What you have to understand is that I (and the rest of us curmudgeonly grognards) have different emotional associations with Racial ASIs because character creation and progression used to be muuucch different, and that still holds a certain emotional attachment for us.
Back in the TSR days one didn’t “build” a character (we couldn’t), one “generated” a character.
Roll Ability scores, strait 3d6, in order Str — Cha.
Figure out whatever class (or classes) best fit those stats (and choose).
There were no Ability Score Adjustments at all, anywhere, at any point, from any sources other than the ones from your Race that you got at character creation, and magic items (like the Tomes & Manuals, or the Belts & Gauntlets). Back then Ability Score Adjustments we’re absolutely integral to Races.
Oh, yeah, racial ASIs work a lot better when you're discovering your character. And technically that's still the default in the PHB! But it's the minority style nowadays, I think. I'd like to pick your brain about it if you've got the time -- I want to bring this style into an upcoming game with players who might have reservations about it, and I'm not sure how to go about onboarding them. I might make a thread.
So you see, for those of us complaining about this, it isn’t that we’re complaining about a shift towards the popular play style of floating ASIs. We’re complaining about the simultaneous shift away from something we have long-standing positive mental associations and emotional attachments to from our treasured memories.
I mean no offense by what I'm about to say, but it's going to be hurtful regardless: your nostalgia can't be allowed to hold back progress. I think you know this.
In addition, I for one at least am also more than a little sick and tired of people telling me I’m a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because my happy, cherished memories have given me positive emotional associations with Racial ASIs.
Oh, Sposta... We don't think you're a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because of your happy memories. We think you're a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because you were created by a terrible, horrible fun-hating god! You're just not capable of anything more. We're doing you a service by cutting you down, really. Wait, I think I've fallen through a dimensional gate or something.
And please stop dismissing my hurt feelings like I don’t count and my feelings don’t matter.
I don’t begrudge anyone else their fun in this regard, so please stop 💩ing all over mine while you’re at it. Is that really so much to ask? Really…?!?
There's definitely some antagonism afoot. We could all probably stand to touch some grass, as the kids say.
2) This "actively punished for existing" bit seems a bit excessive though, or at least the notion that "many" espouse it.
Yurei's penchant for hyperbole aside, fixed racial ASI's do impose an opportunity cost for not choosing a class that utilize the given stats.
Sure, but that's not quite "actively punishing". I've never seen a single DM go after a player/character to compound on the woes of being slightly suboptimal with regards to their primary stat and making them suffer beyond the normal ramifications of their choice. Nor have I seen DMs decide to punish someone for not picking a race with flight, darkvision, keen senses, skill versatility or any of the numerous other racial qualities that can make a significant difference to a character's abilities in their chosen area of expertise. You make a choice, based on whatever preferences you have at the time of character creation, and you live with it. Choosing A means losing out on B. But that's always been the extent of it in my experience, nobody's ever gotten their nose rubbed in picking something that would have been a benefit to them just to make it sting a bit more.
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I came into this thread with a generally unvaforable attitude toward it, but am thinking a bit more positively now.
I liked the idea of allowing someone wanting to play a dwarf wizard for example to move their +1 stat to int so they wouldn't feel as underpowered for doing so. But I disliked the put them wherever you want style. To me it removes a lot of the flavor from the fantasy races. It makes sense that dwarves are heartier than elves and goliaths are stronger than halflings. As well as sort of making all of the fantasy races sort of humans with pointy ears or blue skin. And think it adds to min/maxing.
Whenever these sorts of arguments come up (and they come up super often in these threads), I find it odd that people only attribute these characteristics to where your score increases go and not to any of the other features of a given race.
"Dwarves are heartier than elves" This is absolutely correct, but not limited to their Con bonus. Even with floating ASIs, dwarves still get Dwarven Resilience and Hill Dwarves get Dwarven Toughness.
"Goliaths are stronger than halflings" This is absolutely correct, but not limited to their Str bonus. Even with floating ASIs, goliaths get Powerful Build and are Medium creatures (whereas halflings are Small).This latter detail is important because it means that a goliath can use Heavy weapons without disadvantage and can Grapple/Shove larger creatures than a halfling could.
As for min/maxing, an elf has always been able to get a 20 Con and a halfling has always been able to get a 20 Str if they wanted to, this change just lets them get those scores 1 ASI faster than before. While this can play into min/maxing, I think that it is okay for the tradeoff of players in general not feeling they need to play certain race/class combos just to align their racial bonuses with their primary stats.
I think its probably a function of debating/discussing an issue. In that we mainly focus on the aspects we disagree with, like I could say "I find it odd that people ignore the role stat bonuses play in reflecting the generalizable distinctions between fantasy races".
