One of my oldest HeroForge builds, from a character I built so long ago she was one of my original six pre-subscriber characters. Some useful information: -Tigerlily is 6'10" tall (a smidge over two meters) and weighs between two hundred and seventy to three hundred pounds (122 to 136 kilos). -Tigerlily is extremely proficient in all of the weapons displayed on her figure -Tigerlily's funky left eye is a subclass thing/bit of background weirdness, and has no bearing on her species/base class
For anyone who guesses correctly (or even incorrectly), which reason would you give for disallowing Tigerlily at your tables?
Is she a giantborne deep gnome? Warlock with Archfey patron and pact of the chain?
Like I said, I wouldn't ban her, but would still ask her ASi's and possibly an ASP be placed in something of a 'correct' order.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
General comment to the thread: using "species" instead of "race" might make it sound better, but it's not the imaginary-world science answer anyone is looking for. Things being different species generally means they can't breed with each other. D&D races generally can (though obviously this gets weird and magical in many cases, and isn't necessarily canon for all pairings, etc.).
Again I think the problem is the use of the word race. If we used species or kind to describe a fantasy race it probably wouldn't be as problematic in as many people's minds. No one has a problem thinking that cheetahs are generally faster than lions or that border collies are generally smarter than bulldogs.
No. While the nomenclature is problematic, this would be an issue even without the name. The issue being applying the same kind of thinking to people as we would apply to dog breeds. I don't care about anyone's ideas of fictional biological realism, that kind of eugenicist theory applied to anything that counts as a person is just gross.
There's the other problem. Regardless of nomenclature, D&D's handling of its "races" has been problematic because it's the analog of culture and ethnicity in the real world.
I had no fixed objective in mind, beyond satisfying my curiosity. Three guesses is, frankly, three more than I thought I'd get, so well enough done. Thank you, gentlemen.
Tigerlily is a wood elf barbarian, originally of the Ancestral Guardians path but rebuilt in later times as a Wild Magic path. She is indeed much taller and heavier than the PHB accounts for with elves and was always meant to have a more primal air and aspect to her. Tigerlily leans more into 'barbarian' than 'wood elf'; though her background is very fuzzy as she's never been played, her core concept/identity draws on the idea of 'Nature is a terrifying predatory battle for survival, not a serene little woodsy paradise'. Tigerlily is horrifyingly violent when violence suits the needs of the moment and has little in common with more typical elves. She does not treasure every leaf or spend centuries husbanding a single idyllic natural garden; to her, "living in tune with Nature" is cutting what she needs from the world around her and if the world bleeds? Oh well. It'll scab over, give it a bit and it'll be fine.
This, of course, makes her outrageously illegal at most of the fixed-ASI tables in this thread. Simply her species/class combination alone - an elven barbarian, of all damnfool things - would disqualify her from most of them. The tale of an elf who sees Holy Nature as simply a place to live and resources to use as she requires would be the next best thing to downright blasphemous. She would be vetoed at most any table in this thread simply because she is a drastic, unwanted, and unwarranted departure from her species' iconic character, and as such she has no place in any game set in Faerun. Or Greyhawk, or Mystara, or any of the other old close-Faerun-analogues. Bit of a shame, I always thought people gave barbarians in general too little credit. The whole 'barely sapient slobbering hooligan' thing is funny, but rarely has any depth or impact. None of y'all are Travis Willingham, anmd not every barbarian needs to be Grog [X].0
Ah, wood elf barbarian is a bit more "normal" than what I would have expected from your examples of anti-trope characters. Ah to be honest, the Gurgach are designed to be elven barbarians, no? I don't think she should be vetoed as a whole, but if you wanted to multiclass dip her as a druid, I might say, you'd need to have her learn a bit of a new attitude about nature before a circle would actually accept her into it; and think I am being entirely fair to rule this largely "human" attitude would indeed be antithetical to Druidic circles - unless there is one that perhaps specializes in the death aspect of "Holy Nature". How does Grog compare to Conan? I don't really know Grog, but my "Dwarf" of Barbarians is Conan.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
General comment to the thread: using "species" instead of "race" might make it sound better, but it's not the imaginary-world science answer anyone is looking for. Things being different species generally means they can't breed with each other. D&D races generally can (though obviously this gets weird and magical in many cases, and isn't necessarily canon for all pairings, etc.).
Agreed. I have seen "ancestry" (Pathfinder) and "folk" (Aether Sea) and find those acceptable. I would also find "peoples" acceptable.
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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!
