Last month, I made a Twitter thread about racial ability score bonuses. I don’t like the way that races in D&D get numerical bonuses to their ability scores. I think it’s unnecessarily limiting. There are over 1,000 unique race/class combinations in fifth edition D&D, but only a small handful of them are worth playing from a character optimization standpoint. Not everyone feels the need to play optimal characters, and would instead rather play characters for their roleplay potential than their mechanical viability, but I don’t see why we can’t have both.
Halfling rogues are a classic class combination, for example, because they’re an optimal combo for all three pillars of D&D. Ever since The Hobbit, the idea of halflings being small and sneaky has been a staple of fantasy, giving us prime examples of how one might explore, fight, or interact with people as a halfling rogue. And D&D lets you do all that because of supremely synergistic racial ability score increases, racial traits, and the somewhat more ephemeral idea of being fun to roleplay. On the other hand, class combinations like a half-orc wizard have always been a harder sell. In previous additions, a half-orc’s penalty to Intelligence made being a wizard incredibly hard—and even in fifth edition D&D, the fact that the half-orc race doesn’t get a bonus to Intelligence makes it hard to excel as a wizard because you’ll always have a subpar spell attack bonus and saving throw DC.
This is to say nothing of the fact that linking ability score penalties (which are thankfully absent from the fifth edition Player’s Handbook, at least) to your choice of race has distasteful similarities to real-life racist ideology.
But the thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Ability score increases don’t have to be tied to which race you chose. They could be tied directly to your class, or more indirectly to your background, to some combination of the two options. Let’s take a look at some character creation house rules that you can use to decouple ability scores from race.
Step One: Remove Racial Ability Score Increases
The first step of this house rule is tremendously easy. Simply remove the Ability Score Increase trait from your character’s race and subrace, if applicable. In the case of the so-called “monstrous races” of orcs and kobolds from Volo’s Guide to Monsters, this removes their ability score reductions, as well.
If you’re worried about this making your character’s race irrelevant, or making the various fantasy races of D&D too homogeneous, don’t worry. Each race still has plenty of traits that help make them unique. For example, tieflings still have the Darkvision, Hellish Resistance, and Infernal Legacy traits, all of which make them unique and fantastical—and more importantly, these traits are interesting in a way that numerical stat bonuses just aren’t. Even without racial ability score increases, half-orcs are still strong and tough by virtue of their Relentless Endurance and Savage Attacks traits, and dwarves are still sturdy and martially adept, thanks to their Dwarven Resilience and Dwarven Combat Training traits.
There are few exceptions to this houserule for races and subraces that are highly impacted by their ability score increases. These are:
Human. The variant human presented in the Player’s Handbook is the default example of the human race while using this house rule.
Mountain Dwarf. Since the mountain dwarf subrace gains a +2 bonus to Strength in place of another trait, they gain a new trait in its place: Martial Aptitude. When you hit with a martial melee weapon, you roll an additional 1d4 and add it to the damage.
This trait originally appeared in a different form, which many commenters rightfully pointed out was much stronger than a +2 bonus to Strength. The older version is presented here for consistency.
Martial Aptitude. When using a martial weapon, you roll one additional damage die. For instance, when you hit with a greatsword, you roll 3d6 to determine the attack’s damage, instead of 2d6.
Half Elf. Since half elves gain more ability score increases than most other races, they gain a new trait in its place: Knowledge of the Elves. You possess one of the following traits: Cantrip (as the high elf trait), Elf Weapon Training (as the high elf or wood elf trait), Mask of the Wild (as the wood elf trait), Superior Darkvision (as the drow trait), or Drow Weapon Training (as the drow trait). Other traits, such as those from elves not in the Player's Handbook, can be used at the DM's discretion.
Half-elves originally had a different trait in an earlier version of this article, which several commenters pointed out had unpleasant social implications. The older version is presented here for consistency. Supernatural Charm. You know the friends cantrip. Starting at 3rd level, you can cast charm person once with this trait and regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells.