IRL someone with an IQ of 110 could probably study hard and become as capable at an intellectual job as someone with an IQ of 130. But the person with 130 IQ wouldn't have to work as hard and would have the opportunity to put time and resources elsewhere. A halfling fighter can become as strong as a goliath but the goliath can also take polearm master or some other feat along the way. That's kind of why I like the idea of increased racial caps for stats
I came into this thread with a generally unvaforable attitude toward it, but am thinking a bit more positively now.
I liked the idea of allowing someone wanting to play a dwarf wizard for example to move their +1 stat to int so they wouldn't feel as underpowered for doing so. But I disliked the put them wherever you want style. To me it removes a lot of the flavor from the fantasy races. It makes sense that dwarves are heartier than elves and goliaths are stronger than halflings. As well as sort of making all of the fantasy races sort of humans with pointy ears or blue skin. And think it adds to min/maxing.
Whenever these sorts of arguments come up (and they come up super often in these threads), I find it odd that people only attribute these characteristics to where your score increases go and not to any of the other features of a given race.
"Dwarves are heartier than elves" This is absolutely correct, but not limited to their Con bonus. Even with floating ASIs, dwarves still get Dwarven Resilience and Hill Dwarves get Dwarven Toughness.
"Goliaths are stronger than halflings" This is absolutely correct, but not limited to their Str bonus. Even with floating ASIs, goliaths get Powerful Build and are Medium creatures (whereas halflings are Small).This latter detail is important because it means that a goliath can use Heavy weapons without disadvantage and can Grapple/Shove larger creatures than a halfling could.
As for min/maxing, an elf has always been able to get a 20 Con and a halfling has always been able to get a 20 Str if they wanted to, this change just lets them get those scores 1 ASI faster than before. While this can play into min/maxing, I think that it is okay for the tradeoff of players in general not feeling they need to play certain race/class combos just to align their racial bonuses with their primary stats.
I think its probably a function of debating/discussing an issue. In that we mainly focus on the aspects we disagree with, like I could say "I find it odd that people ignore the role stat bonuses play in reflecting the generalizable distinctions between fantasy races".
IRL someone with an IQ of 110 could probably study hard and become as capable at an intellectual job as someone with an IQ of 130. But the person with 130 IQ wouldn't have to work as hard and would have the opportunity to put time and resources elsewhere. A halfling fighter can become as strong as a goliath but the goliath can also take polearm master or some other feat along the way. That's kind of why I like the idea of increased racial caps for stats
I am not the best person to speak on this, but part of the reason WoTC moved away from racial caps and is moving away from racial stats is because the idea that "because you are this race it is impossible for you to be as smart as this race" has potential to be....problematic to say the least. For a business trying to sell a product, problematic does not do well for sales.
If your table is cool with racial caps and traditional racial stats, then by all means go crazy, but I can understand why having those choices hard-wired into the game design could cause problems at other tables (as some users on these forums have spoken of before when the question of racial bonuses has come up before).
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You could also make twelfth level in, like...a month in older editions of D&D, and as Sposta said your numbers didn't matter and you never got to play what you felt like playing anyways so nobody cared if they got to higher levels or not.
I find level advancement has increased in pace by orders of magnitutde. Back in 2e we could play for years and not hit 9th level when your signature Class feature came online. It only felt faster because most characters died by 3rd level.
I never said that the numbers didn’t matter. In fact, the numbers mattered more than than now. Now everyone has the same numbers to work with for every character. Back then the numbers were so important that you literally couldn’t create a character until you knew what numbers you had to work with, and that didn’t happen until “character creation,” the “session 0 of its day. Those numbers were so important that it wasn’t even useful to automatically consider any one race/class combo to be “optimized” before dropping dice. For one character an Elf might have been the best pick, but another with the same class might best be pared with Half-Orc because the pros & cons it had lined up better for the stats that got rolled. There was little expectation to “play to type” because that wasn’t necessarily gonna be the best fit depending on the numbers.
I also never said that we never played what we wanted. I played exactly what I wanted every time. I played D&D. The game and the mindset were just different then.
You sit in a vacuum and theorycraft and develop a bespoke archetype for a character, assess mechanics and decide you want to play that PC. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just didn’t work for the old system is all. It couldn’t because you didn’t know what your stats would be until everyone rolled them together at the table.
We used to all get together in the same room at the same time and everybody generated their characters together. It was like sitting around opening up a bunch of lootcrates together, or unwrapping presents. We genuinely got excited to “see what we got.” And each player created 1-3 active duty characters, 2 reserves, and a short stack of backups to replace the inevitable dead.
I also never said we didn’t care if we hit higher levels or not. Of course we cared. We cared hard. Part of the excitement was in the process, kinda like the sports draft process. Another part of the fun was finding out which PCs were gonna survive until 5th level, then 7th, then 9th. That was the brass ring, because a class’s signature features didn’t come online until 9th level. 1st — 8th level was like playing the regular season, 9th and up was playoffs baby. The championship was retiring (instead of dying) at the highest level possible.
