Your stat rolling techniques.

VegardPompey

When rolling stats for a new character, do you have any particular techniques for quickly assessing if it's a good roll or not without adding all the numbers? How do you make your judgements of stat rolls as efficient as possible?

My strategy is to instantly click the reroll button if any stat is just one digit (unless all the other stats are really ridiculous) and also dismiss any rolls that are very close to the minimum for the particular race and class chosen.

Moomintroll

I try to see all the numbers at once and judge it that way.

elminster

if there is a number less than 10 anywhere I tend to skip it.

Metal_Hurlant

I pretty much dismiss any single digit roll. I also aim to have around 15 in every stat. If I get a 12, 13 or 14 in one stat, I quickly assess in about a second if I have 16, 17 or 18 in other stats. This excludes STR based classes.

I don't bother adding up numbers and don't look at any one stat. I look at all 6 stats at once. The only time I add up numbers is if I have a good roll and will only add up the second digit in each stat. Then I add up those second digits and if they're around 30, then I know I have a great roll.

For example, you might roll the following numbers.

14
12
16
17
15
16

I can quickly add up the 4, 2, 6, 7, 5 and 6 from each stat and get 30. This takes about 1-2 seconds for me. Add 60 and you get 90. I can do around 100 rerolls in less than 5 minutes and will always get a great character from it.

For classes that have the 18/?? Srength. I hold down the arrow on one stat and then put everything in STR to see what I received in the ?? spot. I always aim for 18/90+ or 18/00 which I've been able to get on numerous occasions.

Debaser

A good roll is really going to add up to around 90...the two best rolls I've had were a 92 and a 91.

Brude

My own silly superstitions: If it's a difficult class to roll for and the RNG isn't giving up the goods, I'll do a shift-control-8 once and save it, in order to "teach" the machine what a good roll looks like.

If it's really not working for me, I'll back out of the Abilities section and re-enter it in order to "clear out" and "reset" my luck.

But yeah, a 10-11 is an automatic reroll in a prime attribute or a dump stat I need to pull points from.

sarevok57

@Metal_Hurlant thats exactly how i do it as well, except for str type classes, i dont go for 18/90, minimum is 18/91 for me

BelgarathMTH

No single digits, and four scores 15 or higher.

sandmanCCL

I don't stress about my slash roll on 18s for warrior classes too much. For a regular fighter, I'm okay with 18/51 and above and honestly don't care what that value is for paladins and rangers as they are so stat reliant in so many other areas.

Only difference between 18/51 and 18/91 is +2 damage. I care more about the thac0 bonus because generally speaking that +2 damage a hit doesn't matter a whole lot at that point. It's more about landing the blows than making each blow inflict more punishment in my eyes. Average hit from a Two-Handed Sword +1 with 18/51 strength is 8.5. Increasing it to 18/91 bumps up the average to 10.5. Still takes just as many hits to kill a dude with 25 HP, and when you've got 6 people attacking a guy it mitigates that bonus damage even more.

I eyeball stats until I can set them at 14 in each roll. On classes without absurd minimums on useless stats, it's enough to hit 18 in all the prime areas and 10 in all your dump stats, which is more than enough for me. On guys like Fighters I plan to dual-class to druid, or a Monk I plan to use Keldorn's armor on, or various other high max dice needs, I'll try to hit 15 in everything. But that's really rare. Once you realize how little Intelligence and Wisdom matter for guys who don't utilize it for their class, they end up being dump stats for everyone.

PugPug

When it comes to Strength, I don't see why people care about the exceptional strength roll. You can get the tome and raise it to 19, which is better than 18/00, soon enough.

Arabus13

This thread reminds me of a conversation I had about a gamer in my PNP group that loved to run char's with not so great stats. I asked him one day if he knew where all the bones in my dungeons came from? When he answered, "No", I told him "Average Characters"!

sandmanCCL

@PugPug: The extra +1 Thac0 for getting it above 18/51 is pretty damn helpful until then, but otherwise I agree.

Dee

I have a great strategy for when I roll up a ranger:

Check Intelligence and Charisma. If either of these scores is below 12, reroll.
If both of these scores are higher than 12 but less than 15, check Strength and Dexterity; if either of these scores is below 15, reroll.
If Intelligence and Charisma are each 15 or higher, check Strength and Dexterity; if either of these scores is below 13, reroll.