Step Two: Reassign Ability Score Increases
Now that you’ve severed ability score increases from races, it’s time to relink them somewhere else in the system. Since almost every race in D&D gains a +2 bonus to one ability score and a +1 bonus to another, a total bonus of +3 should be assigned to all characters. My preferred option is for characters to gain access to improving their ability scores based on the training they undergo to become a member of a certain class. However, while discussing this option with other D&D fans, I found a not-insignificant number of people who felt that this would make all characters of a certain class feel too homogenous, regardless of racial traits.
While I disagree with this take, I’ve nevertheless presented three different ways to reassign ability score increases. Take your pick!
Option One: Class
You gain the Ability Score Increase feature when you choose your class at 1st level. If you gain levels in another class using the optional Multiclassing rules, you don’t gain this feature again.
Ability Score Increase (Barbarian). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution.
Ability Score Increase (Bard). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. You can increase any ability score using this feature.
Ability Score Increase (Cleric). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, or Wisdom.
Ability Score Increase (Druid). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Wisdom, or Charisma.
Ability Score Increase (Fighter). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, or Intelligence.
Ability Score Increase (Monk). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, or Wisdom.
Ability Score Increase (Paladin). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, or Charisma.
Ability Score Increase (Ranger). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, or Wisdom.
Ability Score Increase (Rogue). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. You can increase any ability score using this feature.
Ability Score Increase (Sorcerer). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Dexterity, Constitution, or Charisma.
Ability Score Increase (Warlock). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, or Charisma.
Ability Score Increase (Wizard). You can increase one of your ability scores by 2 and another ability score by 1. Alternatively, you can increase three of your ability scores by 1. The ability scores you can increase using this feature are Dexterity, Constitution, or Intelligence.
Option Two: Background
You gain the Ability Score Increase feature based on your background. This list includes the backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook. If you choose a background from a different book, consult with your Dungeon Master to determine one ability score to gain a +2 bonus in, and another ability score to gain a +1 bonus in.
Ability Score Increase (Acolyte). Your Wisdom score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Charlatan). Your Charisma score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Criminal). Your Constitution score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Entertainer). Your Charisma score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Folk Hero). Your Strength or Dexterity score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Guild Artisan). Your Intelligence score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Hermit). Your Wisdom score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Noble). Your Intelligence or Charisma score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Outlander). Your Dexterity score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Sage). Your Intelligence score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Sailor). Your Strength or Dexterity score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Soldier). Your Constitution score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Ability Score Increase (Urchin). Your Dexterity or Constitution score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.
Option Three: Class and Background
The third and final option is a combination of the two above. When you choose your class, assign a +2 to one ability score available to your class in Option One (or two +1s to two ability scores available to your class). Then when you choose your background, assign a +1 to the ability score specified by your background in Option Two. Since some backgrounds in Option Two let you choose between two ability scores to increase, you can choose either of them.
Would you use this house rule in your home D&D game? Which option is your favorite, or do you have a fourth option that you would use instead?
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019@HrafnkelTheRed
That is what house rules are for. 5th edition has done about as much as a game system can to get out of the way and let people tell whatever stories they want. The established game worlds of Oerth/Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have a history. Something like 30 years of it. That means dwarves live in mountains and have a strict and religious society. They're typically lawful good. In 5e that means they get +2 STR and +2 CON, or they get +2 Con and +1 WIS. This makes them excellent smiths, clerics, and fighters. It doesn't prevent them from being anything else. It does encourage you to create a dwarven take on other classes. As and example, Dwarven Rangers likely wear metal armor, if they're mountain dwarves, probably use crossbows, and may have an axe or a hammer for a melee back up weapon. You can do whatever you want however you want. If you want to create your own game world you're free to recreate the races of that world however you want. That's a big part of what making your own game world is about. What Wizards is responsible for is the consistency of published content.
5th edition more than any previous edition encourages house rules with it's lack of specificity.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019The differences between the races of creatures in D&D is reflected in the mechanics specifically for the stereotypes that they reinforce. A halfling has the bonuses you mentioned specifically for the purpose of creating a mechanic that supports a narrative consistency for players. Why?
I have lived though that particular bit of history, sir! When I was told as a child that I didn't have 'real' friends because I was playing with the kids who read those 'satan books'. ...and I was one of the fortunate ones, because my books were not burned, and I still have them today. You should recall too that this hysteria in the 80's wasn't just about religious dogma... there were actual hysterical accusations and news reports of satanist cults victimizing children; so the social stigma was not trivial. Imagine being a child and having your hobby connected, however distantly to something like that. The very idea that someone engaged in our own community would stir up the same sort of hyperbole when it comes to critical theory related to race is absolutely infuriating... and linking to an article outright calling Tolkien a racist & colonialist?!
