D&D 5E Random point-buy tool

[FormerlyHemlock]

There exist people (I'm not one of them) who say they like the normalization balance of point-buy but enjoy rolling for inspiration. For one of these people, I made this:

https://maxwilson.github.io/RandomPointBuy/

It chooses randomly from all legal variations of point-buy and then randomly arranges the attributes.

Example output:

Strength: 11
Dexterity: 15
Constitution: 11
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 9
Charisma: 15

Source code is on github.

 

[not-so-newguy]

There's another one here:
http://aramis.hostman.us/dnd/RedrickRoller.html

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

There's another one here:
http://aramis.hostman.us/dnd/RedrickRoller.html

Aha. That's much nicer than my thirty-minute version. Use that one instead.

BTW, I must confess that I enjoy rolling point buy more than I thought I would, to the extent that I wouldn't mind playing occasionally in a random-point-buy-in-order campaign even though I wouldn't want to play in a point-buy campaign. After a while it might get claustrophic because the values are always within the same range, but at least the shapes are different! E.g. I find Str 13 Dex 13 Con 15 interesting, and it's not a shape that you'd see in unconstrained point buy.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I love random point-buy, and it's my standard method of character generation in campaigns. You can do it manually with dice by rolling scores the usual way, then adding/subtracting 1 from a random score until you hit your point buy value target. Sometimes takes a while, though. I eventually just wrote up a quick Python script to do it.

What does the probability curve for a score look like with these rollers?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I love random point-buy, and it's my standard method of character generation in campaigns. You can do it manually with dice by rolling scores the usual way, then adding/subtracting 1 from a random score until you hit your point buy value target. Sometimes takes a while, though. I eventually just wrote up a quick Python script to do it.

What does the probability curve for a score look like with these rollers?

In my case, it's a uniform distribution over all possible legal (unordered) sets of point-buy arrays (so, 65 total, taken from https://amp.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/2epkdi/5e_here_is_a_complete_list_of_valid_ability_score/); then random permutation of that array to assign to scores.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think about a method for random point buy without the help of computer and with not too much effort. I think you should use cards. Put in a joker as 0. Then put in a 1,2,3,4,5,7,9 and then draw them. Since you are aiming at 27 points, you need to take away low numbers if you happen to draw low numbers first. If you draw high numbers first, take away the top ones.