I, too like the idea of all the different races having ups and downs on ASIs to balance the other perks and detriments that the racial choice brings. I can also see a lot of value in allowing the ASIs to shift to better suit who this character is within their race. I like the notion of the ASI being to show the average of a race and MOST "Adventurer" types are outside this, even before point buy and stuff. Yes, there was a Dwarf in the clan who just oozed Charisma. He had a way with words and a softer voice than most of his kin and a great sense of humor. Dammit, folks just LIKED him.
The ability to have our cake and eat it too is already there, so these changes aren't TOO new. I can also see the point of how Humans are getting the short end of the stick when i comes to perks and incentives to choose them. Sadly, I have no viable ideas on what might keep them interesting as a choice, amid all this shuffling.
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I believe Dwarves, only because they are dwarves, and for no other reason than that they are dwarves, which is to my mind a perfectly correct, accurate, good, and proper reason, in and of itself; should have a +2 to Constitution, a +1 Strength, a +1 to either Strength or Wisdom, and a -2 to Charisma.
This seems like it remains at least tangentially related to the original topic, so I'd like to focus on the -2 Cha here for a sec. Why is that appropriate for dwarves? Keeping in mind that it's basically the mental equivalent of Str, it's the force of your personality, I really don't see any call for it.
Racial penalties to an attribute can in some cases make sense logically (not in the case above I think, but in some - likely more often when it comes to the physical attributes than the mental ones too), but to any player I know they're just not fun. I don't think I'll ever subscribe to the notion that not getting a bonus is the same as a penalty, and personally I'm in favour of fixed bonuses, but a penalty is obviously a penalty. To me, doing away with them was the right step regardless. But if they're put in the game, there should feel appropriate and given the existing writeups of the races, I see few where I could even make a case for a Cha penalty and fewer where it'd be a good case. Kobolds maybe? They're described as generally timid, at least. Every other race would need some kind of addition to their background lore for it to make sense.
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I believe Dwarves, only because they are dwarves, and for no other reason than that they are dwarves, which is to my mind a perfectly correct, accurate, good, and proper reason, in and of itself; should have a +2 to Constitution, a +1 Strength, a +1 to either Strength or Wisdom, and a -2 to Charisma.
This seems like it remains at least tangentially related to the original topic, so I'd like to focus on the -2 Cha here for a sec. Why is that appropriate for dwarves? Keeping in mind that it's basically the mental equivalent of Str, it's the force of your personality, I really don't see any call for it.
Racial penalties to an attribute can in some cases make sense logically (not in the case above I think, but in some - likely more often when it comes to the physical attributes than the mental ones too), but to any player I know they're just not fun. I don't think I'll ever subscribe to the notion that not getting a bonus is the same as a penalty, and personally I'm in favour of fixed bonuses, but a penalty is obviously a penalty. To me, doing away with them was the right step regardless. But if they're put in the game, there should feel appropriate and given the existing writeups of the races, I see few where I could even make a case for a Cha penalty and fewer where it'd be a good case. Kobolds maybe? They're described as generally timid, at least. Every other race would need some kind of addition to their background lore for it to make sense.
Well, a slight exaggeration for effect. Charisma was what it was in the book and they said something about the gruffness of a Dwarfs attitude to justify it, thus not necessarily an aspect of biology; it's like Yurei correctly accuses me of: I tend to think of dwarf as being Gimli and his drinking contest with Legolas, and the Dwarf in the Dungeons and Dragons movie who takes a bite of chicken then asks the mage about the job while his mouth is full, etc stereotypes. It doesn't actually have to be Charisma, I could see perhaps also Dex. Not INT because of metalurgy skill and craftsmanship. It's just that if you are giving someone two +2's and no -2, then you are making them better than me; and not only that, but they already are better than me feature-wise. If they are being brought down to +2,+1, and I am being brought up to +2, +1 then I suppose we can do without any penalties perhaps, but atm, mt. Dwarves get two more free attribute points than I do, which means to balance us should mean they have a -2 somewhere.