D&D is fiction. It's an artwork. There will always be 2 dimensional or badly motivated people who will take a work of art and use it as a scapegoat to claim that it is the art and artist that are to be blamed for the bad ideas they themselves attribute to the work through their own interpretation of it. In the 20s they tried to ban books because of it, in the 40's they tried to ban comic books because of it, in the 80's they tried to ban music and dungeons & dragons for it... and now, today.... Donald Trump wants to blame video games for societies ills.
Why you, sir, would choose to propagate this nonsense into the community and give a platform to this hyperbolic claptrap to make D&D yet again the target of some political agenda... I don't have the words.
It's literally enough to bring me to tears thinking that somewhere some child is enjoying this game and it's giving him/her a lifeline and escape from his real world social anxieties... when some jaded self-satisfied adult comes along and says to him/her... "how can you read that crap, you know it was invented by people that hate Asians"... placing a disgusting stigma on something they love.
If you want to alter rules for your games any way you see fit, fine... but as a 42 year old man who's seen the name of a game he loves dragged through the mud, I would ask that you not so casually throw around references and links to ideas so toxic to the very nature and foundation of artistic expression. In some circles that sort of critical analysis is erudite and viewed as academic; but here in this context where it's the goal to maintain a free flow of creative thought, and a suspension of disbelief to explore the art... it's like tying a lead weight to a swimmer.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019So instead of celebrating differences, we have to normalize everything. No racial bonus, no background features, no class features, no restrictions on feats or multiclassing. Each of these causes a character to be potentially different than another character. That could hurt someone's feelings.
I want 6e with no classes, races, or backgrounds. Each character starts with 18 in all attributes, and expertise in all skills (again, no one character should be at any disadvantage whatsoever).
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Posted Aug 17, 2019So what’s the Challenge Rating of a straw man? It seems a lot of people love attacking them.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019I think I like the idea of thinning the +3 racial bonuses across race/class/background and concentrating them only through character creation. This way, race choice still matters, just may not make or break the choice to pair certain race/class combos.
Each race gets a +1 in a score (or choice of scores) that makes sense for them. Elves get +1 DEX or CHA, Half-orcs +1 STR or CON, Humans +1 player choice. Then each race gets a feature like relentless endurance, fey ancestry, or whatever. Humans could maybe just pick a feat. This would need more thought, but I think balance can be found.
Classes get a +1 in their king score. Fighters in STR or DEX, rogues in DEX or INT, Casters according to their casting ability, etc.
Backgrounds get a +1 in an area that makes sense for them. Entertainers get +1 CHA, Sages +1 INT, Acolytes +1 WIS
You will always have min/maxers, and this does open the door for putting all 3 into one score, but I think something like this could open the door to people playing combos that please them without feeling like they’re starting in the hole because their wizard is a half orc. Because, hey, he was adopted as a toddler by a noble’s daughter who paid for his private tutoring, and now he’s a sage. So his INT now has a +2 from his class and background choices, while his racial bonus went into CON. Whereas a gnome who went sage/wizard has a +3 INT, but no help to CON.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019HrafnkelTheRed. i get the point quite clearly. And regardless of which race you pick every pc gets 27 points to spread how they please, every pc gets the opportunity to maximize their profession, every pc brings something diverse to the table. Whole cultures can be conditioned in differing ways to other cultures, does it make one better than the other? No. Are there outliers? Absolutely. are they better or worse than members of similar conditioning because they are different? No. To deny whole cultures' prided attributes can be just as belittling to their history or culture as claiming them to be racial stereotypes.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019You are incorrect WordMonger. These two ideas are mutually exclusive... these rules are not an optional alternative, when the the thing they are supposedly an alternative to is real world racism. Accepting the author's premise and then continuing to run D&D business as usual is tantamount to accusing players and GMs of actively propagating racist stereotypes.