If all of the above criteria are met and you still haven't rerolled, reduce all ability scores to as close to 10 as possible, and add points to each of the physical scores until all three of them are at maximum. Add any extra points to Wisdom.

At this point, I check the exceptional Strength value. If the percentage is below 50, I STORE it, and then reroll until I get another array where I have 18s in all three physical scores (the Wisdom is less important, but I pay attention to it anyway). If I get a Strength score higher than my stored one, but still less than 50, I store that one and reroll again.

I continue this until I have a strength exceptional score between 75 and 00. I'm more likely to keep a lower Strength if I'm able to boost my Wisdom to 18.

Munin

For starters I use the same method as @Metal_Hurlant. Just add the right most digit for each. And, as many others have said, if there is a number below 10 unless I see several 17 or higher, it is a reroll. Once I get up to the high twenties, I tend to add them less and just look at the numbers. When your average is around 15, it is fairly easy to tell that 17, 16, 14, 14, 13, 12 just will not average out to 15. But if it is not obviously a bad roll, I fall back on adding the right digits.

I don't know all of the rules, but some classes and races are more likely to get higher numbers. They have higher minimum or maximum numbers. Others can probably explain this much better than I can.

I am playing an elf mage now with cumulative number of 95. When I thought the game was going to come out 8 days ago, I rolled some characters and had a 96 for a paladin.

Necdilzor

The tips found in this thread are very interesting and helped me understand this more. I always assigned the number to myself... 18+ to strength, 18 to constitution, the other stats between 14 and 10. Now I realize, what a horrible human fighter that character was :S.

Dee

My general strategy is to subtract 10 from each ability score, and add the remaining numbers together.

If the total is less than 24 and I'm rolling a fighter, I'll usually reroll (although if it's close, I'll check the Strength percentage first).

Remember that for most abilities, anything between 10 and 14 really makes no mechanical difference. If you're not playing a spellcaster, Intelligence and Wisdom are really only useful for surviving mind flayer attacks and for boosting Lore. Charisma is only useful if you can boost it to 16 or higher.

So if you're playing a warrior class and are concerned about survivability (rather than an interesting "flavor"), you'll want 18s in all of your physical scores, first and foremost. Everything else is gravy.

bbear

The perfect score would be 18 all around and the sum is 108. I think an acceptable score is 90+, with average of at least 15 for all scores. 90+ should be attainable w/in 5-10 minutes of rolling, depending on what class you pick. 95+ is kinda rare, maybe once every 10-30 minutes. My personal best is 97.

HaHaCharade

I tend to roll for 1000 years, get the best possible score, take a screenshot, and ever after I'll hack the game and just set my scores to what I rolled before since I know its possible. That way its not really cheating... its just saving time

Dragonspear

You know you've hit the reroll key in the IE engine too many times when you can tell at first glance without consciously processing it that the roll is shit and to move on to the next one.

That said when I'm aiming for a very particular setup (For example, on my FMT I wanted 18/xx, 19, 17, 18, 10, 18 [ideally never got it of course]) I store my best roll and then keep rolling. You'd be surprised how well that works as a mental carrot for me to push on for that one or two more stat points.

Moomintroll

@Arabus13 sounds like the dungeon bastard!

Cheesebelly

I focus on the weakspots. For instance, let's take an elven fighter thief.
The weakspot should be constitution and wisdom on the top of my head. So what I do is focus my eyes on them when I start rerolling. If any of those two goes below 10, I reroll. But if I catch intelligence or charisma, both with a high score, I'll double check.

It usually is a clever tactic for around 80% of the times (of course if you get wisdom 9 and every other stat is maximum... that isn't a good thing to reroll is it now? :P )

Niphire

I feel like it helps if you take a decent roll (say 26 or 86 depending on how you count), distribute the stats evenly (so they're all 13+ or so), save it and start to reroll. If the streak goes bad, hit recall and start rerolling. If it gets good (like 28), spread the stats evenly and save. It's like the randomizer uses your earlier rolls to determine your next "random" roll, and a 7 on your stats is more likely to give you a low number on your next roll than a 13, and hitting recall helps out. It might be imagination, though, but it's not entierly unlikely that the randomizer is built that way.

