I was curious about whether or not anybody had developed a system for characteristic generation other than rolling, that would give players more control over their characteristics. Possibly some sort of point system? Has anybody heard of/used such a system?

There is a point buy system in Black Crusade that could be repurposed for DH fairly easily.

Rogue Trader somewhere (perhaps in Into the Storm? Might even be core...) has a "high-powered" stat generation method in which players have 100 points to spend. I don't know if it explicitly states this or not, but the assumption would be that each stat must have a minimum of 2 points put into it. Each point costs the same, so it technically averages out to roughly equal to rolling (9 stats x 11 average = 99 points), but the ability to choose stats for 20s and stats for 2s is... potent.

I haven't seen BC's method, yet... I assume it has progressively higher costs for high scores?

The BC method:

An alternative method for generating Characteristic
scores is to give each player a number of Characteristic
points that he may assign as he wishes. In this
case, a Heretic begins with a score of 30 in each
Characteristic if he is a Chaos Space Marine and
25 in each Characteristic if he is a human. A player
may allocate a total of 100 additional points to his
character’s Characteristics, adding no more than 20 to
any one Characteristic. This method generally creates
characters with slightly higher than average scores.
When using this method, characters must still
generate their Infamy characteristic by rolling.

This is the same as the method described in Rogue Trader and Deathwatch. Interestingly, the wording in deathwatch actually states: ... may allocate a total of 100 additional points to his Characteristics, adding no more than 20 to any one Characteristic. This method generates characters with slightly lower than average scores.

Huh.

Well,

This is the method I've used from the start (when DH came out).
Divide 105 points among the profile stats.
Give your pc's maximum wounds
Give your pc's a set number of fate points.

My campaigns tend to be rough and nasty so the somewhat higher TB and SB don't realy matter.
The only time I had some trouble was when a friend mine played a Explorator in RT, that guy was near indestructable...(TB 8, 13 AP)

I dislike it because it encourages min-maxing rather than character-building, and it is more of an issue with this system than in others because of the large characteristic spread between Characteristic Bonuses. In say the Hero System the cutoff points for min-maxing are at intervals of 3 or 5, not 10, so the problem isn't as glaring. In WH40KRP nobody is going to have a 29 or 39 and all of a character's "primary" characteristics will be maxed out. Which is boring, and there are going to be a lot of 40s and 22s.

What I do is just say "if you really don't like the characteristics you rolled, just roll over."

Well, some did people tend to min max but they quickly found it didn't work out the way they hoped.
I did warn them though.

The first one that realy suffered was the Psyker during Tattered Fates (Red Cages), he went for and extreme low WS and S and for high BS and WP.
The willpower helped him from gaining too much Insanity Points, the low WS and S made him useless.

The Guardsman was royaly screw later in the adventure at the Ball, his low fellowship lost him a limb to a powersword just before the big battle after he failed during a duel with a noblemen.

The Assassin was more rounded and did quite fine, at least some people listened to my advice...

So I realy don't care how people min/max their characters because their is always a MIN to their character...

This doesn't mean I just simply disallow certain character builds, a high WS,BS,S,T,Ag character that has the social and mental skills of an ape simply don't make good PC's.

bogi_khaosa said:

I'm using point buy in 40k, and I see no problems you speak of with my players. True, the Psykers tend to have maxed out WP, and fighting types tend to have decent scores in combat stats, but no true minmaxing takes place. That's because my players like to play strong (as in, competent in their chosen field) characters, but characters nonetheless.

Letting anyone reroll whenever he's not satisfied with the stats kinda defeats the purpose of rolling IMO. Better to just hand the points and dispense with the illusion that it'd be better to roll.

It doesn't help that one of my players regularly rolls 10-20 points above the rest total (no cheating, checked that many times, just incredible luck). It's not funny to know your team buddy is pretty much universally better than you.

Our DM just gave us an array to distribute as we felt after randomizing our Careers and Homeworld style (but not specific background).

17, 15, 13 12, 11, 10, 10, 8, 8. Decent. Makes it hard to have more than 1 area of competence. e.g. hard to be a talker and a fighter, but it works decently.

In my game, the players roll 20d10, drop the lowest 2 (well, they may drop others, but that just makes no sense) and may distribute the resulting dice as they wish (as long as 2 dice go to each ability). You may also want to standardize it a bit, disallowing scores lower and than certain values (e.g. 90-10 and 115-130).

20d10; discard the two lowest.
Assign each result to a character statistic.
If total points are lower than 100, distribute remaining points up to a maximum total of 100 at will.
If total points are higher than 110, lower remaining points down to a minimum total of 110 at will.

Results are still random, but allows you to choose which of your stats should be prioritized, and the highest advantage anyone has over someone else is a total of 10.