The obvious other one with Cha penalties once upon a time is Orcs. Aside from a violent upbringing that leads to scarring and perhaps brands etc. The description of orcs in older editions was basically "Gamoreans": I don't know if you've been watching book of Bobba Fett; but that is what Mountain Ocs in Faerun basically looked like in older editions.
I mean before all this there were very clear negatives for picking races that fit your story idea but that didn’t give you boosts in the right places and that sucked.
I think having races all give options as to where the points go, that’s fine and works. It lets you play the fantasy tropes if you like, but also explore the stories of those who differ without feeling weaker. The brawny and clumsy elf, the lithe but frail dwarf. Why not?
and if you want to play suboptimally, then you have the option too. I know I have chosen races I didn’t want to make my character feel relevant with the fixed scores and this change excites me.
don’t get me wrong I am fine with races having different ability score points to place. I am fine with the human +1 to everything. I am fine with races having +1 to 3 skills. I am also fine with some races having less ability score increases if the race has a fun ability they can use. hypothetically if a race had pack tactics but had 1 less point to use that works for me.
We solved this via role play. And depending on your creation method for ability scores created quite a range. From 3e forward class restrictions were removed. The favored class showed what the cultural norm was but didn’t stop you from other things. Ability Score Adjustments should reflect differences in Races in my opinion, some settings even overwrote those to be different because their world was different than normal. there is a reason it held throughout the editions even into 5E. i think ASIs should be an option open for DMs to have in their game but the base should be a standard. Dwarf = Strong and Hearty (Str & Con).
The adjustable ASI just leads to more power creep. Many are just going to look at what are the best secondary abilities of a race are and never play anything else.
Power creep? Maybe on your table with your players and maybe that’s the game they want to play? I find this argument is always just funny, power creep means that you are treating DND as a game to be won and lost, so what if a party want to optimize everything, as a DM I just throw challenges at them to make them think, or I give them the game they want to play, or they find a different DM. Lol.
The changes simply mirror the way I have been letting players create characters since almost day one of 5th edition, I have always let players shift the racial ASIs around depending on character story so it just makes raw a houserule I have always allowed
People have always been homebrewing it that way anyways, and really any sentient, thinking species should have capacity for variation and not locked into racial essentialism.
People have always been homebrewing it that way anyways, and really any sentient, thinking species should have capacity for variation and not locked into racial essentialism.
Not to start flogging this horse so thoroughly bereft of life again, but variation comes from choosing which stat to assign to which attribute and if the essentialist nature of fixed ASIs is an issue I'd argue so is having wings, darkvision, claws, resistances, not needing to sleep, innate magic - almost all of the qualities that set races apart from each other. But as in all things: do what you want and what works for your group. You're not doing it wrong unless someone's not having fun (that doesn't just go for D&D either).
Since we're going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" why wouldn't they simply set every stat at 10? Then, at character creation, you can take 2 points from one stat and assign them to another and 1 point from another stat to assign elsewhere. That would give you a 12 and an 11, an 8 and a 9 and the rest left at 10. Wouldn't that be "fairer" or more "balanced"?
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Since we're going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" why wouldn't they simply set every stat at 10? Then, at character creation, you can take 2 points from one stat and assign them to another and 1 point from another stat to assign elsewhere. That would give you a 12 and an 11, an 8 and a 9 and the rest left at 10. Wouldn't that be "fairer" or more "balanced"?
We arent going that route at all. Nearly every racial option in the game still offers an array of features to add to your character. Using floating ASIs does not equal "race just means what skin the character has"
I will name a "few" examples of what I think are racial features that will be an impactful part of a character, even if using floating ASIs
Thats only a fraction of the racial features that exist and the list above is only considering the races from the PHB. It gets even larger when you start looking at VGtM, MToF, and other source books
So, to reiterate, moving to a floating ASI system is NOT going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" Each race will have its own unique influence on what your character can do, one way or another.