General comment to the thread: using "species" instead of "race" might make it sound better, but it's not the imaginary-world science answer anyone is looking for. Things being different species generally means they can't breed with each other. D&D races generally can (though obviously this gets weird and magical in many cases, and isn't necessarily canon for all pairings, etc.).
Again I think the problem is the use of the word race. If we used species or kind to describe a fantasy race it probably wouldn't be as problematic in as many people's minds. No one has a problem thinking that cheetahs are generally faster than lions or that border collies are generally smarter than bulldogs.
No. While the nomenclature is problematic, this would be an issue even without the name. The issue being applying the same kind of thinking to people as we would apply to dog breeds. I don't care about anyone's ideas of fictional biological realism, that kind of eugenicist theory applied to anything that counts as a person is just gross.
There's the other problem. Regardless of nomenclature, D&D's handling of its "races" has been problematic because it's the analog of culture and ethnicity in the real world.
Its true, species really isn't the right word either. But the definition of fantasy race isn't the same as the real world definition. Its more than just a semantic argument, the way you define and think of the word effects how you feel about it and the way you project those feelings onto things. Its the definition that makes the analogy. I do like ancestry.
In general I guess I just don't get it. I think of humans as semi sophisticated animals and often not much better than hairless apes, we have all sorts of conditioning that comes from our biology that might be different if our biology was different. Fight, flight, freeze, an impulse for belonging and cooperation, sex, tribalism, etc. Evolution didn't stop at the neck. We have the unique ability to layer reason and culture on that but our biology is pretty foundational, its an important part of what it means to be human.
Is the worry that if people think of fantasy races as being biologically distinct then they will think of real world races as being biologically distinct?
The classes aren't completely balanced. Neither are the feats, or the spells, or the proficiencies. And neither are the races, whether you use racial ASIs or floating ones. And thus characters aren't balanced. They simply aren't, and by dint of the rules not being completely balanced they simply can't be.
While balance problems are inevitable in any game system with a large number of options, that doesn't mean they aren't a problem that should be fixed where practical.
Is the worry that if people think of fantasy races as being biologically distinct then they will think of real world races as being biologically distinct?
This is difficult to meaningfully prove, especially off-the-cuff, but arguably it happened the other way [the following is a massive oversimplification]: a lot of fantasy tropes about fantasy races exist because the people who wrote them believed that the real world races are biologically distinct (or were "inspired" by such thinking).
My usual pithy line about this is "it's The White Man's Burden all the way down."
Is the worry that if people think of fantasy races as being biologically distinct then they will think of real world races as being biologically distinct?
That is only one layer of the problem cake and not even the most immediate one. The most immediate one is that the language used to differentiate the "races" of people in D&D, especially language that implies inherent aptitudes and deficits is the same language used to denigrate real life people and is directly harmful and painful to people who have suffered from this in real life. It wasn't that long ago that AD&D capped the Strength score for woman characters lower than that of men's and I'm pretty sure we're all glad to be rid of that claptrap.
I think for me, the numbers break down as being easier to meassure than other racial traits like Darkvision. It was worse when there were negative stat modifiers. That blatantly said, "You are mentally or physically inferior". As the editions changed and we were left with only the positive numbers, it didn't really feel that much better because is still said, "you are dumber than this other group of people or you are weaker than this other group of people". But then we get to the point where everyone caps out at the same and that was better, but still wasn't quite enough because those numbers still said, "You can be just as smart eventually, but since you are disadvantaged compared to those people, you will have to work harder to do it."
I think it really boils down to the fact that numbers are easy to quantify for most people. The math is easy to see. Darkvision or Fey Ancestry don't hit as hard as raw numbers do.
... the negative influence of bio-essentialism in the game's design.
The negative influence of half the races lacking darkvision? The negative influence of not every race having magic resistance or hunter's instincts, or maybe skill versatility or mind link or natural armor?
Bioessentialism is bad because in real life it's used to imply a division within the human race based on ethnicity that would prove one kind of human is better than another. That's negative, yes. Don't want that. But this is D&D and we're not talking about one group within a race vs another (though we could be, what with several races coming in multiple varieties). We're talking about fantasy races all having different qualities because, well, they're different races. Different races which all have the exact same potential when it comes to the six attributes, mind you. I get that someone might not want to play a dwarf if a dwarf character can't be as intelligent as a gnome character with the same stat array at first. I get that they might think that unfair even, if they really wanted to play a highly intelligent dwarf. But at the same time I can only assume they want to play that highly intelligent dwarf because of something that makes that character a dwarf. Seems to me like a tiny bit of a double standard, wanting to play a given race because of some intrinsic quality that race has, but not wanting races to have certain other intrinsic qualities.
