How do you like your Character Generation?

[NotScaryBats]

High-powered? Low-powered?

Free two feats (because your flaw would just be something that would never come up anyway?)

All 18s? 32 PB? Roll 4d6b3?

All the books and dragons? Just one sourcebook of your choice and core?

How involved should the DM be? Do you ever play "you have to be an arcane caster, living in this city, of this race, blah blah blah"

[pwykersotz]

Somewhat low powered. Mostly because it gives me somewhere to go.

As both GM and player, I tend to do 28 point buy, no starting stat above 20 after racial adjustments. Classes/feats are limited broadly to setting such as Eberron feats stay in Eberron, unless something fits a character so beautifully I can't imagine them not having it. Also, I have a houserule of roll half your die, auto-get the other half. So a Barbarian would get 6+d6 at each level. It keeps the melee from having fewer HP than the casters.

[Segev]

When I DM, I always have people roll what I call the "matrix method." THat is, 4k3 d6, rolled in order top to bottom left to right to generate a 6x6 matrix of stats.

Then, select the row, column, or diagonal you like the best for your character concept.

Once selected, you may assign the stats in that selected set of 6 as you see fit.

e.g.:

10 12 12 15 9 7
15 15 17 5 12 8
11 14 12 10 14 11
16 7 13 11 15 13
5 16 15 8 14 12
9 13 7 9 14 11
This could be a matrix. Playing a wizard, you might select the third column, and assign the stats as such:

ST: 12
DX: 15
CN: 12
IT: 17
WS: 13
CH: 7


If you didn't want "the best" stat line - perhaps you had a vision of somebody particularly physically frail as a wizard - you could instead take the 2nd row (keeping the 17, but getting two low stats).

ST: 5
DX: 8
CN: 12
IT: 17
WS: 15
CH: 15

[TuggyNE]

High-powered? Low-powered?

Moderate.


Free two feats (because your flaw would just be something that would never come up anyway?)

Flaws or nothing.


All 18s? 32 PB? Roll 4d6b3?

Point buy; I haven't had a chance to try my organic variant in a game yet, but I intend to make it a high priority.


All the books and dragons? Just one sourcebook of your choice and core?

Core + books as approved by and available to the DM, with suitable bans, nerfs, fixes, and adjustments for all of those (including and especially to Core itself).


How involved should the DM be? Do you ever play "you have to be an arcane caster, living in this city, of this race, blah blah blah"

Mostly "here's the hook that got your team together, figure out how your character fits that and would respond".

[Zanos]

32 PB is my preference. Rolling seems archaic and unfair, but is alright in certain campaigns.

Flaws never work out right. I like it when GMs use the "feat every odd level" progression instead, so the first level isn't so front-loaded with feats.

Unlimited access to sourcebooks provides far more variety. Limiting sourcebook access doesn't really improve balance anyway.

If my DM thought s/he could decide what class/race I was playing, I would probably politely step out of the campaign. The rest of the world is yours, give me my character.

These are all preferences, of course. Nothing is really a deal-breaker, and even dictated races/classes can be alright or necessary in certain campaigns. That's stuff that should be addressed at the very beginning, though.

[EugeneVoid]

I prefer medium to low power, because when optimization isn't too high, the mundanes can still feel like heroes.

I like flaws, but too many flaws are just cheesy.

28 PB is fantastic. I love PB, because I like to pick my class and race, thank you.

The more books the better. I don't like homebrew such, because often it's poorly written.

DMs should try to create an "adventure!"

[The Trickster]

High-powered? Low-powered?

Free two feats (because your flaw would just be something that would never come up anyway?)

All 18s? 32 PB? Roll 4d6b3?

All the books and dragons? Just one sourcebook of your choice and core?

How involved should the DM be? Do you ever play "you have to be an arcane caster, living in this city, of this race, blah blah blah"

Low powered-ish. I like T3 concepts, if that makes any sense.

I'm with Tuggy. Flaws w/ feats, or no flaws, no feats.

My group usually do the stat rolling thing. I would prefer point system.