People have always been homebrewing it that way anyways, and really any sentient, thinking species should have capacity for variation and not locked into racial essentialism.
Not to start flogging this horse so thoroughly bereft of life again, but variation comes from choosing which stat to assign to which attribute and if the essentialist nature of fixed ASIs is an issue I'd argue so is having wings, darkvision, claws, resistances, not needing to sleep, innate magic - almost all of the qualities that set races apart from each other. But as in all things: do what you want and what works for your group. You're not doing it wrong unless someone's not having fun (that doesn't just go for D&D either).
Query.
How many DMs allow players to assign their own attributes? As opposed to assigning a fixed table of stats and ideally a fixed class and background when a player declares their intent to play a certain species? That seems to be the desire of many of the anti-floating stats folks in this thread and all the hundreds of others. "Play your species' iconic character or get the hell away from my table."
How many DMs allow players to assign their own attributes? As opposed to assigning a fixed table of stats and ideally a fixed class and background when a player declares their intent to play a certain species? That seems to be the desire of many of the anti-floating stats folks in this thread and all the hundreds of others. "Play your species' iconic character or get the hell away from my table."
I use fixed ASIs as the standard. If players ask though, I'm not telling them they can't shift those points around.
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I use fixed ASIs as the standard. If players ask though, I'm not telling them they can't shift those points around.
No no, I meant things like Alice saying "I'm going to play a dwarf this time!", and the DM saying "Great! I love dwarves! Your stats are 16 | 8 | 17 | 10 | 13 | 12, you're gonna play a Battle Master fighter and your background is Clan Crafter. I'll get you a write-up of how dwarves work and what your clan geneology is like by next session. This is gonna be great!"
I use fixed ASIs as the standard. If players ask though, I'm not telling them they can't shift those points around.
No no, I meant things like Alice saying "I'm going to play a dwarf this time!", and the DM saying "Great! I love dwarves! Your stats are 16 | 8 | 17 | 10 | 13 | 12, you're gonna play a Battle Master fighter and your background is Clan Crafter. I'll get you a write-up of how dwarves work and what your clan geneology is like by next session. This is gonna be great!"
I have never once done that in my life. I love when players play against type. (That’s why I like having a type in the first place.) Hells, whenever a player has ever asked me if they can float their ASIs I have said “yes” every time.
Don’t you understand, while there’s a “ type” for any race that means everyone who does something different gets to be special (like Elyona). But if there is no “type” and everyone is “special” then that makes “special” normal, so then there can be no “special” anymore. It’s the banal that makes the exotic. Without normal there can be no special. Like the man said, “if everyday is a sunny day, then WTF is a sunny day?!?”
I mean, I get the whole, "Nobody's special if everyone is."
Yet, doesn't that only apply across campaigns and not within a single campaign? If we compare Dwarfs in a single campaign, we end up with most of the Dwarfs in the world being standard and player character Dwarfs, if they so choose, being the exceptional. The same goes for another individual campaign—the only exceptional people are the player characters.
I still side with DMs on this, though. All the sources are tools and not weapons, but we seem to have people who feel threatened by them, validated by those few who threaten people with them. Courtesy is a player not trying to crowbar a floating ASI character into a DM's standard ASI campaign by throwing a book with optional rules at the DM.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Since we're going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" why wouldn't they simply set every stat at 10? Then, at character creation, you can take 2 points from one stat and assign them to another and 1 point from another stat to assign elsewhere. That would give you a 12 and an 11, an 8 and a 9 and the rest left at 10. Wouldn't that be "fairer" or more "balanced"?