This response tells me you don't really understand what I was talking about, and I don't have the energy to be your education. I know you've been in what must be dozens of threads like this and been there when people like Ophidimancer explain this. Just scroll up a couple posts for goodness sake. You should know better by now.
This, of course, makes her outrageously illegal at most of the fixed-ASI tables in this thread. Simply her species/class combination alone - an elven barbarian, of all damnfool things - would disqualify her from most of them. The tale of an elf who sees Holy Nature as simply a place to live and resources to use as she requires would be the next best thing to downright blasphemous. She would be vetoed at most any table in this thread simply because she is a drastic, unwanted, and unwarranted departure from her species' iconic character, and as such she has no place in any game set in Faerun. Or Greyhawk, or Mystara, or any of the other old close-Faerun-analogues. Bit of a shame, I always thought people gave barbarians in general too little credit. The whole 'barely sapient slobbering hooligan' thing is funny, but rarely has any depth or impact. None of y'all are Travis Willingham, anmd not every barbarian needs to be Grog [X].0
Can I politely ask what exactly it is that you smoked while typing this?
We play fixed asi's I have an Eladrin STR build Paladin, we have a Yuan-ti Rogue and a Triton fighter using a trident 2 handed, they are along side a variant human sorcerer. I didn't realize our group by your standards where blasphemous, utter trash, and illegal (all things you've claimed in this thread)
We've roundly trounced about everything Salt Marsh has thrown at us except for one fight where I went down, we're currently lvl 7. I guess I missed the fact that our racial picks destroyed the universe at our table and I suppose only DM fiat has allowed our group to push through combats since clearly having a STR of 16 has meant I was dead weight all this time and our Yuan-ti doesn't have any primary stats with bumped ASIs at all..
Or maybe.. just maybe. your being a little ridiculous about the extreme game changing power of +1
I think it really boils down to the fact that numbers are easy to quantify for most people. The math is easy to see. Darkvision or Fey Ancestry don't hit as hard as raw numbers do.
Let's also remember Darkvision, Fey Ancestry, innate magic and the like are like literally wonderful traits outside the range of possible expressions of humanity. However the 'stats in their numeric rankings on a 3-18 scale are too similar to "sorting methods" of a bunch of debunked 'ologies where some human peoples were thought to have inherent racial advantages in some traits than others (and I'll save my soap box on how most of the stats don't really work well in "realistic" metrics of human mental and physical performance anyway and are really simply game contrivances as opposed to some example of simulationist brilliance). It just hits what was once called "The Mismeasure of Man," what we now call bioessentialism, too squarely on the nose. That's where the "why ability score increases and not other PC racial traits?" argument doesn't really land on any solid ground and jhust sorta sinks (with the exception of those racial traits that play off of tropes usually used to demeaningly characterize IRL humans, like groveling as a racial feature, etc. and we see that getting reworked through UA though we haven't seen the final kobold yet).
I think it really boils down to the fact that numbers are easy to quantify for most people. The math is easy to see. Darkvision or Fey Ancestry don't hit as hard as raw numbers do.
This all just speculation on my part though.
No your pretty on the nose, people look to much at exact stats and easily dismiss other abilities because 'well this race doesn't bump by primary stat so clearly its inferior.' like mmmmm nope try looking again..
I am wondering how many of the people here stating that floating ASIs are a bad idea have actually had real table experience of playing it? Or is this all just opinion with nothing to back it up? Would love to hear some real world examples of it actually not working as opposed to thought experiments, as stated my experience both as DM and player is it does not “break” or impact the game in anyway, it doesn’t affect the mechanics, it doesn’t affect the roleplay or the world building in a negative way and actually enhances the game.
So anyone actually got any experience? Tasha’s has been out 18 months now, those that dislike it must have some real experiences as to how it is broken to feel this strongly, or are you just imagining the worst case without actually putting it into practice?
By definition is affects the mechanics. Any changes to the mechanics affects the mechanics....
I had no fixed objective in mind, beyond satisfying my curiosity. Three guesses is, frankly, three more than I thought I'd get, so well enough done. Thank you, gentlemen.
Tigerlily is a wood elf barbarian, originally of the Ancestral Guardians path but rebuilt in later times as a Wild Magic path. She is indeed much taller and heavier than the PHB accounts for with elves and was always meant to have a more primal air and aspect to her. Tigerlily leans more into 'barbarian' than 'wood elf'; though her background is very fuzzy as she's never been played, her core concept/identity draws on the idea of 'Nature is a terrifying predatory battle for survival, not a serene little woodsy paradise'. Tigerlily is horrifyingly violent when violence suits the needs of the moment and has little in common with more typical elves. She does not treasure every leaf or spend centuries husbanding a single idyllic natural garden; to her, "living in tune with Nature" is cutting what she needs from the world around her and if the world bleeds? Oh well. It'll scab over, give it a bit and it'll be fine.