I like all the books, with no dragon magazine. I don't mind when the DM gets involved, just as long as it makes sense, and as long as they are willing to work with me on making a character that is fun for me and is storyline appropriate.

[Callin]

My group does 15 for every stat add and subtract till you get the stats you want. Then add racials. No flaws and if its in a book its allowed with no errata. The D m likes us to not be superhuman but melee its cool breaking caster causes him a fuss. Even optimizing casters causes grief. Psions is mostly banned but they can be squeezed in most times.

[Dimers]

When I DM for 3.X, I generally tell my players to set their stats to whatever they think is right for the character. Hasn't turned out anything ridiculous yet.

When I play, the most important aspect of building a character is making relationships with other PCs, so I like to do character-building in a group.

[nyjastul69]

Low-mid op.

No flaws, no extra feats.

4d6b3 7 times, choose best 6 scores

I will allow almost anything on a case-by-case basis. All WotC, Dragon, 3.0, most 3rd party stuff too.

The DM should be involved to whatever degree the group is comfortable with. I'm mostly hand-off unless asked to fill in details. I usually bring 4 or 5 campaign settings to the table when starting a game and we decide which one to use.

[Meth In a Mine]

I prefer 4d6b3, but sometimes re-rolls are allowed (decided on a case-by-case basis, i.e. I rolled a character and got 10, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9. I got to re-roll that).
We don't use flaws, but no extra feats. We allow any class that was 3.5 or pathfinder eligible, but the GM has the final say.
That said, while I prefer 4d6b3 I think some form of point-buy system would be better (We actually have an orc with Str 25, Dex 16, Con 18, Int 14, Wis 14, Cha 14 at 6th level, thanks to some stupid character optimization on some 3rd party psionics gear. Man, I don't like that)

[RegalKain]

Our group allows anything without excess of cheese. (We avoid T1 optimization, as not everyone in our group is good at optimizing.) We use either 36 point-buy or 4d6 drop the lowest. Players choice but if you choose to roll, you're stuck with the rolls regardless (Obvious exceptions like 5 stats under 10 etc but you get the idea)

We usually don't have issues with someone/something being broken, we tend to play fair and do things we enjoy more then power-gaming. We've had a few players in the past who tried to power-game, they were dealt with very viciously IC, so we made sure power-gaming wasn't allowed to stop the Meta and the bickering

[hicegetraenk]

We do the 4d6b3 7x thing. To me rolling is more interesting than point-buy, and I like to have at least a little bit of randomness in my attributes.

We do not use flaws and usually no extra feats, the exception being me the DM allowing the players to pick one regional feat appropriate for their character since I locate all my campaigns in the forgotten realms.

Content-wise everything is possible, but usually dragon magazine is frowned upon. We aim at a rather low op game because we think that the less optimized characters are more plausable and fun to play.
There are some bans on specific feats, classes etc. that root in our agreement of these breaking the game (greenbound summoning for example), and in general, every character has to be made with the confirmation of the DM.

Plot hooks usually are loosely and can be picked up to fit the character into the adventure, or, what I tend to do, I specify a location / area the PCs have to be around and then I create hooks designed to fit them.

[HammeredWharf]

Two flaws. Feats aren't particularly powerful and most of the time two extra feats help underpowered, feat-starved characters more than they help the party Wizard.

32 PB or roll 4d6 and drop the lowest result. In my opinion a higher PB mostly helps MAD classes that aren't great to begin with.

At least Core, Complete X, Dungeonscape and ToB are allowed, other sources are campaign-specific or allowed with DM permission. You can pick neat, flavorful options from any book or Dragon Magazine, but if the source is exotic I want to see it, first. I dislike "all books allowed" games mostly because in our group it takes casters ages to choose their spells in them.

As for the DM's involvement, I think it's fine both ways. Some campaign ideas require chargen restrictions, while others don't.

[SiuiS]

75 points allocated to each ability from zero, free +4 LA that cannot be bought off but that doesn't count toward your level.

This turned out to be substantially A) weaker and B) more fun that our standard numbers generation method.