So you develop a character you love, create the PC, and then play the game. We did the exact same steps, just in a different order is all. We created our PCs, played the game, and then fell in love with our characters. And we loved them for their shortcomings and “wasted stats” and everything as much as for all the good parts. It was through that process that I realized there are no “wasted stats.” That’s because sooner or later, that thing I hadn’t needed became something I was kissing my dice for giving me when the least expected things came up and I ended up very effing glad my Wiz had some beef to him.
As for min/maxing, an elf has always been able to get a 20 Con and a halfling has always been able to get a 20 Str if they wanted to, this change just lets them get those scores 1 ASI faster than before. While this can play into min/maxing, I think that it is okay for the tradeoff of players in general not feeling they need to play certain race/class combos just to align their racial bonuses with their primary stats.
(Snipped by Choir)
IRL someone with an IQ of 110 could probably study hard and become as capable at an intellectual job as someone with an IQ of 130. But the person with 130 IQ wouldn't have to work as hard and would have the opportunity to put time and resources elsewhere. A halfling fighter can become as strong as a goliath but the goliath can also take polearm master or some other feat along the way. That's kind of why I like the idea of increased racial caps for stats
I mean, really what we're trying to do here is provide a sense of progress, not reflect reality. If we were trying to reflect reality, you wouldn't be able to increase Charisma by killing a bunch of elementals in a cave. The very loose sense of verisimilitude that you get from the notion of "more experience = better abilities" is sufficient to make the mechanics understandable, and that's all it needs to be, and that's all it is. Any specific realism-related complaints need to be placed upon the altar and stabbed with this Fact Dagger, repeatedly until dead, as an offering to the ancient and cryptic gods of game design, who simply do not care whether biological essentialism is Cool And Groovy, as they are from another dimension and have no moral code that we could possibly comprehend.
What you have to understand is that I (and the rest of us curmudgeonly grognards) have different emotional associations with Racial ASIs because character creation and progression used to be muuucch different, and that still holds a certain emotional attachment for us.
Back in the TSR days one didn’t “build” a character (we couldn’t), one “generated” a character.
Roll Ability scores, strait 3d6, in order Str — Cha.
Figure out whatever class (or classes) best fit those stats (and choose).
There were no Ability Score Adjustments at all, anywhere, at any point, from any sources other than the ones from your Race that you got at character creation, and magic items (like the Tomes & Manuals, or the Belts & Gauntlets). Back then Ability Score Adjustments we’re absolutely integral to Races.
Oh, yeah, racial ASIs work a lot better when you're discovering your character. And technically that's still the default in the PHB! But it's the minority style nowadays, I think. I'd like to pick your brain about it if you've got the time -- I want to bring this style into an upcoming game with players who might have reservations about it, and I'm not sure how to go about onboarding them. I might make a thread.
I would be more than happy to help with such a worthy endeavor.
So you see, for those of us complaining about this, it isn’t that we’re complaining about a shift towards the popular play style of floating ASIs. We’re complaining about the simultaneous shift away from something we have long-standing positive mental associations and emotional attachments to from our treasured memories.
I mean no offense by what I'm about to say, but it's going to be hurtful regardless: your nostalgia can't be allowed to hold back progress. I think you know this.
Who wants to hold back progress?!? Like I have publicly stated more times than I can count by now, I am perfectly happy they have made floating ASIs an official thing for people. I’m just unhappy they haven’t included both methods as equally viable options (just like rolling Ability Scores is alongside Standard Array and Point Buy). We can have both progress and nostalgia, it doesn’t have to be either/or.
In addition, I for one at least am also more than a little sick and tired of people telling me I’m a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because my happy, cherished memories have given me positive emotional associations with Racial ASIs.Back in the TSR days one didn’t “build” a character (we couldn’t), one “generated” a character.
Oh, Sposta... We don't think you're a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because of your happy memories. We think you're a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because you were created by a terrible, horrible fun-hating god! You're just not capable of anything more. We're doing you a service by cutting you down, really….
I mean, really what we're trying to do here is provide a sense of progress, not reflect reality. If we were trying to reflect reality, you wouldn't be able to increase Charisma by killing a bunch of elementals in a cave. The very loose sense of verisimilitude that you get from the notion of "more experience = better abilities" is sufficient to make the mechanics understandable, and that's all it needs to be, and that's all it is. Any specific realism-related complaints need to be placed upon the altar and stabbed with this Fact Dagger, repeatedly until dead, as an offering to the ancient and cryptic gods of game design, who simply do not care whether biological essentialism is Cool And Groovy, as they are from another dimension and have no moral code that we could possibly comprehend.