We arent going that route at all. Nearly every racial option in the game still offers an array of features to add to your character. Using floating ASIs does not equal "race just means what skin the character has"
I will name a "few" examples of what I think are racial features that will be an impactful part of a character, even if using floating ASIs
Thats only a fraction of the racial features that exist and the list above is only considering the races from the PHB. It gets even larger when you start looking at VGtM, MToF, and other source books
So, to reiterate, moving to a floating ASI system is NOT going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" Each race will have its own unique influence on what your character can do, one way or another.
I'll expand upon this. Here are the non-cultural racial abilities from every race in the game that not only still exist post-Tasha's, but also don't make any difference to you based on your class (to counter the people that say "all racial abilities favor one class over another, it's impossible to want races that don't favor any class over any other").
I use fixed ASIs as the standard. If players ask though, I'm not telling them they can't shift those points around.
No no, I meant things like Alice saying "I'm going to play a dwarf this time!", and the DM saying "Great! I love dwarves! Your stats are 16 | 8 | 17 | 10 | 13 | 12, you're gonna play a Battle Master fighter and your background is Clan Crafter. I'll get you a write-up of how dwarves work and what your clan geneology is like by next session. This is gonna be great!"
I know what you meant, Yurei. In an ironic twist you seem to trying to make me answer a certain way regardless of my personal desires, not unlike some hypothetical DM trying to make a player create their character a certain way regardless of their personal desires. ;)
To answer how many DMs allow players to assign their own attributes, I think that's a fair chunk of them. Possibly a majority even. Hard to tell when the fraction of DMs out there I know anything about is negligible, of course.
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But perhaps the biggest question regarding the rationale of homogenizing racial stats is why are we now choosing that particular rabbit hole to go down.
“For quite some time, we have not liked how the choice of race in the game had often too much weight on the player’s choice of class,” Crawford admitted. “Fans often talk about this—that connection between race and class is not something we as designers actually desire. We want players to pick those two critical components of their character and choose the two that really sing to them so they don’t feel like they’re pigeonholed. [In Monsters of the Multiverse] people will get the floating bonuses we introduced in Tasha’s Cauldron. If somebody is making a character, and wants to recreate the bonuses that existed previously, the advantage of the floating bonus system is they can do exactly that.”
“Player characters are the beloved creations of our players, and again, we didn’t want to give the impression we were putting our hand on the scale and the personality and values of a player’s personal character. But again, alignment is still in the game, but as it’s always been, it’s the player’s choice and the DM’s choice.”
Why only buy toilet paper when you're out at the store and not laundry detergent? Because it was determined that toilet paper was the item that was needed and thus on the agenda?
And for you and your games, Shoak, that's fine. Your table doesn't really care that dwarves are never spellcasters, tieflings are never anything but spellcasters, that Small species are barred from martial classes entirely, and that a few species are so typecast by their stats/reputation that it's categorically impossible for them to be anything but their 'iconic' character. Remember that absolute hory sheet moment when Fjord was a half-orc warlock in CR campaign 2? The Internet-wide response of "****, is that even possible? Can half-orcs be anything but barbarians? Like...is that even in the rules?"
That's the natural result of classes and species being so tightly bound together - and no, the whole "starting with a 7 in your class-defining stat is every bit as good as starting with a 16 or a 17, that just makes for better roleplaying!" thing is not a rebuttal. Wizards has even said themselves now, in that Gizmodo intervew J-Craw did, that the Wotsee design team has considered the tight interlinking of class and species and undesireable artifact of their initial game design for quite some time. It's an argument that's been had a billion times on this board, and the answer is always the same - being bad at your job is no substitute for being good at your job.
Which means that species with fixed ASIs will always be tightly linked to the classes those ASIs are helpful for, with classes their default numbers don't boost being more-or-less softlocked away from them unless you're pulling Heroic Arrays. And even then, you're better off coloring inside the lines and playing the iconic character for your species than doing just about anything else. It's especially critical for prepared-spell caster classes, who actively lose prepared spells and are objectively worse at their jobs than someone with a higher class-defining number. The whole "an orcish wizard with an intelligence of 4 is a perfectly valid character!" thing is provably false - that character is an active hindrance to its party no matter what else it might be good at because it's sabotaged its entire core class concept. That character has no business existing; its story is not interesting, it is agonizing.