[Thurbane]

4d6 best 3, arrange in any order, re-roll of 1 dice allowed at any point during the process.

[J-H]

I prefer rolled stats.

[lytokk]

4d6, drop the lowest, 7 times, drop the lowest is how we usually play. Max HP at first level. Not sure if that one was a house rule or if its in the books, but thats how the first DM of the group ran things, and since I took over, I've just kept it.

Our last game, I changed it from 7 times to 6 times, but gave everyone a free 18 at creation. Only PC's got this free 18, any NPC's that I feel like rolling out don't (yet somehow have all gotten one. Never roll this good when I'm making characters for myself). I wanted a way of setting the PC's ahead of NPCs of equal level, make them feel special.

Typically, I tell people they can reroll if their stats are too low (or in once case too high, ended up being loaded dice), or if there's a really really funky distribution (18, 18, 14, 8, 7, 3). Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I like a normal bell-curve of stats, averaging around 14 myself.

Had one DM that did 4d6 drop low 7 times dropping the lowest, but instead had us roll the stats twice and him once, and use whatever array we preferred. Was kinda nice to have that variety.

[Calimehter]

We've been all over the map as far as character generation goes. I'm a fan of arrays, but that's a recent development. The other regular GM in our group likes point-buy - 32 for our upcoming campaign - but we used random rolls the last time he ran.

In my last campaign, I gave out a couple of extra skill points and class skills. Specifically, +2 points/level (+3 for skillmonkey classes) combined with the optional bonus social-class based class skills from Cityscape. I really liked how that worked out and would recommend it to the thread readers. Its sort of like getting the benefits of Pathfinder's condensed skill system while retaining the granularity of 3.5.

We generally don't allow extra subsystems (psionics, etc.) but we allow lots of other material from extra sourcebooks. Since we were a core-only group for many years, core stuff tends to factor big into settings and character concepts.

The GM usually gives a broad overview of the campaign setting and what skills/talents/etc. would be good to have in the party, and races are *sometimes* restricted based on what would fit in. Otherwise, class decisions (and usually race too) and the rest are left up to the players. If we end up with an odd set of classes, the GM usually just works the campaign around it rather than insisting on reworks.

[Jergmo]

35 PT buy (consistent arrays of 15, 25, 35 points)
Two flaws max
Generic Classes variant with methods made for a wide variety of abilities.

No one has yet to feel like they are being outshined or don't have options.

[danzibr]

75 points allocated to each ability from zero, free +4 LA that cannot be bought off but that doesn't count toward your level.

This turned out to be substantially A) weaker and B) more fun that our standard numbers generation method.
I'd be interested to see the races/templates people come up with to get to that +4.

For me, I like 32 pb, up to 2 flaws, free +1 LA (or an extra 20 points for the pb... which doesn't give as much as it sounds), feat every odd level, stat point every even level, HD*3/4 hp when you level up to remove randomness, retroactive skill point gains. At least, that's how I do it when I DM.

[CombatOwl]

High-powered? Low-powered?

Depends on the kind of game I want to run.


Free two feats (because your flaw would just be something that would never come up anyway?)

All 18s? 32 PB? Roll 4d6b3?

All the books and dragons? Just one sourcebook of your choice and core?

I'm currently setting up a game where all 3.0 and 3.5e books + Ptolus + Hallowed and Eldritch Might are allowed. Very high OP intended (players are a team in a competitive dungeon crawling "Scrying Pool Show"). Only requirement is that broken builds be unique--no character may copy another character's broken tricks.


How involved should the DM be? Do you ever play "you have to be an arcane caster, living in this city, of this race, blah blah blah"

I've done "you all come from this village" before, but never more specific than that. There are, I suppose, some logical inferences from that ("how, exactly, did you learn to be a wu-jen there?")...

[Coidzor]

I prefer middling to middling-high. I prefer not to go above 20 for first level characters, not sure why though, exactly.

I like playing characters that aren't SAD, so I prefer a higher point buy or more forgiving form of rolling as a matter of course, because I find low point buys and only being able to get one decent/good ability score favors casters and forces optimization to increase or die rather than more varied character types.