One of the things I like most about D&D is the imaginative aspect, where you try to put yourself in the game world. Some sense of realism is important to me, for example I like the grittier sort of SciFi like Battlestar Gallactica or The Expanse more than Star Trek or Star Wars. There's nothing wrong with trying to include realism in your random number generating and number crunching strategy game. I actually kind of like the idea of gaining experience only for the abilities you use, other games I've seen have used that. Though I think it probably makes for a less fun game for many.
So I take your point that realism often gets sacrificed for better game play. I'd just say that there is more to D&D than game mechanics, and realism is a part of that other aspect. Ideally there will be an optimum balance between the two, but I don't think that balance point will be the same for any two people. I like the distinctions between fantasy races, and want to keep it. I think the problematic aspect is the word race as it means different things in the game and IRL, there needs to be a better word for the fantasy races.
One of the points that is occasionally raised is that the distinction between fantasy species often comes at the cost of any distinction between fantasy individuals.
With fixed species ASIs and iconic character builds, dwarves are super distinct from elves. It's pretty much impossible for anyone but a real raging idiot to mistake the one for the other. But with fixed points, fixed traits, and a strong, strong push to conform to the iconic build for each species?
Dwarves are super distinct from elves. Dwarves are not terribly distinct from each other. Any two given dwarves start becoming largely interchangeable - pluck Himli the dwarven warrior from Campaign X and drop him into the same slot as Fimli the dwarven soldier from Campaign Y, and neither X nor Y will generally know the difference. Many players seem to strongly value sharp delineation between the various fantastical species in the gamew, but attach no real value to sharp delineation between individuals. To them, every single dwarf being the exact same dwarf is just kinda how dwarves work, and so long as that infinite legion of identical dwarves is super sharp and distinct from the infinite legion of identical elves, and the legion of identical elves are super sharp and distinct from the legion of identical half-orcs, so on and so forth? Then the game feels like D&D to them and everything is kosher. They say "if you want who you are to matter more than what you are, play a goddamned human and leave our fantasy species alone."
Obviously, other players have some pretty strenuous objections to every single member of a given species being treated as an inflexible stereotrope and being told that only humans are allowed to have personalities of their own. Alas, just one of the many strenuous objections constantly being raised by this issue.
... with fixed points, fixed traits, and a strong, strong push to conform to the iconic build for each species? Dwarves are super distinct from elves. Dwarves are not terribly distinct from each other. Any two given dwarves start becoming largely interchangeable - pluck Himli the dwarven warrior from Campaign X and drop him into the same slot as Fimli the dwarven soldier from Campaign Y, and neither X nor Y will generally know the difference.
Well, yes. If there's a strong push to conform to the iconic build, characters will conform - not exactly a surprising thesis there. Again though, I don't experience this push. Not strong, not even weak. And if it's just the ASI being fixed or floating, that doesn't make a ton of difference compared to how much arranging your stat matters and to how strongly those fixed racial qualities matter.
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2) This "actively punished for existing" bit seems a bit excessive though, or at least the notion that "many" espouse it.
Yurei's penchant for hyperbole aside, fixed racial ASI's do impose an opportunity cost for not choosing a class that utilize the given stats.
Sure, but that's not quite "actively punishing". I've never seen a single DM go after a player/character to compound on the woes of being slightly suboptimal with regards to their primary stat and making them suffer beyond the normal ramifications of their choice.
Like I said, hyperbole aside. I haven't seen a DM specifically go after the suboptimized, but I have seen DM's who say they are "hardcore" and don't pull their punches and I'm sure you have, too. It's a guarantee that at those tables, the players will be picking races for their stats.
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2) This "actively punished for existing" bit seems a bit excessive though, or at least the notion that "many" espouse it.
Yurei's penchant for hyperbole aside, fixed racial ASI's do impose an opportunity cost for not choosing a class that utilize the given stats.
Sure, but that's not quite "actively punishing". I've never seen a single DM go after a player/character to compound on the woes of being slightly suboptimal with regards to their primary stat and making them suffer beyond the normal ramifications of their choice.
Like I said, hyperbole aside. I haven't seen a DM specifically go after the suboptimized, but I have seen DM's who say they are "hardcore" and don't pull their punches and I'm sure you have, too. It's a guarantee that at those tables, the players will be picking races for their stats.
No punches pulled is really my default expectation, but if someone makes a point of confirming that I'm more likely to walk away and find a table where I don't expect the DM to be at least semi-adversarial. Point taken though.
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Those folks would look at Mira and say "tabaxi are just not supposed to be wizards. There's no reason for a tabaxi to be a wizard. Take a -2 penalty to Intelligence because you're an easily distractible catgirl, and then if you continue to insist on playing a stupid anime catgirl at my table you make her into a ranger or rogue like tabaxi are supposed to be." Doesn't matter that Mira's entire characterization is predicated on having a rare and powerful natural talent for magic. As she herself has said, "magic comes easily to me, and I do not shy from it." But Shepherd specifically is calling for every last single nonhuman species in D&D to have a -2 to something, and so are many of the other folks fishing for fixed modifiers.
