SunRuanEr:
In much the same vein, I feel that to do Point-Buy "correctly", you have to put a lot of caps and restrictions in place for how high/how low individual stats can be. Why? Because there are far too many twinks out there that will try to jack their pertinent stats with 25s (or something equally silly) while eating multiple single-digit dump stats. I loathe min-maxing, and I find that Point-Buy tends to favor people who want to min-max.
Thanks for coming out and admitting that. I think that's not an uncommon view.
From a GM point of view, I can see this. I do in fact put one particular restriction on my point-buy game, which is that a characters highest skill must be below X-2, where X is the target number for a moderately difficult skill check. This is so that the character can at least fail that skill check on a 1. If a 1 were an automatic skill failure in the game I play, I probably wouldn't apply that, but it isn't and I don't feel like changing that.
But really what I would prefer to be able to do, and what I'm trying to get better at doing, is running a game that simply doesn't give any incentives to min/max. In many games, min/maxing is completely understandable, because one's character is their only point of control with the game, missing is completely uninteresting, and failure means ejection from the game. It's a little silly and even a tad anti-social
not to min-max under such conditions. So, I try to tamp down on those circumstances, even though the game I play is heavy with all of them.
As a player, being annoyed by min/maxing is just going to stress out a person and the table. If one doesn't want to min-max under point buy, then they don't have to and shouldn't (unless they're going the other way and making a useless character in order to annoy). But one should take care not to let their negative feelings toward a particular approach creep into their views of other players.
SunRuanEr:
...unless you have a bunch of restrictions to bring their purchased stats into some kind of "normal" equilibrium, in which case you might as well have just rolled with a few common sense restrictions (like 'your overall stat bonuses should add up to 0+') in the first place.
Maybe. I don't see that such restrictions make dice rolling that much more inherently appealing.
One alternative that has been around for a while, but that I haven't seen mentioned here is for the GM to give the players an array of ability scores (or a choice of arrays) to place how they'd like. If a game has 6 ability scores, that's 720 different permutations, after which someone can customize with things like choice of race, profession, feats, or other things. When I make pregenerated characters for my games, they are all based of a single standard array.