This, of course, makes her outrageously illegal at most of the fixed-ASI tables in this thread. Simply her species/class combination alone - an elven barbarian, of all damnfool things - would disqualify her from most of them. The tale of an elf who sees Holy Nature as simply a place to live and resources to use as she requires would be the next best thing to downright blasphemous. She would be vetoed at most any table in this thread simply because she is a drastic, unwanted, and unwarranted departure from her species' iconic character, and as such she has no place in any game set in Faerun. Or Greyhawk, or Mystara, or any of the other old close-Faerun-analogues. Bit of a shame, I always thought people gave barbarians in general too little credit. The whole 'barely sapient slobbering hooligan' thing is funny, but rarely has any depth or impact. None of y'all are Travis Willingham, anmd not every barbarian needs to be Grog [X].0
Personally would love this on my table, I love it when players upend the apple cart and actually think about there characters instead of just playing to trope.
I mean many Barbarian players will look at this build and recoil in horror, path of the wild magic, but, that is just well, meh, it doesn't give you more hitting power, or more protection. I have a barbarian playing it at the moment in my game and randomness aside from a storytelling aspect it has given me so much to work with, he is a minotaur so where did his magic come from.
Another table I run a player is playing a gnome Barbarian, I know, shocking. He has named him E.R and only tells people his name is emergency rations, he loves taking creatures out at the knee. But plays the character as intelligent, well read, always thumbing through a book during rests, some great literature classic, or a treaties on the power of gods, or some other philosophical piece.
If allowing for flexible ASI because not every character fits the generalizable average for their race, what about allowing the flexible allocation of other racial abilities?
A 'design your own "racial" template' system is a perfectly reasonable idea in the abstract, and would be convenient for DMs who want to run homebrew worlds, but is a large amount of work to do in a remotely balanced way. However, if a player came to me with the "goliath halfling" concept I'd certainly consider the concept, though there might be some negotiation (Is Brave a fair trade for Stone's Endurance? I'd have to think about that one for a bit).
I have done a bit of this in the past, more to do with character size, so an Elf who was born height limited (3 foot tall) we agreed that he shouldnt have an elves standard movement, what with not having long legs, but, i was willing to give him the halfling nimbleness and allow him to hide behind other larger creatures (although with disadvantage for him because this is not an inherent trait, more something he learnt to do to avoid ridicule as he was growing up).
There are plenty of DMs, yours truly included, who like to have certain things be part of the official rules yet don't mind overriding those things if a reasonable request is made (and by reasonable I typically mean phrased as a request rather than a demand).
Since my prep for the weekend is done, I'll expand on the topic ever so slightly° (bear with me, your honor - I promise it's relevant). I'm a let's roll for stats kind of DM. I'm not married to it (see also the not minding mentioned above), but I like it and have used it extensively. It rarely results in equal statlines across the board, but that's not an insurmountable issue. I'm also a two-line-ish campaign descriptor during session zero kind of DM (I'd rather spend that time on making sure everyone's comfy in the group and helping out with characters and how to play). Most of the time this means the players think up characters who have some relevant qualities and are prepared for the obvious challenges ahead, but aren't necessarily experts in anything the campaign ends up focusing on every now and then. Usually the group will try to cover what they feel are the essential bases; this means that they rarely don't have anyone who's good at whatever the situation calls for, but also that there's rarely no-one who's not out of their depth in any given situation. I'm also a let's see how I can work with this kind of DM rather than a the work is done for me DM when I run published adventures. And a not ashamed to fudge when it's really called for DM (even if I do keep it to a minimum).
What all this meandering comes down to is that imbalance is part of the game for me, and managing that so it doesn't spoil the fun is part of being the DM. The classes aren't completely balanced. Neither are the feats, or the spells, or the proficiencies. And neither are the races, whether you use racial ASIs or floating ones. And thus characters aren't balanced. They simply aren't, and by dint of the rules not being completely balanced they simply can't be. It's an illusion people can cling to if they want, but that's a mirage. It's not real. But it's ok, because we have a DM. We have someone who can give the monk as many opportunities to steal the spotlight as the wizard, give the half-orc their due share of time talking with NPCs instead of spending entire sessions knocking on heads and keeping schtum in between, allow the bard to find religion and the paladin to occasionally step out of line and pull that stick out of their ass. We have a DM who can look at a character sheet and figure out what a fun challenge would be for that specific character, instead of rigidly holding on to whatever adventure someone else who never even met the people at the table wrote and running it by the numbers.