Thought experiment: you're explaining D&D to a new player, and you say "these numbers define your character's abilities. They can only ever go up to 20, and increasing them after character creation is super hard and comes at the cost of being able to pick out cool abilities for your character. For certain characters, having a bad number in their most defining attribute makes it really hard for them to contribute to a game. If you make your character a certain way you can start with a 17 in your most defining attribute. If you make your character another way, and it won't at all be obvious which way is which before you decide on your idea, you'll only be able to start with a 13. Everything clear? Cool! let's make a character!"
What do you think the reaction will be?
Yurei believes that if a DM can't come up with a better reason for "you can't do that" than "because Tolkien didn't write about catgirl wizards!", that DM might need to unclench a little. Valid reasons for "no catgirl wizards" absolutely exist, but if the DM can't explain those reasons to a reasonable player's satisfaction, perhaps that player has some right to be annoyed?
Tabaxi, don't particularly seem 'anti-wizard to me. The description says they like to uncover secrets. That jives with wizard, diviner in particular. Wisdom - easily distractable catgirl ;-P. your DM is mean if they pick INT while you're trying to make a wizard. The lack of advice for me on what actually is a tabaxi weakness is part of what I complain about, but old precedent seems to imply the counterstat for dexterity is wisdom; intelligence is the counterstat for Strength, and Charisma for Constitution. I can't see the volo's details yet, but does it actually say Tabaxi favor ranger/rogue? Mind you the only one I've seen live so far was from the Dungeon Dudes game and she was indeed a gloomstalker/arcane trickster. That's not necessarily a lore determination though, it's just a great stack, feline agility with Zephyr Strike. Your description would make me ask "Why not Sorcerer?" You already have the +2CHA, and it says "a rare and powerful natural talent which comes easily for you". If you prefer Wizard though, so be it, but again I think you overexaggerate the "awfulness" of having to start with a 16 instead of 18 in INT @ level 1. It's really not going to hold you back I promise. Humans too I said - a floating -2. Unless you want to drop the bonus altogether like in 3.0e, but nah.
I wouldn't say "Super hard" and at the cost of cool abilities; just "a bit of a chore to".
6&7 are "below average", 8-12 are average, 13-17 are above average. 18+ is paragon-hero: like avengers level awesome. Yes, I would make clear that some builds can start with an 18 at level 1, but it isn't a necessity to go out of your way to do that and you aren't going to fail to contribute to the party just because you are Hawkeye or Natasha at the start of the game and not immediately someone with "super-power". Also things are different with an experienced player like yourself versus a newbie. I would probably recommend a newbie use an optimized build to start with just until they get the hang of things before trying a more challenging archetype.
Tolkein didn't write about Barbarians or Monks either, that I know of. There are more than one trope incorporated into D&D. Yurei, this is the second time you've assumed I'd ban something. I never ban anything. If catgirl is its own trope, and wizard is atypical of that trope for some reason, then the same rules apply as do with elves or anyone else. In the old day's we'd have to grow in power over the course of the game even if we did start optimized. Ye lot have it so much easier these days...
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Dwarves are super distinct from elves. Dwarves are not terribly distinct from each other. Any two given dwarves start becoming largely interchangeable - pluck Himli the dwarven warrior from Campaign X and drop him into the same slot as Fimli the dwarven soldier from Campaign Y, and neither X nor Y will generally know the difference. Many players seem to strongly value sharp delineation between the various fantastical species in the gamew, but attach no real value to sharp delineation between individuals. To them, every single dwarf being the exact same dwarf is just kinda how dwarves work, and so long as that infinite legion of identical dwarves is super sharp and distinct from the infinite legion of identical elves, and the legion of identical elves are super sharp and distinct from the legion of identical half-orcs, so on and so forth? Then the game feels like D&D to them and everything is kosher. They say "if you want who you are to matter more than what you are, play a goddamned human and leave our fantasy species alone."
This is true. I'll cop to this. I do unfortunately seem to see the same dwarf in every dwarf I see; except for Varrick from Dragon Age 2 who made a point of not having a beard. Unironically, his is the only name I remember. I don't even remember all the dwarves from the Hobbit. ... or Snow White.
On one hand it's nice that when I want to make say Eladrin Paladin now I can just bump STR and CHA at char gen and start of stronger.. on the other hand minor stat differences no longer exist as your just going to pump whats meta for the class so having something like my paladin with a higher dex won't exist anymore.
Game power lvls its nice, for total sameness in stats and not having minor variances its a drawback.. just kinda "ok"
I like the races have their own unique flavor. I will not be buying ANY WotC content that will put those changes into my game. If WotC were smart, they would renegotiate their digital contracts before their content goes lives and allow players to opt out of the changes on their digital characters and they would make more sales. But hey it's WotC, good luck on common sense.