If that's fine by the DM and the table? Then there ye go. But people can't argue it's not a thing anymore when Wizards has directly acknowledged that it is a thing and they don't like it.
I mean, I get the whole, "Nobody's special if everyone is."
Yet, doesn't that only apply across campaigns and not within a single campaign? If we compare Dwarfs in a single campaign, we end up with most of the Dwarfs in the world being standard and player character Dwarfs, if they so choose, being the exceptional. The same goes for another individual campaign—the only exceptional people are the player characters.
I still side with DMs on this, though. All the sources are tools and not weapons, but we seem to have people who feel threatened by them, validated by those few who threaten people with them. Courtesy is a player not trying to crowbar a floating ASI character into a DM's standard ASI campaign by throwing a book with optional rules at the DM.
I’ve used the same evolving setting for almost 30 years, my high school friends’ retired PCs are high level NPCs in that world. My friends PCs now will eventually join that roster too. I don’t use those published, pre-packaged 1 — X campaigns and then wipe the slate clean, I write my own or “curate” from the old (actually modular) modules. Every player I have ever DMed for has left their mark on my world. I don’t see a series of individual, 1-off campaigns. I see 30 years of adventure following hundreds of PCs over more than a dozen campaigns across 4&½ editions. I’m glad players are happy, they’re their campaigns after all, not mine. But its my world being changed against my will. WotC is so concerned about not leaning on any one player’s PC, and that’s fine. The PCs are theirs, the campaigns are theirs (after all, their characters are the stars).
You know what the DMs “character” is? The world. The other players get to show up one night every week, do their thing for 4 hours, and then they’re off again, and the whole campaign is all about them too. The other players get the star characters in their own personalized campaign, all of that belongs to them. As DM, I do more work on the campaign per week between sessions than the four of them combined during the session. I get to be their BBEs, their families, their weather, I juggle smoke and mirrors for them, and for all of that, my slice of the pie is my world. Their PCs, their Campaigns, my world.
Hey!! Crawford! The DM’s a player too. Where’s your “light touch” for my “character,” hmm…? Get your thumbs outta my slice o’ the pie li’l Jack Horner.
I'm of two minds about it. I think in some games, like the one I'm getting ready to run, locking in the ASIs means that players will end up with either 1) an extraneous feature or two, or 2) an extraneous ASI or two, and that can be good. It's similar to when a player is in a tight spot and looks in their inventory and finds that potion from level 2 that solves the problem. It's an improvisational aid, maybe. It keeps you from optimizing yourself into a corner, also. I think it's best in shorter games, or games where you control multiple characters.
But in other games, the fact that part of your alleged power budget is basically being wasted because it's not contributing to your intended game plan feels really bad. I think you'd rather have the floating ASI in games that will run a long time, games where everyone is optimizing, and/or games where the party roles are really strict -- nobody tries to talk to NPCs except the Bard, nobody checks for traps except the Rogue, etc.
Obviously there's some outliers in both groups but anyway. I reckon the second category of games is larger than the first, and that's why the general sentiment is trending towards floating ASIs being a good thing. Personally I think there's certainly value in both kinds... From a gameplay perspective. From any other perspective, I think floating ASI is the clear winner, and I'm so very tired of arguing about why.
So anyway I put "I like it."
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I, too like the idea of all the different races having ups and downs on ASIs to balance the other perks and detriments that the racial choice brings. I can also see a lot of value in allowing the ASIs to shift to better suit who this character is within their race. I like the notion of the ASI being to show the average of a race and MOST "Adventurer" types are outside this, even before point buy and stuff. Yes, there was a Dwarf in the clan who just oozed Charisma. He had a way with words and a softer voice than most of his kin and a great sense of humor. Dammit, folks just LIKED him.
