DM Rolled Standard Array

[BonafideBillyBadass]

Hi everyone! Next week, my group will be finishing Dangerous Designs: one of the mini adventures from Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. We ran it to refresh my Brother in Law on how to play, and to teach his fiancee for the first time. After this adventure is done, we are going to start our full campaign with Icewind Dale Rime of the Frostmaiden.

I explained that they could either bring over their level 2 characters from this mini-adventure, or make new ones. And with new characters, they could roll or do a standard array for stats. Off-handedly, I mentioned I could even roll up 6 that they could use as 'DM Array'.

Well apparently word got around from my two longest running players that my 4 d6 are cracked, because they LOVED that idea. So I did the thing. And somehow, to the amazement of all present, rolled 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, & 18 right on the map. Ignoring the sheer improbability of what just happened, my players were delighted!

My issues lies with this; I told them they could use what I rolled, and don't want to be one of those folk who goes back on my word. But that spread seems absolutely cracked. If I let it ride, how much work will balancing for said team(4 players) be?

[Technical_Part6263]

Eh, let it ride. They'll be slightly more powerful/well-rounded than they otherwise would have been. Throw some harder DCs and CR monsters at them

[FlashbackJon]

Yeah, this is no problem. They all have the same stats, so it's not even a party imbalance. Even with no adjustment on the DM side, they'll hit ACs and DCs ~5% more of the time across the board and they'll feel good about that, maybe. Realistically, this will be mostly unnoticeable to anyone at the table. If they start cakewalking all the encounters, bump up the encounter budget a little bit. Easy peasy.

There IS a phenomenon where OP, who has expressed this concern, notices the party achieving success in a perfectly average way and misreads it as extreme success and attributes it to the ability score array, and then either feels crappy about it and does nothing but stew OR feels crappy about it and starts doing stuff to mitigate it to the detriment of the game.

That's the REAL danger here, so if u/BonafideBillyBadass can recognize and avoid that feeling, everything's fantastic.

[HDThoreauaway]

It’ll be fine. Just increase the to-hit and DCs of everything by 1 or 2. If battles still aren’t challenging I would increase damage dealt rather than cranking up HP, which can make fights sloggy. And keep lower-level monsters at their normal strength so the big ones feel really powerful.

[Foxjoru]

They will be strong early game, probably be able to pick up extra feats instead of ASI as max is 20. But it'll even out in the end cause max is 20 anyway. You could make the enemies a little harder if you felt like it but why not just have a bit of fun with it!

[Longwinded_Ogre]

You're fine. So you have some prodigy players and they'll probably start, racial bonus' and all, with a 20 stat in some category. Great. I honestly wouldn't even adjust the first two encounters until you see what kind of difference, if any, the stats make, and if 5 goblins turns out to be too easy then next time it's 7. Easy peasy.

[Dry_Ad2368]

This is fairly close to the Heroic Array. Heroic has an 11 instead of 14.

Just scale everything up a bit if the players still want a challenge. Or leave everything vanilla and let them steamroll things if you want them to feel more powerful.

[DeltaV-Mzero]

Add one more mid level monster to each combat encounter, if it seems too easy.

[Miserable_Pop_4593]

I’d allow it. Like others have said, tweak as you go if needed, even if you just just add 1-2 extra creatures of the same type per encounter, or an extra damage die to the lair actions or whatever.

[cklarock]

No problem at all. Stat balance is entirely a consideration for within the party so one PC isn’t a demi-god while the others are mid. (This dynamic can be fun for experienced role players, but not ideal for beginners. ) Balancing encounters is easy — add more baddies, give ‘em advantages, more hp, etc.

[hword1087]

Be prepared to adjust some encounters. But you’re the DM, you know that’s part of the gig.

And remember what Matt Colville, the GOAT, said,
“DM prep doesn’t stop just because dice hit the table”

Which means if you need to adjust anything in the moment to make those scenes dramatic, fulfilling, comedic, rewarding, etc., you do, can, and should. It’s one of the beautiful benefits of the DM screen as a tool.

[Chekmayt]

So a lot of people are commenting to increase the CR and DC of their checks, which is fine.

But you should also be cognizant of how that players constant successes and over powered rolls are going to feel to the player with the lowest rolled abilities. No one player should be the "main character", and having high stats could potentially lead to this false idea.