I came into this thread with a generally unvaforable attitude toward it, but am thinking a bit more positively now.
I liked the idea of allowing someone wanting to play a dwarf wizard for example to move their +1 stat to int so they wouldn't feel as underpowered for doing so. But I disliked the put them wherever you want style. To me it removes a lot of the flavor from the fantasy races. It makes sense that dwarves are heartier than elves and goliaths are stronger than halflings. As well as sort of making all of the fantasy races sort of humans with pointy ears or blue skin. And think it adds to min/maxing.
Whenever these sorts of arguments come up (and they come up super often in these threads), I find it odd that people only attribute these characteristics to where your score increases go and not to any of the other features of a given race.
"Dwarves are heartier than elves" This is absolutely correct, but not limited to their Con bonus. Even with floating ASIs, dwarves still get Dwarven Resilience and Hill Dwarves get Dwarven Toughness.
"Goliaths are stronger than halflings" This is absolutely correct, but not limited to their Str bonus. Even with floating ASIs, goliaths get Powerful Build and are Medium creatures (whereas halflings are Small).This latter detail is important because it means that a goliath can use Heavy weapons without disadvantage and can Grapple/Shove larger creatures than a halfling could.
As for min/maxing, an elf has always been able to get a 20 Con and a halfling has always been able to get a 20 Str if they wanted to, this change just lets them get those scores 1 ASI faster than before. While this can play into min/maxing, I think that it is okay for the tradeoff of players in general not feeling they need to play certain race/class combos just to align their racial bonuses with their primary stats.
I think its probably a function of debating/discussing an issue. In that we mainly focus on the aspects we disagree with, like I could say "I find it odd that people ignore the role stat bonuses play in reflecting the generalizable distinctions between fantasy races".
IRL someone with an IQ of 110 could probably study hard and become as capable at an intellectual job as someone with an IQ of 130. But the person with 130 IQ wouldn't have to work as hard and would have the opportunity to put time and resources elsewhere. A halfling fighter can become as strong as a goliath but the goliath can also take polearm master or some other feat along the way. That's kind of why I like the idea of increased racial caps for stats
I always found Irl arguments weird because magic exists and these concepts are very complicated in the real world. Like in the real world IQ corresponds to certain intellectual skills but doesn't correspond to being correct in the same way a high roll in dnd does, you can be intelligently wrong about things, its called debating. So even these rules would not capture the actual complexity of this issue. At the same time why should it be realistic? We could create increasingly complex rules at infinitude to closer and closer represent reality but never hit it and possibly not make a fun game.
So I encourage what I think is fun which is impactful choices and if you read this thread you will many people here talking about how the set asi failed at that both limiting choice and lacking impact. Although people argue these as opposite positions both are true. It didn't force you it just made it feel bad to not follow the trend. It was toothless and pointless at the same time it was this token +1 to rolls that tricked people into chasing this trend of race class combos. I think things like racial features and size are more impactful so they are my preference as the delineation between races over asi and I rather people make their race decisions based on that.
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Oh, yeah, racial ASIs work a lot better when you're discovering your character. And technically that's still the default in the PHB! But it's the minority style nowadays, I think. I'd like to pick your brain about it if you've got the time -- I want to bring this style into an upcoming game with players who might have reservations about it, and I'm not sure how to go about onboarding them. I might make a thread.
I mean no offense by what I'm about to say, but it's going to be hurtful regardless: your nostalgia can't be allowed to hold back progress. I think you know this.
Oh, Sposta... We don't think you're a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because of your happy memories. We think you're a terrible, horrible fun-hater who should feel bad because you were created by a terrible, horrible fun-hating god! You're just not capable of anything more. We're doing you a service by cutting you down, really. Wait, I think I've fallen through a dimensional gate or something.
There's definitely some antagonism afoot. We could all probably stand to touch some grass, as the kids say.
Sure, but that's not quite "actively punishing". I've never seen a single DM go after a player/character to compound on the woes of being slightly suboptimal with regards to their primary stat and making them suffer beyond the normal ramifications of their choice. Nor have I seen DMs decide to punish someone for not picking a race with flight, darkvision, keen senses, skill versatility or any of the numerous other racial qualities that can make a significant difference to a character's abilities in their chosen area of expertise. You make a choice, based on whatever preferences you have at the time of character creation, and you live with it. Choosing A means losing out on B. But that's always been the extent of it in my experience, nobody's ever gotten their nose rubbed in picking something that would have been a benefit to them just to make it sting a bit more.
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I think its probably a function of debating/discussing an issue. In that we mainly focus on the aspects we disagree with, like I could say "I find it odd that people ignore the role stat bonuses play in reflecting the generalizable distinctions between fantasy races".