The ability to have our cake and eat it too is already there, so these changes aren't TOO new. I can also see the point of how Humans are getting the short end of the stick when i comes to perks and incentives to choose them. Sadly, I have no viable ideas on what might keep them interesting as a choice, amid all this shuffling.
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This seems like it remains at least tangentially related to the original topic, so I'd like to focus on the -2 Cha here for a sec. Why is that appropriate for dwarves? Keeping in mind that it's basically the mental equivalent of Str, it's the force of your personality, I really don't see any call for it.
Racial penalties to an attribute can in some cases make sense logically (not in the case above I think, but in some - likely more often when it comes to the physical attributes than the mental ones too), but to any player I know they're just not fun. I don't think I'll ever subscribe to the notion that not getting a bonus is the same as a penalty, and personally I'm in favour of fixed bonuses, but a penalty is obviously a penalty. To me, doing away with them was the right step regardless. But if they're put in the game, there should feel appropriate and given the existing writeups of the races, I see few where I could even make a case for a Cha penalty and fewer where it'd be a good case. Kobolds maybe? They're described as generally timid, at least. Every other race would need some kind of addition to their background lore for it to make sense.
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Well, a slight exaggeration for effect. Charisma was what it was in the book and they said something about the gruffness of a Dwarfs attitude to justify it, thus not necessarily an aspect of biology; it's like Yurei correctly accuses me of: I tend to think of dwarf as being Gimli and his drinking contest with Legolas, and the Dwarf in the Dungeons and Dragons movie who takes a bite of chicken then asks the mage about the job while his mouth is full, etc stereotypes. It doesn't actually have to be Charisma, I could see perhaps also Dex. Not INT because of metalurgy skill and craftsmanship. It's just that if you are giving someone two +2's and no -2, then you are making them better than me; and not only that, but they already are better than me feature-wise. If they are being brought down to +2,+1, and I am being brought up to +2, +1 then I suppose we can do without any penalties perhaps, but atm, mt. Dwarves get two more free attribute points than I do, which means to balance us should mean they have a -2 somewhere.
The obvious other one with Cha penalties once upon a time is Orcs. Aside from a violent upbringing that leads to scarring and perhaps brands etc. The description of orcs in older editions was basically "Gamoreans": I don't know if you've been watching book of Bobba Fett; but that is what Mountain Ocs in Faerun basically looked like in older editions.
(1) gammoreans - Bing images
Orcs have been drawn more humanlike in later editions particularly as they shifted to a more acceptable origin for half-orcs.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
This right here makes for better design. Make racial traits that illustrate non ability score narrative characteristics.
Power creep? Maybe on your table with your players and maybe that’s the game they want to play? I find this argument is always just funny, power creep means that you are treating DND as a game to be won and lost, so what if a party want to optimize everything, as a DM I just throw challenges at them to make them think, or I give them the game they want to play, or they find a different DM. Lol.
The changes simply mirror the way I have been letting players create characters since almost day one of 5th edition, I have always let players shift the racial ASIs around depending on character story so it just makes raw a houserule I have always allowed
People have always been homebrewing it that way anyways, and really any sentient, thinking species should have capacity for variation and not locked into racial essentialism.
Not to start flogging this horse so thoroughly bereft of life again, but variation comes from choosing which stat to assign to which attribute and if the essentialist nature of fixed ASIs is an issue I'd argue so is having wings, darkvision, claws, resistances, not needing to sleep, innate magic - almost all of the qualities that set races apart from each other. But as in all things: do what you want and what works for your group. You're not doing it wrong unless someone's not having fun (that doesn't just go for D&D either).
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Since we're going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" why wouldn't they simply set every stat at 10? Then, at character creation, you can take 2 points from one stat and assign them to another and 1 point from another stat to assign elsewhere. That would give you a 12 and an 11, an 8 and a 9 and the rest left at 10. Wouldn't that be "fairer" or more "balanced"?