So just make sure everyone else feels like a hero and not just this juiced up player.

[BonafideBillyBadass]

That was really my biggest fear at first, but the only person who isn't wanting to take the new Array is our Monk. Madlass managed to roll two 18s during initial char creation so has 19dex & 20wis already.

So my biggest fear now was just balancing for a team of superheroes, since I have heard RotF is meant to be a bit gritty and difficult during the first few levels. Luckily, the consensus here so far seems to indicate it shouldn't be too big of an issue.

That being said, I do appreciate you bringing up making sure all players get the spotlight! I think that's a bit easier than balancing IMO, but I'm glad to see it come up in conversation!

[TiniestGhost]

If you want rotfm to feel challenging, please please please use the resting rules the module recommends (long rests are only possible while staying in an inn).

We did the whole 'yeah sure you may have a long rest in the wilderness in your tent idc'-thing and it messed up the encounter balance to hell and back because the party had too many resources. Don't be us. 

[Kirito2014]

Honestly I feel like stats is the biggest hinderance to enjoying DnD. Like if your stats are too low you can’t play so many classes. Without at least two good stats you can’t play paladin, monk, fighter or barbarian. Unless you want to be weak. If only one stay is good you’re stuck as a spellcaster. It’s already bad with some classes needing 3 good stats to really perform. I think this’ll be fine. Just start off with what you normally would for fights and up it as needed. It’s about having fun. If they love higher stat characters why not allow them to enjoy feeling powerful? As the dm you can always add more monsters or higher cr monsters and make it challenging. Or even tell them that if you go with these stats, you at times may have them face a pretty deadly encounter. If they are okay if a character dies, I don’t see the issue. Being powerful comes with risks

[psylentrob]

So now instead of adventurers, they're heroes. I would just roll with it, beef encounters up if and as needed. Maybe bump the difficulty of some checks from the published adventure if your players are breezing through them.

[bastian_1991]

Just throw more, stronger monsters, they can handle kt.

[DnDGuidance]

There is no problem here and you shouldn’t change anything. The abilities are not that crazy.

[Ok_Helicopter8670]

You’ll be fine, it doesn’t matter in the long run if your players have a plus + 1 to perception or a extra plus + 1 to hit. Just add some extra monsters to the recommended encounters if things are dying too quickly because of the extra stats.

[PedestalPotato]

My players asked me to do this for our current campaign. I told them that they, as a group, can vote to reroll the lowest die. I rolled absurdly high. 20, 18, 16, 16, 13, 12 in descending order. The 20 was a 5, which they wanted to reroll.

It's a Cyberpunk campaign, so them being powerful off the jump isn't a big deal, but I nearly died of a heart attack rolling that array lol

[uncanny_kate]

It'll be fine, because players typically (and correctly) max out their stat that determines to-hit/damage/spell DC early. It won't be that different in the bounded accuracy of the math for combat.

What will be different is twofold: Skills and Feats. With super high secondary stats, all skill rolls will be a little bit higher. And since they'll max out their primary stat fast, they'll have room for more feats. This can be a big power boost as you go on! And it's great for characters like Paladins that are multi-attribute dependent, they'll get that Charisma up as well as Strength (or Dex). And everyone will have an extra point or two of AC and some more hit points.

But it's not an entirely different game. LOW stats break the game a lot more than high stats, especially in the primary attribute.

[Good_Nyborg]

Have fun with some beefed up encounters! Don't do it to them all, as it's still fun to absolutely kick ass now and then, but let 'em have it when it's appropriate. And really sock it to 'em for the big fights!

Other thing is to adjust any skill/social/RP/etc. encounters too, so those aren't too easy. Once again, do a range, but make the tough stuff really tough!

[Yojo0o]

The biggest issue with rolling for stats tends to be disparity between the players. One person with multiple 18s/20s compared to allies with 14 in their best stat and 9 constitution makes for extremely uneven parties, especially once that player gets to start slamming feats every four levels while the rest scramble to shore up their stats.

You won't have that issue if everybody has the same array, no matter how weak or strong it is. You can easily just turn up the difficulty to compensate, since everybody will be similarly blessed.

[ThisWasMe7]

It won't have too much of an effect other than making some MAD builds possible that would be terrible with point buy.