IRL someone with an IQ of 110 could probably study hard and become as capable at an intellectual job as someone with an IQ of 130. But the person with 130 IQ wouldn't have to work as hard and would have the opportunity to put time and resources elsewhere. A halfling fighter can become as strong as a goliath but the goliath can also take polearm master or some other feat along the way. That's kind of why I like the idea of increased racial caps for stats
I am not the best person to speak on this, but part of the reason WoTC moved away from racial caps and is moving away from racial stats is because the idea that "because you are this race it is impossible for you to be as smart as this race" has potential to be....problematic to say the least. For a business trying to sell a product, problematic does not do well for sales.
If your table is cool with racial caps and traditional racial stats, then by all means go crazy, but I can understand why having those choices hard-wired into the game design could cause problems at other tables (as some users on these forums have spoken of before when the question of racial bonuses has come up before).
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I find level advancement has increased in pace by orders of magnitutde. Back in 2e we could play for years and not hit 9th level when your signature Class feature came online. It only felt faster because most characters died by 3rd level.
You sit in a vacuum and theorycraft and develop a bespoke archetype for a character, assess mechanics and decide you want to play that PC. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just didn’t work for the old system is all. It couldn’t because you didn’t know what your stats would be until everyone rolled them together at the table.
We used to all get together in the same room at the same time and everybody generated their characters together. It was like sitting around opening up a bunch of lootcrates together, or unwrapping presents. We genuinely got excited to “see what we got.” And each player created 1-3 active duty characters, 2 reserves, and a short stack of backups to replace the inevitable dead.
So you develop a character you love, create the PC, and then play the game. We did the exact same steps, just in a different order is all. We created our PCs, played the game, and then fell in love with our characters. And we loved them for their shortcomings and “wasted stats” and everything as much as for all the good parts. It was through that process that I realized there are no “wasted stats.” That’s because sooner or later, that thing I hadn’t needed became something I was kissing my dice for giving me when the least expected things came up and I ended up very effing glad my Wiz had some beef to him.
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This part of my comment was directed at y'all:
I would be more than happy to help with such a worthy endeavor.
Who wants to hold back progress?!? Like I have publicly stated more times than I can count by now, I am perfectly happy they have made floating ASIs an official thing for people. I’m just unhappy they haven’t included both methods as equally viable options (just like rolling Ability Scores is alongside Standard Array and Point Buy). We can have both progress and nostalgia, it doesn’t have to be either/or.
Well I am Catholic so I’ll give ya that one. 😉
Grazie, lei è molto gentile.
PS- You touch it, I’ma toke mine. L8er h8ers. 🤣😂🤣
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One of the things I like most about D&D is the imaginative aspect, where you try to put yourself in the game world. Some sense of realism is important to me, for example I like the grittier sort of SciFi like Battlestar Gallactica or The Expanse more than Star Trek or Star Wars. There's nothing wrong with trying to include realism in your random number generating and number crunching strategy game. I actually kind of like the idea of gaining experience only for the abilities you use, other games I've seen have used that. Though I think it probably makes for a less fun game for many.
So I take your point that realism often gets sacrificed for better game play. I'd just say that there is more to D&D than game mechanics, and realism is a part of that other aspect. Ideally there will be an optimum balance between the two, but I don't think that balance point will be the same for any two people. I like the distinctions between fantasy races, and want to keep it. I think the problematic aspect is the word race as it means different things in the game and IRL, there needs to be a better word for the fantasy races.
To avoid derailing further, here's my new thread about old-school chargen. (Hopefully I fixed the link.)
One of the points that is occasionally raised is that the distinction between fantasy species often comes at the cost of any distinction between fantasy individuals.
With fixed species ASIs and iconic character builds, dwarves are super distinct from elves. It's pretty much impossible for anyone but a real raging idiot to mistake the one for the other. But with fixed points, fixed traits, and a strong, strong push to conform to the iconic build for each species?
Dwarves are super distinct from elves. Dwarves are not terribly distinct from each other. Any two given dwarves start becoming largely interchangeable - pluck Himli the dwarven warrior from Campaign X and drop him into the same slot as Fimli the dwarven soldier from Campaign Y, and neither X nor Y will generally know the difference. Many players seem to strongly value sharp delineation between the various fantastical species in the gamew, but attach no real value to sharp delineation between individuals. To them, every single dwarf being the exact same dwarf is just kinda how dwarves work, and so long as that infinite legion of identical dwarves is super sharp and distinct from the infinite legion of identical elves, and the legion of identical elves are super sharp and distinct from the legion of identical half-orcs, so on and so forth? Then the game feels like D&D to them and everything is kosher. They say "if you want who you are to matter more than what you are, play a goddamned human and leave our fantasy species alone."
Obviously, other players have some pretty strenuous objections to every single member of a given species being treated as an inflexible stereotrope and being told that only humans are allowed to have personalities of their own. Alas, just one of the many strenuous objections constantly being raised by this issue.