That's why this whole penalty malarkey is so bizarrely alien to me. There are drawbacks and disadvantages and actual penalties and imbalances galore in the game. Arguably they're part of what makes it fun and interesting. The stars of the show aren't the characters with the biggest numbers on their sheet. The stars are whoever the DM shines the spotlight on and casts in the starring role for the next fifteen minutes. You'll get your chances, you just have to take them.
Bounded accuracy, at least the core idea of it, is a genius concept. In essence it says that the odds of success should always be within a certain range of probability. There's no real need to pump those numbers as high as you can - if you get them in the ballpark, the game works. That's brilliant. I know, I know, lizard brain says big number better number. It's not possible to always have a big number for everything though, so to keep the game fun and interesting it has to be made to work with not-quite-so-big numbers too. DMs should be doing that anyway. ASIs aren't a switch to flip between 'game bad' and 'game good'. They just are, and they have to be looked at in the moment regardless.
° obviously this is code for "wall of text incoming"
Leaving this whole block here because I think there might be something important to the discussion in it, at least insofar as how player psychology works.
I'm the kind of player who kinda actively hates when the DM panders to me. When a DM looks at my character sheet and goes out of their way to contrive a Job for Aquaman, it throws me out of the game and makes me feel like I'm stealing the game and the story from everybody else at the table. Choices made during character creation should have as much weight and impact as every other choice you make, and if a table decides to make a bunch of damnfool jackalopes with no useful skills, or if they quintuple-down on a single skillset? They should feel the weight of those choices just as much as someone should feel the weight of choosing never to throw a single "Hey are there traps or curses in here?" check in an ancient hostile undead tomb.
My favorite game of D&D is one where it feels like the story was always there, always going to happen, and the party managed to stumble into it. Not where it feels like the gods hand-curated a specific set of scenarios explicitly designed and intended to make me and mine a bunch of Legendary Heroes. Characters should feel like part of the world, like they always existed in the world and you're simply stepping into them and experiencing that world and its stories as if you'd never interceded. No Jobs for Aquaman. No "oh, you rolled shit stats/committed to a shit build, here's a super rare and powerful magical item that, inexplicbaly, everyone else around you from the PCs to every NPC in the entire nation is supposed to know was destined for you alone to fix your shitness."
It's also why I don't generally favor "Discover your character at the table" and having future Legendary Heroes just kinda spring into existence in Starter Tavern and start taking quests, with no history or connection to the world. How can someone experience the story this character was always meant to have in the world if the character never existed in the first place and is only in the world because the gods crowbarred him in there after the fact because they dun forgot somebody? It's why I strongly prefer having a good campaign brief/pitch when I can and knowing enough about the world to try and find a reason for the character to exist in it, make that character a seamless part of the story. I don't always get those boons though, and sometimes I end up making characters that don't fit and don't really work.
When that happens? I do not want the DM to course-correct and find ways to Job-for-Aquaman the game until my character becomes the perfect non-Euclidian trapezoidal peg to fit in the non-Euclidian trapezoidal hole the campaign bent itself over backwards to produce for me. If I created the wrong character? That's on me, that's a choice I made, and it means my part of the story we're telling at the table together is the story of someone constantly out of their depth and struggling to keep up, hoping against hope they can at least find a way not to drag their friends down with their presence. if every last conceivable character is The Perfect Character For the Story - if I could just hit the "randomize" button on DDB and Trust My DM to make sure that whatever garbage the randomizer spit out was just the perfect character for the story? I would very much feel like there isn't even any point playing.
When a DM contorts the game to make every possible choice the best choice, there are no choices. There are no meaningful decisions. And there's no reason to continue playing. Just write "and she saved the day and lived happily ever after" on your character sheet and pack it up, because why bother with a contrived story you can't possibly fail?
I know, I know - I'm gonna get called "literally insane" by at least half a dozen people and told that this sort of pandering is the actual factual point of the DM's existence. And yes - a certain amount of course correction to accomodate the party one has is inevitable and beneficial. It needs to remain a light hand on the wheel, though. I would legitimately, truly, and sincerely rather watch my character flounder, fail and die than be constantly Job For Aquaman'd, and if I'm decked out in multiple legendary-level gear pieces by level five because I rolled a Village Idiot stat array and had the iron ****** needed to play it instead of whining and demanding a reroll, it'll never stop bothering me that nobody else in the world is ever working to claim these incredibly powerful artifacts of immense strength from the walking waste of kith flesh that's besmirching them. Even the rest of my party shouldn't be allowing me near these things; they're not meant for me, they're meant for heroes, and my 13/11/10/9/7/6 stat roll (note: an array I rolled for Wysperra's game and was absolutely going to stick to until Wysperra put his foot down and said he wasn't having that in his game) is not a hero.
