This is a poll linked to Reddit, and to here.
What Tabletop Ability Score Generation is best in your opinion?
The classic random method that puts your abilities in completely random places where they don’t belong, much like a game thread in About This Message Board, is my least favorite. I prefer the Point Buy system, which allows you to fine-tune both your score and its placement, much as board software allows you to write an OP and put it in the correct forum.
Let me just move that over for you.
And 3d6 straight. No mercy and live with what you get. Not all characters are supermen.
Remind me to never let you DM a D&D game for me. I don’t want to pay the sickly farm boy. I want to play the hero. But I also don’t like point buy, as I hate min-maxing. 4d6, reroll 1, use then in the order rolled.
Thank you very much, I’m new to this thread posting “thing,” thanks for the help.
Btw, for future reference, where should I post questions about boardgames?
If you’re rolling dice, you need to roll 3d6 and live with it. I feel very strongly about that. Sickly farmboys can be really fun to play. A character’s ability to kill stuff is not a measure of fun.
All the other rolling techniques just seem like justified cheating to me. In my experience, they’re not even the end of the wheedling that goes on. “Oh, let me just re-roll that one one more time. Wait, I’m going to re-roll the whole character. Oh, that 1 was tipped up on some paper, let me come up with more excuses to re-roll it until I get a 6.”
If you want to eliminate a sickly farmboy possibility, then you need to use a point buy system. Give yourself enough points to be as strong as the group wants their characters to be.
I do want to nominate one “other” house method that I kind of liked. You got six numbers: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and you could assign those to the stats you wanted to. It’s a little like a point buy system reduced to ultimate simplicity.
None of the options.
My favorite is straight 3d6, no re-rolls, no swapping order. And then, to prevent sour grapes, you have to pay for what you rolled. So a character with great attributes will have fewer useful abilities and skills. And the reverse.
This is easy to do in point systems like Gurps or Hero. But not too hard in D&D, just give bonus proficiencies or spells or whatever, or take some back, as needed.
Other.
In the games I run we use the elite array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8.
The sickly one studies magic, duh. Or poisons, alchemy, arcane scrolls, whatever.
But if you want the brawny fighter, you could always hand that character off (or, “leave him in town”) and try rolling another.
4d6 (drop the lowest) in order down the line.
If a score wouldn’t be high enough to allow your desired class, it gets swapped for your highest score and raised to the minimum. So if a 1st ed AD&D paladin rolled a 16 in strength but a 14 in charisma (min 17), he’d now have a 14 strength and 17 charisma.
While checking the minimum 1st ed paladin STR score, I came across this page which breaks down the odds of getting each class using the 3d6 model and 1st ed AD&D rules:
Cleric: 61.28%
Druid: 2.87%
Fighter: 58.30%
Paladin: 0.10%
Ranger: 0.16%
Magic-User: 61.28%
Illusionist: 0.37%
Thief: 61.28%
Assassin: 6.39%
Monk: 0.04%
Bard: 0.0017% (and the requirement to advance through five levels of fighter and five levels of thief)
Barbarian (Unearthed Arcana): 0.14%
Cavalier (UA): 0.03%
Paladin (UA rules): 0.0002%
Thief-Acrobat (UA): 0.43%
That is all using rules for humans. Other races had their own minimums so you could roll adequate scores to play a human thief but not an elven thief.
4d6, drop the lowest. If my players don’t like their rolls, they can use the standard array.
I started preferring point buy when I bought Champions in 1982, and I haven’t changed my mind since then.
Maybe for you. Spending three levels running away from rats, just to get good enough to stand a chance against a kobold runt, is not fun.
I’m often the least capable in combat (and not because I’m a magic-user), so this I understand. Still, the protagonists in most books aren’t your average schmuck, they’re exceptional in some way (even if they don’t know it yet).
Point-buy. I generally have a decent idea of what kind of character I want to play, their background, what they should be good at, what are their downsides etc… long before I pick up a die. The dice telling me “nuh-huh ! You play dumb barbarian guy (or whatever) instead !” is not my idea of fun.
If we are playing something that has regular combat, I need to be able to be competent in something combat-related or I’ll just hate the game. Not necessarily killing as such - buffing and healing work for me too (or pissing off a werewolf and doing half a dozen retreating all-out defense dodges in a row while your friends kill it), but you’ll need decent stats either way.
So yeah, if a GM is giving me 3d6 and telling me the campaign is doing the old-school character generation, I’ll probably just walk. 
I’m all for coming up with a character, and using the character generation system to refine and flesh out the details. Going the other way around is a recipe for archetypes, not characters. Playing an involuntary stereotype is a fun quick challenge - but if I’m going to do that, why not just give me the character? Why make me roll it?
(My second choice would be “other” - pre-written characters with preset stats, randomly allocated by dice roll).
Points for me. I came to DnD from GURPS and Rolemaster, and we used points systems for both of those.
Other - 4D6, drop lowest, don’t reroll 1’s, arrange in any order, can drop one stat by 2 in order to increase a stat by 1, once.
My favorite RPG is Champions, so I’m not opposed to point-buy systems. But I was playing D&D before Dragon magazine published alternate roll methodologies. I have fond memories of rolling up characters. But 3d6 often made characters just as average as the guys playing them, and that wasn’t the escapism we were seeking. We wanted to be heroic. We didn’t want to be pigeonholed into playing the wizard because 16 was the roll in the intelligence spot (I hate playing wizards). So as we and the game matured, we adopted alternate techniques to increase enjoyment, but kept rolls because that bit of randomness adds a nice, but not crippling, twist.
Points, though frankly, the term “point buy” gives me nightmare flashbacks to GURPS, which isn’t really a positive thing either.
These days, I think I favor arrays, templates, or the Apocalypse world “Here are your stats, you can raise one of them by one.” approach (which sounds lame until you realize that the ‘here are your stats’ block is different for each ‘class’ and that stats range from -1 to +3, so adding +1 to something is actually pretty significant). All of these approaches give me sufficient control over the identity of my character without getting me bogged down in too much “Okay, so I really need to have a strength of 15, so that’s 60 points, which means that if I go cheap on my Int, I can still spent…” nonsense.
If I’m actually playing a game that involves rolling stats, then frankly, I don’t really care what stat rolling method we use, though I favor the ones that have a comparatively low chance of my character having a net stat mod of -1. 
(I don’t really care about having ‘high’ stats, but it’s depressing when your character’s high stat is a 12 and his low stat is a 7 because you are basically doomed to a life of ineptitude in most game systems.)