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We arent going that route at all. Nearly every racial option in the game still offers an array of features to add to your character. Using floating ASIs does not equal "race just means what skin the character has"
I will name a "few" examples of what I think are racial features that will be an impactful part of a character, even if using floating ASIs
Thats only a fraction of the racial features that exist and the list above is only considering the races from the PHB. It gets even larger when you start looking at VGtM, MToF, and other source books
So, to reiterate, moving to a floating ASI system is NOT going the route of "race just means what skin the character has" Each race will have its own unique influence on what your character can do, one way or another.
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Query.
How many DMs allow players to assign their own attributes? As opposed to assigning a fixed table of stats and ideally a fixed class and background when a player declares their intent to play a certain species? That seems to be the desire of many of the anti-floating stats folks in this thread and all the hundreds of others. "Play your species' iconic character or get the hell away from my table."
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I use fixed ASIs as the standard. If players ask though, I'm not telling them they can't shift those points around.
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No no, I meant things like Alice saying "I'm going to play a dwarf this time!", and the DM saying "Great! I love dwarves! Your stats are 16 | 8 | 17 | 10 | 13 | 12, you're gonna play a Battle Master fighter and your background is Clan Crafter. I'll get you a write-up of how dwarves work and what your clan geneology is like by next session. This is gonna be great!"
Please do not contact or message me.
I have never once done that in my life. I love when players play against type. (That’s why I like having a type in the first place.) Hells, whenever a player has ever asked me if they can float their ASIs I have said “yes” every time.
Don’t you understand, while there’s a “ type” for any race that means everyone who does something different gets to be special (like Elyona). But if there is no “type” and everyone is “special” then that makes “special” normal, so then there can be no “special” anymore. It’s the banal that makes the exotic. Without normal there can be no special. Like the man said, “if everyday is a sunny day, then WTF is a sunny day?!?”
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I dunno.
I mean, I get the whole, "Nobody's special if everyone is."
Yet, doesn't that only apply across campaigns and not within a single campaign? If we compare Dwarfs in a single campaign, we end up with most of the Dwarfs in the world being standard and player character Dwarfs, if they so choose, being the exceptional. The same goes for another individual campaign—the only exceptional people are the player characters.
I still side with DMs on this, though. All the sources are tools and not weapons, but we seem to have people who feel threatened by them, validated by those few who threaten people with them. Courtesy is a player not trying to crowbar a floating ASI character into a DM's standard ASI campaign by throwing a book with optional rules at the DM.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I'll expand upon this. Here are the non-cultural racial abilities from every race in the game that not only still exist post-Tasha's, but also don't make any difference to you based on your class (to counter the people that say "all racial abilities favor one class over another, it's impossible to want races that don't favor any class over any other").
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Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I know what you meant, Yurei. In an ironic twist you seem to trying to make me answer a certain way regardless of my personal desires, not unlike some hypothetical DM trying to make a player create their character a certain way regardless of their personal desires. ;)
To answer how many DMs allow players to assign their own attributes, I think that's a fair chunk of them. Possibly a majority even. Hard to tell when the fraction of DMs out there I know anything about is negligible, of course.
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That question has been answered by Jeremy Crawford in a Gizmodo interview.
Why only buy toilet paper when you're out at the store and not laundry detergent? Because it was determined that toilet paper was the item that was needed and thus on the agenda?
Actually that does look like it's going to happen.
Actually no, as I've already given the statement from Jeremy Crawford, that's not it.
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!
And for you and your games, Shoak, that's fine. Your table doesn't really care that dwarves are never spellcasters, tieflings are never anything but spellcasters, that Small species are barred from martial classes entirely, and that a few species are so typecast by their stats/reputation that it's categorically impossible for them to be anything but their 'iconic' character. Remember that absolute hory sheet moment when Fjord was a half-orc warlock in CR campaign 2? The Internet-wide response of "****, is that even possible? Can half-orcs be anything but barbarians? Like...is that even in the rules?"