Above all, I want the story to make sense and for the players'/characters' decisions to matter. That means there needs to be both good decisions and bad decisions, and that stretches all the way back into Session Zero and chargen.
Does that make things any clearer, at least on the player-psychology end? Because I know for a fact I'm far from the only person who feels this way, and it's one of the big reasons why tight control over chargen is important to me when I can get it.
... the negative influence of bio-essentialism in the game's design.
The negative influence of half the races lacking darkvision? The negative influence of not every race having magic resistance or hunter's instincts, or maybe skill versatility or mind link or natural armor?
Bioessentialism is bad because in real life it's used to imply a division within the human race based on ethnicity that would prove one kind of human is better than another. That's negative, yes. Don't want that. But this is D&D and we're not talking about one group within a race vs another (though we could be, what with several races coming in multiple varieties). We're talking about fantasy races all having different qualities because, well, they're different races. Different races which all have the exact same potential when it comes to the six attributes, mind you. I get that someone might not want to play a dwarf if a dwarf character can't be as intelligent as a gnome character with the same stat array at first. I get that they might think that unfair even, if they really wanted to play a highly intelligent dwarf. But at the same time I can only assume they want to play that highly intelligent dwarf because of something that makes that character a dwarf. Seems to me like a tiny bit of a double standard, wanting to play a given race because of some intrinsic quality that race has, but not wanting races to have certain other intrinsic qualities.
This response tells me you don't really understand what I was talking about, and I don't have the energy to be your education. I know you've been in what must be dozens of threads like this and been there when people like Ophidimancer explain this. Just scroll up a couple posts for goodness sake. You should know better by now.
I've seen it. I don't agree with it. I understand how Ophidimancer feels about it, but that doesn't mean I agree that's how it is.
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I've seen it. I don't agree with it. I understand how Ophidimancer feels about it, but that doesn't mean I agree that's how it is.
You don't get to agree or disagree about how something makes someone feel. It's not your place to decide how certain language is painful to other people.
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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!
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Is she a giantborne deep gnome? Warlock with Archfey patron and pact of the chain?
Like I said, I wouldn't ban her, but would still ask her ASi's and possibly an ASP be placed in something of a 'correct' order.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
General comment to the thread: using "species" instead of "race" might make it sound better, but it's not the imaginary-world science answer anyone is looking for. Things being different species generally means they can't breed with each other. D&D races generally can (though obviously this gets weird and magical in many cases, and isn't necessarily canon for all pairings, etc.).
There's the other problem. Regardless of nomenclature, D&D's handling of its "races" has been problematic because it's the analog of culture and ethnicity in the real world.
Ah, wood elf barbarian is a bit more "normal" than what I would have expected from your examples of anti-trope characters. Ah to be honest, the Gurgach are designed to be elven barbarians, no? I don't think she should be vetoed as a whole, but if you wanted to multiclass dip her as a druid, I might say, you'd need to have her learn a bit of a new attitude about nature before a circle would actually accept her into it; and think I am being entirely fair to rule this largely "human" attitude would indeed be antithetical to Druidic circles - unless there is one that perhaps specializes in the death aspect of "Holy Nature". How does Grog compare to Conan? I don't really know Grog, but my "Dwarf" of Barbarians is Conan.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Agreed. I have seen "ancestry" (Pathfinder) and "folk" (Aether Sea) and find those acceptable. I would also find "peoples" acceptable.
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!
Its true, species really isn't the right word either. But the definition of fantasy race isn't the same as the real world definition. Its more than just a semantic argument, the way you define and think of the word effects how you feel about it and the way you project those feelings onto things. Its the definition that makes the analogy. I do like ancestry.
In general I guess I just don't get it. I think of humans as semi sophisticated animals and often not much better than hairless apes, we have all sorts of conditioning that comes from our biology that might be different if our biology was different. Fight, flight, freeze, an impulse for belonging and cooperation, sex, tribalism, etc. Evolution didn't stop at the neck. We have the unique ability to layer reason and culture on that but our biology is pretty foundational, its an important part of what it means to be human.
Is the worry that if people think of fantasy races as being biologically distinct then they will think of real world races as being biologically distinct?
While balance problems are inevitable in any game system with a large number of options, that doesn't mean they aren't a problem that should be fixed where practical.