Other than that... straightforward and with a clear goal, I suppose.

Never really been with a group that was interested in going past mid-op, but I'm pretty easy going as long as it's relatively clear what op level is being targeted and that it's not painfully low, because if we're going to be pants on head silly, we should at least be playing a game like Toon where that's the point. Also, it'd be a great excuse to get people to try out Toon, as I've been wanting to take a crack at it since I first heard of it. XD


All the books and dragons? Just one sourcebook of your choice and core?

How involved should the DM be? Do you ever play "you have to be an arcane caster, living in this city, of this race, blah blah blah"

Honestly I've never quite understood the point of that. You have the books. You know the books. You're deliberately disregarding all but 3 of them but you're switching up what the third is. Or fourth, I suppose, depending upon whether MM1 is counted. :smallconfused:

Well, ideally they'd be facilitating communication at the very least, in order to help the group understand what kind of game they're going into, since there's nothing fun about getting dressed up for adventures in space and then having to go home and get changed because you're actually in the jungle. I've done one game where we were all students at the same school, and we kept discussing a sort of Magic School/University game though it never quite managed to get made into a reality. XD

[CombatOwl]

Never really been with a group that was interested in going past mid-op, but I'm pretty easy going as long as it's relatively clear what op level is being targeted and that it's not painfully low, because if we're going to be pants on head silly, we should at least be playing a game like Toon where that's the point. Also, it'd be a great excuse to get people to try out Toon, as I've been wanting to take a crack at it since I first heard of it. XD

I enjoy high-op as long as everyone knows what they're getting into. I usually don't bother with much of a story in those games though. It's really just there as an excuse for the tactical encounters if I'm running high-op. If I'm trying to do an interesting story, it's usually low-op with my harsh house rules on character progression (PrCs must logically follow from experience, feats must be learned from someone, spells are rare, gods won't grant spells that oppose their domains, etc).

[SiuiS]

I'd be interested to see the races/templates people come up with to get to that +4.

Party was a;
Phrenic Winged human(ish) Monk
Human saint cleric
*deep breath* draconic chaosite half-fey bard1/Lillend racial class
Human barbarian draconic half dragon
Magebred abberant lolth-touched grey elf duskblade

The magebred gent took a flaw where he couldn't lower his SR, so ninety percent of everyone's spells went into trying to heal the bastard back to functional, until we just gave up on him. XD

[Zanos]

I enjoy high-op as long as everyone knows what they're getting into. I usually don't bother with much of a story in those games though. It's really just there as an excuse for the tactical encounters if I'm running high-op. If I'm trying to do an interesting story, it's usually low-op with my harsh house rules on character progression (PrCs must logically follow from experience, feats must be learned from someone, spells are rare, gods won't grant spells that oppose their domains, etc).
I actually get more into my character backgrounds in high-op settings, as characters are less likely to die. Or at least, die permanently.

[zilonox]

Here's what I do when I GM (because this is also the way I like to play):

36 PB, but one stat must be an odd number.
All published sources (3rd party, Dragon, 3.0, any world-specific) - though you must use the most recently published version/errata (though there are a few exceptions to this, like Samurai). Homebrew usually denied, though I will at least take a look and consider it if it's not uber-powered.
Max HP at all levels.
Up to 2 flaws.
LA buyoff allowed.
Evil alignments allowed, but only if you can make it work with the group. Problem characters will be rock-falled to smithereens if we (as DM and player) cannot come to some mutually agreeable change to the character's character.
LG Paladins allowed, but only if you can make it work with the group. See above.
Any race/class okay, as long as you can make it work with the group. See above.


Generally, if GM is going to force me into a class or race, then I will usually find myself suddenly too busy to join/continue the game and politely bow out.

[Raven777]

[PF] All Paizo sources + FAQ, no concept restrictions, 2 traits, 20 pts buy, max HP at first level, average on rest, all recruited by the quest giver.


Generally, if GM is going to force me into a class or race, then I will usually find myself suddenly too busy to join/continue the game and politely bow out.