That's the natural result of classes and species being so tightly bound together - and no, the whole "starting with a 7 in your class-defining stat is every bit as good as starting with a 16 or a 17, that just makes for better roleplaying!" thing is not a rebuttal. Wizards has even said themselves now, in that Gizmodo intervew J-Craw did, that the Wotsee design team has considered the tight interlinking of class and species and undesireable artifact of their initial game design for quite some time. It's an argument that's been had a billion times on this board, and the answer is always the same - being bad at your job is no substitute for being good at your job.
Which means that species with fixed ASIs will always be tightly linked to the classes those ASIs are helpful for, with classes their default numbers don't boost being more-or-less softlocked away from them unless you're pulling Heroic Arrays. And even then, you're better off coloring inside the lines and playing the iconic character for your species than doing just about anything else. It's especially critical for prepared-spell caster classes, who actively lose prepared spells and are objectively worse at their jobs than someone with a higher class-defining number. The whole "an orcish wizard with an intelligence of 4 is a perfectly valid character!" thing is provably false - that character is an active hindrance to its party no matter what else it might be good at because it's sabotaged its entire core class concept. That character has no business existing; its story is not interesting, it is agonizing.
If that's fine by the DM and the table? Then there ye go. But people can't argue it's not a thing anymore when Wizards has directly acknowledged that it is a thing and they don't like it.
Please do not contact or message me.
I’ve used the same evolving setting for almost 30 years, my high school friends’ retired PCs are high level NPCs in that world. My friends PCs now will eventually join that roster too. I don’t use those published, pre-packaged 1 — X campaigns and then wipe the slate clean, I write my own or “curate” from the old (actually modular) modules. Every player I have ever DMed for has left their mark on my world. I don’t see a series of individual, 1-off campaigns. I see 30 years of adventure following hundreds of PCs over more than a dozen campaigns across 4&½ editions. I’m glad players are happy, they’re their campaigns after all, not mine. But its my world being changed against my will. WotC is so concerned about not leaning on any one player’s PC, and that’s fine. The PCs are theirs, the campaigns are theirs (after all, their characters are the stars).
You know what the DMs “character” is? The world. The other players get to show up one night every week, do their thing for 4 hours, and then they’re off again, and the whole campaign is all about them too. The other players get the star characters in their own personalized campaign, all of that belongs to them. As DM, I do more work on the campaign per week between sessions than the four of them combined during the session. I get to be their BBEs, their families, their weather, I juggle smoke and mirrors for them, and for all of that, my slice of the pie is my world. Their PCs, their Campaigns, my world.
Hey!! Crawford! The DM’s a player too. Where’s your “light touch” for my “character,” hmm…? Get your thumbs outta my slice o’ the pie li’l Jack Horner.
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I'm of two minds about it. I think in some games, like the one I'm getting ready to run, locking in the ASIs means that players will end up with either 1) an extraneous feature or two, or 2) an extraneous ASI or two, and that can be good. It's similar to when a player is in a tight spot and looks in their inventory and finds that potion from level 2 that solves the problem. It's an improvisational aid, maybe. It keeps you from optimizing yourself into a corner, also. I think it's best in shorter games, or games where you control multiple characters.
But in other games, the fact that part of your alleged power budget is basically being wasted because it's not contributing to your intended game plan feels really bad. I think you'd rather have the floating ASI in games that will run a long time, games where everyone is optimizing, and/or games where the party roles are really strict -- nobody tries to talk to NPCs except the Bard, nobody checks for traps except the Rogue, etc.
Obviously there's some outliers in both groups but anyway. I reckon the second category of games is larger than the first, and that's why the general sentiment is trending towards floating ASIs being a good thing. Personally I think there's certainly value in both kinds... From a gameplay perspective. From any other perspective, I think floating ASI is the clear winner, and I'm so very tired of arguing about why.
So anyway I put "I like it."