Thats why in 3rd Ed D&D they got away with rolling dice for character creation and have point buy system. Where you have set pool of points and distribute them as you wish.
Problem is that you create this min-maxed characters.
Rolling dice in OD&D was more of a roleplay definition of your character than anything else. Stats didnt mater so much.
You must mean 4E, as in 3E it was still 4d6 drop lowest. Or just 3d6. IIRC Unearthed Arcana may have had a point buy system, and certainly a DM could go with their own, but the core game was still rolling the bones, for stats as well as in-game.
http://www.bukisa.com/articles/7454...agons-part-ii-rolling-up-character-attributes
In the 3.5E version of D&D, in order to generate the values for a character (coloquially known as "rolling up a character"), one would take four six-sided dice (4d6) and roll them, then add up the three highest scores, disregarding the lowest roll. This would be redone five times, leaving the player with six scores for his/her attributes. Depending on the type of character the player wanted, they would assign the scores to suit the player.
Note that this was also an option in AD&D 2e books, IIRC. Though I got the impression that TSR deemed that method as "overpowering".
I always preferred 4d6 drop lowest, and the assign to whatever stat you wished. That way, I wasn't stuck with one type of character when I wanted another.
For the record, I much prefer rolling vs point buy for my cRPGs. Instead of min-maxing everyone, I've got to use what I've got. The only caveat I prefer is that I like being able to swap stats around, so I can take a good roll and swap for the character I need/want, rather than keep rolling hoping for a good one that matched. Older Might and Magic games (3-5 at least) were like this.
skavenhorde said:
I doubt we'll see another hardcore d&d rpg from the AAAs, but there is always KOTC 2. The OGL is close enough to D&D that I hardly notice a difference.
KOTC wasn't quite pure OGL, it was heavily altered. It seemed a solid, hardcore d20-based cRPG though, so you might try it. I decided against buying it myself, as the changes were too jarring to me, and I wanted a 3.x based game that I hadn't played. I'm still looking too. I haven't looked into KOTC2.
Since 4E is now WotCs garbage rule-set of choice, there's no hope for a good D&D cRPG (unless 5E is a major step back). Pathfinder or Trailblazer, both d20 SRD-based systems, may offer some hope, but I'm not familiar with the licensing enough to know if they can market a video game based on it. Then again, they are competing (very well, in Pathfinder's case) against 4E D&D in the PnP market. So maybe there is hope.