Also this.

[Togo]

4d6b3. Results can then be kept or swapped for 28pt buy.

No flaws, or extra feats.

optimisation level depends on the players' preferences, but I tend to try for a level of balance between characters. Weak characters can get away with almost anything, but very powerful characters can not.

As default, I ban persist and extend, DMM, polymorph line, nightsticks, and a few spells, depending on the game or setting.

[Amphetryon]

For real-life 3.5 games:
Roll for point buy - Each of my four Players rolls 4d6b3, as do I. Each Player besides me (or the theoretical other DM) than rolls 1d6 and we drop the lowest number. This gives us 6 stats. The Players may choose to drop one, and only one, of the stats generated in exchange for a 13. The stats thus generated are converted to a point buy based on the DMG chart, and everyone gets the 'thrill' of rolling with the fairness of point buy, without the 'cookie cutter' feel of either an array or a set point buy number.

I generally only allow Flaws if everyone wants to get the same Feat to start with, like Tomb-Tainted Soul. I allow any WotC official source, including Dragon Compendium but excluding individual Dragon magazines, and by and large use the Test of Spite ban list otherwise.

[Yawgmoth]

When I run, my chargen is to assign the array of 18 16 14 12 12 10 to stats, 2 flaws, nothing expressly forbidden but a lot of things houseruled. I prefer to keep things tier 3ish and mid-op, but since I also prefer to start at lv5-6 I know that things are just going to Get Out Of Hand in about 10 levels.

[Zharradan Marr]

I like (but never got to try) the "25 minus" system. The gist of it is that you generate your first three ability scores in whichever way you like (3d6, 4d6b3, etc, doesn't matter), as long as scores below 7 are rerolled. So you end up with three numbers between 7 and 18. Your last three scores are 25 minus the first three scores.

So if you got 9, 11, 15 for the first three, you'll have 16, 14, 10 for the last three. Then arrange as desired. The resulting array has the look-and-feel of randomly generated numbers, but every PC is going to have the same average score.

[Coidzor]

I enjoy high-op as long as everyone knows what they're getting into. I usually don't bother with much of a story in those games though. It's really just there as an excuse for the tactical encounters if I'm running high-op. If I'm trying to do an interesting story, it's usually low-op with my harsh house rules on character progression (PrCs must logically follow from experience, feats must be learned from someone, spells are rare, gods won't grant spells that oppose their domains, etc).

I should be OK with the idea, in theory, based upon what's actually said, but I've yet to actually encounter a case where a DM's "logic" and my own have meshed well. :/

The bit about feats having to be learned from someone else especially sticks in my craw though, as it either adds a bunch of unnecessary metagaming where you go up to NPCs and ask them what their feats are or you just gut the feat section and eliminate all feats that can't be readily and obviously taught. Or both. :smalleek:

[Valtu]

When I DM, I always have people roll what I call the "matrix method." THat is, 4k3 d6, rolled in order top to bottom left to right to generate a 6x6 matrix of stats.

Then, select the row, column, or diagonal you like the best for your character concept.

Once selected, you may assign the stats in that selected set of 6 as you see fit.

e.g.:

10 12 12 15 9 7
15 15 17 5 12 8
11 14 12 10 14 11
16 7 13 11 15 13
5 16 15 8 14 12
9 13 7 9 14 11
This could be a matrix. Playing a wizard, you might select the third column, and assign the stats as such:

ST: 12
DX: 15
CN: 12
IT: 17
WS: 13
CH: 7


If you didn't want "the best" stat line - perhaps you had a vision of somebody particularly physically frail as a wizard - you could instead take the 2nd row (keeping the 17, but getting two low stats).

ST: 5
DX: 8
CN: 12
IT: 17
WS: 15
CH: 15

That is really cool. I like that a lot.

I even like the regular point-buy system too, or really anything that gives you more direction other than the normal 4d6b3 rolls.

I wonder if our DM would go for something like that, or allow us to. I did the 4d6b3 for my current character and lucked out immensely, but it'll probably never happen again