72; so, are these characters equal? They're certainly close, but if I was going to min/max a PC I'd certainly take the stats of Character 2.

According to the Point Buy System I built, Character 1 has a stat value of 291, while Character 2 has a stat value of 378 (30% stronger), which seems about right.

Here is the link to the Point Buy System (which includes instructions on how to use it): 

This system was built with the following example in mind:

You're starting a game with a new party (you're the DM/GM). You want the PCs to all be roughly equal, which can be hard to do with 3d6 or even 4d6d1 stat generation. When the party gets together to make characters, you ask your players how strong of characters they wish to play. They might say, "We want to play a group of regular folk who get swept up into a grand adventure", or they might say, "We want to play epic characters that bash faces in all day every day".

In the former case, you could look at the PBS and see that average characters have a stat value around 200. So you give your PCs 200 points with which to buy their stats (see the PBS for specific values). Or you could set them up to be heroic characters with 360 points to buy their stats. 

Alternatively you could let your players roll for stats, and then plug them in to the PBS to make sure people are near the same power level (and if they're not, you can adjust some stats until they're near one another).

At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong way to make your characters. As long as you're all having fun, you're doing it right. I hope this system is useful to some of you, and I'd love to hear what you have to say about it.

- Neal

PBS Link:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18yWs6S_RX4x0QNqLSdaLHu1dISMgihHjt99mjfRddqk/edit#gid=0