I think my personal record is 34.

Lock

Exactly what @Metal_Hurlant said, snap judgement, don't stop clicking unless it looks like at least 15 in each stat average. In 5 minutes I'd roll between 300 and 500 times (depending on the caffeine levels I'm pushing), for hours, saving each successively better roll and settle when I hit 94 or above for a basic class (fighter, thief), maybe 98 for an intermediate roller (specialist mage) or 100 for something easy like a paladin. That was a long sentence.

If I get bored with that, mix it up for a while and just focus on a 2-3 stat block and only check the others if you hit gold - works best for classes with a couple of decent prerequisites - focus on a non-prereq block of stats. But generally the first method is more effective.

SirCumference

What is the max possible stat rolling? I always figured stat rolling was capped according to your race/class combination. No matter how many rolls i took (and with how many chars I made.....) I never had anything add up to as high as a paladin roll. I always thought that because Paladins have such high minimum stat values that they would be able to technically roll say an 8 in charisma but it would automatically be boosted to 17 since that is the minimum which is what allowed them to have higher stats.

Using that theory I always figured that there was a maximum amount of stat points you could roll and the only way to get more points than that was to roll classes that had high minum stat values as it sort of bypassed the cap. I have never ever been able to reach my highest paladin rolls with a fighter roll no matter how many rolls I tried.

ajwz

My stat rolling technique?
I took all of my advice from this book. Now I never get less than 3 18s on a roll

Khamill

I gently tap left mouse button with right hand forefinger and then whisper....higher...higher:P

Son_of_Imoen

I have a certain goal to aim for in my head beforehand. When I start rolling, I try an estimate of all the six numbers, especially looking at single digits - more than 1, roll again and rolls of 17-18 - if there's not too many low rolls countering them.

If a rol seems promising, I click up and down to get all stats to be a 15 and see how much I have a lack or an access to get 6 times 15. So I define a roll as for instance a 6*15 -4 or 6*15 +1. Then I add or substract points again to get to the actual allocation I had in mind. If I get close to the goal, I save the roll and continue to get closer, but have a fallback option.

Finally, if I a roll exceeds my goal, I simply discard some points and leave them un-allocated. I don't want an uber-character.

What my goal is depends on class and personality I have in mind for my PC: certain bonusses I'd like to have , no excessive bonusses everywhere, fitting with the character type are the factors involved in determining what stats I want to achieve.

sandmanCCL

Dragonspear said:

You know you've hit the reroll key in the IE engine too many times when you can tell at first glance without consciously processing it that the roll is shit and to move on to the next one.

That said when I'm aiming for a very particular setup (For example, on my FMT I wanted 18/xx, 19, 17, 18, 10, 18 [ideally never got it of course]) I store my best roll and then keep rolling. You'd be surprised how well that works as a mental carrot for me to push on for that one or two more stat points.

You know what I've found on any hybrid mage character is that I end up dumping strength down to 14ish, because guys like that tend to rely on buff spells and "Strength" lasts a really long time. Saves me a lot of time re-rolling and eventually the best thing you can do for STR is equip a belt anyway, you know?

Obviously it's different if I actually manage to get a good slash value, but generally speaking if the 18/?? is 01-50, I just dump it.

sarevok57

in SoA its very common to get 90+ for paladins and rangers for some weird reason, i made a ranger in bg II once from scratch and i dont think i ever rolled under 87 and then after roll 7 or so i hit 95

Dragonspear

@SandmanCCL the reason I keep those for something like a FMT is because I know there is a Str tome later anyway. That said you bring up a good point about the multitude of strength enhancing equipment. It WOULD reduce the overall cost of some of my early game items (moving those points into Cha), however I feel that level 2 is a very "busy" spell level for a long time. With spells like Horror, Web, Mirror Image, Blur, Melf's Acid Arrow and Aganazzar's Scorcher, fitting in a strength spell can be difficult.

sandmanCCL

I usually have tons of Strength spells loaded, at least in BG1. Of course, I always end up with a really arcane-heavy party because Xan and Imoen are awesome.