This is difficult to meaningfully prove, especially off-the-cuff, but arguably it happened the other way [the following is a massive oversimplification]: a lot of fantasy tropes about fantasy races exist because the people who wrote them believed that the real world races are biologically distinct (or were "inspired" by such thinking).
My usual pithy line about this is "it's The White Man's Burden all the way down."
That is only one layer of the problem cake and not even the most immediate one. The most immediate one is that the language used to differentiate the "races" of people in D&D, especially language that implies inherent aptitudes and deficits is the same language used to denigrate real life people and is directly harmful and painful to people who have suffered from this in real life. It wasn't that long ago that AD&D capped the Strength score for woman characters lower than that of men's and I'm pretty sure we're all glad to be rid of that claptrap.
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!
I think for me, the numbers break down as being easier to meassure than other racial traits like Darkvision. It was worse when there were negative stat modifiers. That blatantly said, "You are mentally or physically inferior". As the editions changed and we were left with only the positive numbers, it didn't really feel that much better because is still said, "you are dumber than this other group of people or you are weaker than this other group of people". But then we get to the point where everyone caps out at the same and that was better, but still wasn't quite enough because those numbers still said, "You can be just as smart eventually, but since you are disadvantaged compared to those people, you will have to work harder to do it."
I think it really boils down to the fact that numbers are easy to quantify for most people. The math is easy to see. Darkvision or Fey Ancestry don't hit as hard as raw numbers do.
This all just speculation on my part though.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
This response tells me you don't really understand what I was talking about, and I don't have the energy to be your education. I know you've been in what must be dozens of threads like this and been there when people like Ophidimancer explain this. Just scroll up a couple posts for goodness sake. You should know better by now.
Can I politely ask what exactly it is that you smoked while typing this?
We play fixed asi's I have an Eladrin STR build Paladin, we have a Yuan-ti Rogue and a Triton fighter using a trident 2 handed, they are along side a variant human sorcerer. I didn't realize our group by your standards where blasphemous, utter trash, and illegal (all things you've claimed in this thread)
We've roundly trounced about everything Salt Marsh has thrown at us except for one fight where I went down, we're currently lvl 7. I guess I missed the fact that our racial picks destroyed the universe at our table and I suppose only DM fiat has allowed our group to push through combats since clearly having a STR of 16 has meant I was dead weight all this time and our Yuan-ti doesn't have any primary stats with bumped ASIs at all..
Or maybe.. just maybe. your being a little ridiculous about the extreme game changing power of +1
Let's also remember Darkvision, Fey Ancestry, innate magic and the like are like literally wonderful traits outside the range of possible expressions of humanity. However the 'stats in their numeric rankings on a 3-18 scale are too similar to "sorting methods" of a bunch of debunked 'ologies where some human peoples were thought to have inherent racial advantages in some traits than others (and I'll save my soap box on how most of the stats don't really work well in "realistic" metrics of human mental and physical performance anyway and are really simply game contrivances as opposed to some example of simulationist brilliance). It just hits what was once called "The Mismeasure of Man," what we now call bioessentialism, too squarely on the nose. That's where the "why ability score increases and not other PC racial traits?" argument doesn't really land on any solid ground and jhust sorta sinks (with the exception of those racial traits that play off of tropes usually used to demeaningly characterize IRL humans, like groveling as a racial feature, etc. and we see that getting reworked through UA though we haven't seen the final kobold yet).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
No your pretty on the nose, people look to much at exact stats and easily dismiss other abilities because 'well this race doesn't bump by primary stat so clearly its inferior.' like mmmmm nope try looking again..
By definition is affects the mechanics. Any changes to the mechanics affects the mechanics....
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU









Personally would love this on my table, I love it when players upend the apple cart and actually think about there characters instead of just playing to trope.
I mean many Barbarian players will look at this build and recoil in horror, path of the wild magic, but, that is just well, meh, it doesn't give you more hitting power, or more protection. I have a barbarian playing it at the moment in my game and randomness aside from a storytelling aspect it has given me so much to work with, he is a minotaur so where did his magic come from.
Another table I run a player is playing a gnome Barbarian, I know, shocking. He has named him E.R and only tells people his name is emergency rations, he loves taking creatures out at the knee. But plays the character as intelligent, well read, always thumbing through a book during rests, some great literature classic, or a treaties on the power of gods, or some other philosophical piece.
I have done a bit of this in the past, more to do with character size, so an Elf who was born height limited (3 foot tall) we agreed that he shouldnt have an elves standard movement, what with not having long legs, but, i was willing to give him the halfling nimbleness and allow him to hide behind other larger creatures (although with disadvantage for him because this is not an inherent trait, more something he learnt to do to avoid ridicule as he was growing up).