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Well, yes. If there's a strong push to conform to the iconic build, characters will conform - not exactly a surprising thesis there. Again though, I don't experience this push. Not strong, not even weak. And if it's just the ASI being fixed or floating, that doesn't make a ton of difference compared to how much arranging your stat matters and to how strongly those fixed racial qualities matter.
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Like I said, hyperbole aside. I haven't seen a DM specifically go after the suboptimized, but I have seen DM's who say they are "hardcore" and don't pull their punches and I'm sure you have, too. It's a guarantee that at those tables, the players will be picking races for their stats.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
No punches pulled is really my default expectation, but if someone makes a point of confirming that I'm more likely to walk away and find a table where I don't expect the DM to be at least semi-adversarial. Point taken though.
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I don’t think it is.
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Whoops. I've now cast Mending on the link.
Tabaxi, don't particularly seem 'anti-wizard to me. The description says they like to uncover secrets. That jives with wizard, diviner in particular. Wisdom - easily distractable catgirl ;-P. your DM is mean if they pick INT while you're trying to make a wizard. The lack of advice for me on what actually is a tabaxi weakness is part of what I complain about, but old precedent seems to imply the counterstat for dexterity is wisdom; intelligence is the counterstat for Strength, and Charisma for Constitution. I can't see the volo's details yet, but does it actually say Tabaxi favor ranger/rogue? Mind you the only one I've seen live so far was from the Dungeon Dudes game and she was indeed a gloomstalker/arcane trickster. That's not necessarily a lore determination though, it's just a great stack, feline agility with Zephyr Strike. Your description would make me ask "Why not Sorcerer?" You already have the +2CHA, and it says "a rare and powerful natural talent which comes easily for you". If you prefer Wizard though, so be it, but again I think you overexaggerate the "awfulness" of having to start with a 16 instead of 18 in INT @ level 1. It's really not going to hold you back I promise. Humans too I said - a floating -2. Unless you want to drop the bonus altogether like in 3.0e, but nah.
I wouldn't say "Super hard" and at the cost of cool abilities; just "a bit of a chore to".
6&7 are "below average", 8-12 are average, 13-17 are above average. 18+ is paragon-hero: like avengers level awesome. Yes, I would make clear that some builds can start with an 18 at level 1, but it isn't a necessity to go out of your way to do that and you aren't going to fail to contribute to the party just because you are Hawkeye or Natasha at the start of the game and not immediately someone with "super-power". Also things are different with an experienced player like yourself versus a newbie. I would probably recommend a newbie use an optimized build to start with just until they get the hang of things before trying a more challenging archetype.
Tolkein didn't write about Barbarians or Monks either, that I know of. There are more than one trope incorporated into D&D. Yurei, this is the second time you've assumed I'd ban something. I never ban anything. If catgirl is its own trope, and wizard is atypical of that trope for some reason, then the same rules apply as do with elves or anyone else. In the old day's we'd have to grow in power over the course of the game even if we did start optimized. Ye lot have it so much easier these days...
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This is true. I'll cop to this. I do unfortunately seem to see the same dwarf in every dwarf I see; except for Varrick from Dragon Age 2 who made a point of not having a beard. Unironically, his is the only name I remember. I don't even remember all the dwarves from the Hobbit. ... or Snow White.
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Overall I have to say I'm ok with it.
On one hand it's nice that when I want to make say Eladrin Paladin now I can just bump STR and CHA at char gen and start of stronger.. on the other hand minor stat differences no longer exist as your just going to pump whats meta for the class so having something like my paladin with a higher dex won't exist anymore.
Game power lvls its nice, for total sameness in stats and not having minor variances its a drawback.. just kinda "ok"
I like the races have their own unique flavor. I will not be buying ANY WotC content that will put those changes into my game. If WotC were smart, they would renegotiate their digital contracts before their content goes lives and allow players to opt out of the changes on their digital characters and they would make more sales. But hey it's WotC, good luck on common sense.
I always found Irl arguments weird because magic exists and these concepts are very complicated in the real world. Like in the real world IQ corresponds to certain intellectual skills but doesn't correspond to being correct in the same way a high roll in dnd does, you can be intelligently wrong about things, its called debating. So even these rules would not capture the actual complexity of this issue. At the same time why should it be realistic? We could create increasingly complex rules at infinitude to closer and closer represent reality but never hit it and possibly not make a fun game.
So I encourage what I think is fun which is impactful choices and if you read this thread you will many people here talking about how the set asi failed at that both limiting choice and lacking impact. Although people argue these as opposite positions both are true. It didn't force you it just made it feel bad to not follow the trend. It was toothless and pointless at the same time it was this token +1 to rolls that tricked people into chasing this trend of race class combos. I think things like racial features and size are more impactful so they are my preference as the delineation between races over asi and I rather people make their race decisions based on that.