Having a high chance of dying at level 1 is a feature, not a bug. Level 1 characters are supposed to suck. If you don’t suck at first level, then whence do you get the sense of accomplishment when, at higher levels, you start not sucking?
Point buy. It starts everyone off at the same overall level, it eliminates complaints about luck, and it allows players to build the type of characters they want to play.
I think that’s a minority opinion these days, since the only games that consider that good design are the ones purposefully evoking oldschool RPGs, and that’s a pretty niche market.
Sense of accomplishment comes from character progression and development, not from defying the odds by somehow managing to not get killed at level 1.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be “defying the odds”. It just needs to be “you’d better be very damn careful”. At high level, when you can survive any combat, solving all your problems via combat is easy, if you want to go that route. But at low level, you’re going to be trying to avoid combat whenever humanly (or elvishly or dwavishly or halflingly) possible.
I can’t speak for modern games but back in the day, the standard route to gaining experience WAS combat. Maybe you’d have a DM assign some xp for non-combat player actions or solving a problem but by-in-large you didn’t advance until you killed enough kobolds, giant bats and goblins. Avoiding combat was just delaying the inevitable.
Anyway, I preferred other methods just because inviting someone to a game and then saying “Nope, you can’t be a wizard like you wanted, the dice say you’re too stupid… you have to be a thief” is a great way to make people think “this sucks” before they even get to their first shadowy stranger at the village inn.
By actual accomplishment of things that are logically challenging rather than arbitrary fake difficulty.
20+ years of DMing and point buy all the way. (An array would be a secondary satisfactory solution in a pinch)
It’s not even the concern that a player might get stuck with a bad character per se, but that the character could be completely inferior to all the other characters in the party. Point buy simply levels the playing field, making sure all the characters are as equal as the game system allows at the outset.
It’s true that many DMs houserule that combat is the only way to gain XP. But like the money on Free Parking in Monopoly, this is a really bad houserule, and the game works much better without it.
I’ve been playing D&D since the early eighties. First edition AD&D and regular old D&D allowed you to gain XP in two ways that I remember: 1 xp per gp, and killing monsters. If there were story awards, I definitely don’t recall them. 2nd edition had story rewards, I think, but killing was still a major way to gain XP. 3E and 3.5E definitely included story awards and also gave a general rule of thumb that levels should be gained every 3-5 levels.
So old school D&D is the kill-and-loot model. And looting almost always follows killing.
As for lethality, I find that combat in 3.X games and Pathfinder becomes more lethal at higher levels, when dragons and demons and save-or-die spells start to become common. I have a much easier time killing a character with a prismatic spray than I do with a handful of skeletons at the appropriate level.
Although here’s my zombie trick, free of charge. Have enough zombies attack your level 1 PCs that it’ll take a few rounds to whittle them down. Have zombies spread out to attack PCs. And then as soon as a PC drops, all zombies go against that PC attempting a coup de grace (this may not be legal, given the partial action; I rule that zombies can do this one full-round action). They’re going for the brains.
Since CdG provokes an attack of opportunity, the remaining PCs can probably, through adroit play, prevent a death–but suddenly the zombies are Serious Business. I’ve used it more than once and watched players perk right up.
My games gave XP for solving problems and achieving goals; defeating an antagonist by means other than combat was as useful.
So roll up a mess of characters in advance. Have them “in town,” or otherwise available, complete with as much backstory as the GM feels like giving them. If somebody really wants a wizard, here’s two to pick from.
Except for D+D pre-3rd Edition, which also gave XP for treasure – typically more than the XP for killing monsters. But that was very DM-dependent since there’s only so much you can tweak a monster’s difficulty-to-XP rating, but each DM could give an arbitrarily large or small treasure haul.
To those saying that rolling causes inequality between PCs: Consider the “Rolled Communal Array”.
Regardless of whether you use 3d6 or 4 keep 3 or whatever, you have the players take turns rolling one ability score until you have six scores. Each player arranges this array of scores however they like. That way the PCs are equal without resorting to point buy or a fixed array.
That’s functionally equivalent to a point-buy ; with the added problem that either the whole party might be underpowered or overpowered. Why bother ? What’s the point ?
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Except for D+D pre-3rd Edition, which also gave XP for treasure – typically more than the XP for killing monsters. But that was very DM-dependent since there’s only so much you can tweak a monster’s difficulty-to-XP rating, but each DM could give an arbitrarily large or small treasure haul.
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From what I understand, in old timey DnD that’s actually how Rogues levelled exclusively. All the other classes got XP for fighting stuff ; Rogues got 1 xp per gold worth of loot sold.
Gary Gygax was a weird, weird man is what I’m trying to say 
Honestly, I don’t really grok the point of tallying XP. Most published adventures will tell you when your PCs are supposed to be level X (or what the level range of the PCs should be to attempt the adventure) ; and if they don’t it’s usually easy to ballpark it. Important story milestone, level. Important boss beaten, level. Etc… Obviously it’s even easier to do so when you’re the one designing the adventures, encounters and challenges.
XP feels like archaic busywork (outside of computer games obviously).
Sure. Or, you know, let the new guy make his own character with the class he wants to play by tweaking the stat determination process rather than giving him some pre-made character.
Agreed. Characters leveled when I said they levelled (when I GMed)
Also, though I started characters at level 1, all characters also got 8 free HP - they were their maxed-out 0-level human/elf/whatever hit dice from before they were characters.
Point Buy. I generally gimp my character by making sub-optimal decisions about Feats and such for the sake of an interesting concept, so I don’t need any help from the dice in that regard.
I felt vaguely guilty when I started doing that, until I realized how ridiculous that was and started doing it that way every time.
I like the idea of rewarding extra-good play, as systems like White Wolf do with XP. But over the long term, it leads to a positive feedback loop, where the good players get characters with more options who are easier to play in an interesting way. I prefer systems that give Awesome Points or Hero Points or the like for fun play, things that can be used mid-session for a small bonus.
My favorite beer-and-pretzel system, Old School Hack, works this way, with a twist: players get Awesome Points awarded by other players whenever they do something that makes the game more fun (solely at the discretion of other players), and spend their Awesome Points for small in-game advantages. Characters level up when every character has spent ten Awesome Points. So players who hog the limelight are encouraged to recognize when quieter players do something cool, and quieter players are encouraged to speak up and take a risk.
That’s too fast, IMO. And also doesn’t account for some characters doing more than others.
Actually starting at zero level (-whatever XP) can be pretty fun.