Leaving this whole block here because I think there might be something important to the discussion in it, at least insofar as how player psychology works.
I'm the kind of player who kinda actively hates when the DM panders to me. When a DM looks at my character sheet and goes out of their way to contrive a Job for Aquaman, it throws me out of the game and makes me feel like I'm stealing the game and the story from everybody else at the table. Choices made during character creation should have as much weight and impact as every other choice you make, and if a table decides to make a bunch of damnfool jackalopes with no useful skills, or if they quintuple-down on a single skillset? They should feel the weight of those choices just as much as someone should feel the weight of choosing never to throw a single "Hey are there traps or curses in here?" check in an ancient hostile undead tomb.
My favorite game of D&D is one where it feels like the story was always there, always going to happen, and the party managed to stumble into it. Not where it feels like the gods hand-curated a specific set of scenarios explicitly designed and intended to make me and mine a bunch of Legendary Heroes. Characters should feel like part of the world, like they always existed in the world and you're simply stepping into them and experiencing that world and its stories as if you'd never interceded. No Jobs for Aquaman. No "oh, you rolled shit stats/committed to a shit build, here's a super rare and powerful magical item that, inexplicbaly, everyone else around you from the PCs to every NPC in the entire nation is supposed to know was destined for you alone to fix your shitness."
It's also why I don't generally favor "Discover your character at the table" and having future Legendary Heroes just kinda spring into existence in Starter Tavern and start taking quests, with no history or connection to the world. How can someone experience the story this character was always meant to have in the world if the character never existed in the first place and is only in the world because the gods crowbarred him in there after the fact because they dun forgot somebody? It's why I strongly prefer having a good campaign brief/pitch when I can and knowing enough about the world to try and find a reason for the character to exist in it, make that character a seamless part of the story. I don't always get those boons though, and sometimes I end up making characters that don't fit and don't really work.
When that happens? I do not want the DM to course-correct and find ways to Job-for-Aquaman the game until my character becomes the perfect non-Euclidian trapezoidal peg to fit in the non-Euclidian trapezoidal hole the campaign bent itself over backwards to produce for me. If I created the wrong character? That's on me, that's a choice I made, and it means my part of the story we're telling at the table together is the story of someone constantly out of their depth and struggling to keep up, hoping against hope they can at least find a way not to drag their friends down with their presence. if every last conceivable character is The Perfect Character For the Story - if I could just hit the "randomize" button on DDB and Trust My DM to make sure that whatever garbage the randomizer spit out was just the perfect character for the story? I would very much feel like there isn't even any point playing.
When a DM contorts the game to make every possible choice the best choice, there are no choices. There are no meaningful decisions. And there's no reason to continue playing. Just write "and she saved the day and lived happily ever after" on your character sheet and pack it up, because why bother with a contrived story you can't possibly fail?
I know, I know - I'm gonna get called "literally insane" by at least half a dozen people and told that this sort of pandering is the actual factual point of the DM's existence. And yes - a certain amount of course correction to accomodate the party one has is inevitable and beneficial. It needs to remain a light hand on the wheel, though. I would legitimately, truly, and sincerely rather watch my character flounder, fail and die than be constantly Job For Aquaman'd, and if I'm decked out in multiple legendary-level gear pieces by level five because I rolled a Village Idiot stat array and had the iron ****** needed to play it instead of whining and demanding a reroll, it'll never stop bothering me that nobody else in the world is ever working to claim these incredibly powerful artifacts of immense strength from the walking waste of kith flesh that's besmirching them. Even the rest of my party shouldn't be allowing me near these things; they're not meant for me, they're meant for heroes, and my 13/11/10/9/7/6 stat roll (note: an array I rolled for Wysperra's game and was absolutely going to stick to until Wysperra put his foot down and said he wasn't having that in his game) is not a hero.
Above all, I want the story to make sense and for the players'/characters' decisions to matter. That means there needs to be both good decisions and bad decisions, and that stretches all the way back into Session Zero and chargen.
Does that make things any clearer, at least on the player-psychology end? Because I know for a fact I'm far from the only person who feels this way, and it's one of the big reasons why tight control over chargen is important to me when I can get it.
Please do not contact or message me.
I've seen it. I don't agree with it. I understand how Ophidimancer feels about it, but that doesn't mean I agree that's how it is.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
That's certainly one viewpoint, and one that could rastically influence one's opinion of a lot of things.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
You don't get to agree or disagree about how something makes someone feel. It's not your place to decide how certain language is painful to other people.
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!