That is... if you accept the premise behind this critical theory. I reject it personally, I think the linked artical is badly motivated bunk of the same quality written by William Schnoebelen back in the 80's accusing the fiction of pushing satanism and witchcraft.
Haeck is putting forth the idea (intentional or not) that the fun people have with the base rules as written, is wrong and racist. As far as ideas go, I don't think I've ever seen something as toxic, divisive, and damaging to the game and community ever published by an official source.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019If you use Point Buy as your stat generator, this all becomes moot.
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Posted Aug 17, 2019No straw man here, but thanks for trying. It's a reduction to absurdity. It means if we keep going down this road it's only logical conclusion is that everything must equal to ensure no one feels bad.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019I did not read all the comments (15 pages worth) but has anyone mentioned supporting this in D&D Beyond? I think this would be a good way to offer out some house rules by giving us an option to use them programatically.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019My groups homebrew rules only go to a max of 10th level to keep things low-powered, so I just give them a +1 bonus to apply to whatever ability they want each level instead of racial bonuses. If you play to 20th, just give the players a +1 ability bonus on every odd level instead.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019@Deyric Troll
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Posted Aug 18, 2019Since playing outside of Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds is pretty popular (judging from the majority positive responses to the OP's post), I would encourage WotC to accelerate release of official 5e conversion rules for the Dark Sun and Spelljammer campaign settings. #Tri-kreeniswhatIMean #SorcererKingstookalltheBling #HeadCanonOctopiTime
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Posted Aug 18, 2019I wonder how many of the people claiming that something is or isn't racist have actually experienced real-life systemic oppression as a result of their real-life race.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019Call it like I see it. If you disagree with the content, fine. But to call him a Hack, when he's probably accomplished more for this game than you, makes you a troll.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019Reductio ad absurdum is only valid if it is based on the premises already in the argument. Deliberately misinterpreting an argument to a more absurd version is a straw man fallacy. Nowhere does he say that everything needs to be normalized or that there can be no differences, and in fact he spends a significant amount of the article stating the exact opposite of that explaining how racial traits other than ability scores are useful and interesting as well as how characters can still be different from each other.
So, yes, your comment was a straight up textbook straw man fallacy.
Don't read defensively, looking to be offended. As I tell my students, listen to and respond to what he actually says, not what you imagine he says.
Of course, anyone who belittles trying to avoid racism as just "ensuring no one feels bad," I don't know where to even begin. But here's a good start for something to consider:
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Posted Aug 18, 2019If anyone is having "issues" with any part of this game, you should at least play some of the other editions of D&D. Why? Many of the game mechanics in 5th edition are holdovers from the previous 4 editions of the game, with a large emphasis on AD&D. Racial abilities have been a staple of this game since the beginning, but one thing that was not included was the "racial limitations" that were imposed from the 1st edition of the game. There was a time when elves could reach the same strength maximum as other races (primarily humans) nor could the non-human races achieve class levels beyond level 8. This was what the advantage that humans had over every other race, their only limits was that they couldn't gain a 19 in any of their stats, nor could they multi-class. This is what I believe is missing in the current edition of D&D - Racial Limits on classes, and level progression. If a dm wants to promote humans over other races in their games, impose class restrictions or level caps for non-humans (or both) and bar Humans from multi-classing. That's going to become the
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Posted Aug 18, 2019Option 4: Put the +2 and +1 into any stat you want regardless of class/background. The reason this doesn't end up being nonsensical is because people are going to put the stats in places where they think the character will benefit from them the most based on whatever their concept for them was. It doesn't actually need to be built in to a specific class/background/whatever choice because those things have already been chosen by the player and those choices inform (but do not necessarily enforce) the player's choice of stat allocation.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019There is already a "Manual" option for the character creator, that lets you put your points wherever you like; and, I believe, doesn't take racial bonuses in to account either.
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Posted Aug 18, 2019I don't see any racism at all in how you build your characters today. Rather, all of the races (which are really species) have different awesome abilities that makes them special and unique - just like real life. Biology is an important factor when designing a species or a race if you will, and it makes sense that half-orcs are stronger than halflings when it comes to pure strength. Why is that so dangerous? It's up to all of us to make a game where there's room for everything, and with the removal of the penalties (which I agree was a bit too much), you can just go for anything you like. It's perfect as is.