Ability Score Handicapping

The random generation of ability scores seems to be one of those fault lines that divides even the old school gaming community, with plenty of people willing to argue its rightness or wrongness, as I recently discovered. And it's an old and active fault line, probably going all the way back to the dawn of the hobby, when someone decided he really wanted to play a magic-user and complained bitterly to his referee when he rolled a 5 for his character's Intelligence score.

By the early 1980s, there seemed to be two "solutions" for this "problem." The first, pioneered by Superhero 2044, was a point-buy system that abandoned randomness entirely. This is the mechanical birth of character creation rather than generation. The second solution is to "handicap" rolls for ability scores in order to give PCs an edge. Take, for example, this table from FGU's Space Opera, first published in 1980:

Ability scores in Space Opera (called "personal characteristics") range from 1 to 19, but, rather than generating them by rolling 3D6 (or even 1D20) with modifiers, they're generated by rolling D100 and consulting a chart that, in the words of its designers, is "'loaded' toward the higher end of the scale." That is, even a middling roll is likely to (in most cases) give a personal characteristic score of 13 or thereabouts, ensuring that PCs are generally well above average -- and that's not even counting the dice modifiers each class gets in order to boost the characteristics most closely associated with them.

TSR's own SF RPG, Star Frontiers, opted for a similar approach to generating ability scores, although, unlike Space Opera, it not only ensures that PCs are well above average but that they are not typically too far above average:

Other TSR games also attempted to blunt the edge of random ability score generation, but did so in a different fashion, as did 1980's Top Secret:

Instead of wholly divorcing the percentile roll from the ability score generated as both Space Opera and Star Frontiers do, Top Secret instead provides a sliding scale of bonuses to the roll, so that very poor rolls are given a large boost and better rolls are given a smaller one (if any at all). This is the same approach taken in 1982's Gangbusters. In fact, it's the exact same table.

I've begun to wonder if perhaps elements of these tables couldn't be adopted in Dungeons & Dragons, at least in AD&D, where ability scores matter a great deal more than they do in OD&D. What I like about these tables is that they still preserve varying degrees of randomness rather than out and out making PCs simply better than average, as do the more ridiculous methods presented in Unearthed Arcana and even the DMG.