Thank you for skipping to the end of my comment. It really helps move the conversation along.
Well, you mostly just seemed to be arguing with yourself, since you were the one who initially said, "Now the average orc has a strength of 10, just like humans. The average elf has a dex of 10, just like humans. The average gnome has intelligence of 10, just like a human", so I didn't see the need to interrupt. If you now disagree with that statement, cool! So did I.
That's the average orc combatant. That is not what an orc would be without training to go out on hunts where you would encounter them.
The average orc combatant is the average orc in the average/common campaign setting. Non-combatant orcs, whether PC or NPC, are basically a rounding error in number compared to all the cannon fodder enemies
You seem to be trying to have it both ways. You assume DMs will be tweaking their world (by, say, adding to the commoner stat block depending on what race the NPC is, even though the stat block clearly says it can be used for all humanoids) when it's convenient for your argument, and assuming they won't when it isn't
The basic gist of your complaint, as I understood it, was that taking away pre-set ASIs made it more difficult for players to "play against type" when making characters. But the original stat blocks for all those monster races still exist, and the writeups of the basic races still contain descriptions like "Bold and hardy, dwarves are known as skilled warriors... Their courage and endurance are also easily a match for any of the larger folk." There's still a "type" to play against as a PC, even without the ASIs
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Reminder to be civil to each other. I don't want to have to call a mod over since they're probably tired of arguing threads. Again, not pointing this at either of you specifically, I'd just like there to be a little more understanding of each other.
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Countershere(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
...But if I’m not mistaken, and I’m not that familiar with Ebberon setting, there have been Drow that are not evil, way before Tasha’s was a thing. ...
As a brief aside (and because I'm playing an Eberron drow specifically because I found the idea fascinating)...
Nothing in Eberron is 'Good' or 'Evil'. Or rather, no specific species or culture is such. One of the primary selling points of the setting is that everything is grey and even traditionally Pure Evil characters can be something else in this setting. One can never assume a creature is 'Evil', no matter what it might be in other settings.
Drow in particular are extremely rare in 'typical' Eberron games, which take place in the Five Nations of Khorvaire. Drow, instead, are native to the shattered continent of Xen'drik, homeland of the giants, and come in three distinct flavors - the Vulkoori, jungle-dwelling tribal folk who hunt rogue, stunted giants and other monsters on the surface; the Sulatar that exist in a handful of isolated obsidian citadels throughout Xen'drik and cling to the final remnants of the elemental shaping techniques of the Age of Giants; and the Umbragen that survive in the depths of Khyber, wielding sophisticated spellwork in neverending warfare against the lurking horrors of that benighted realm.
The closest to the moustache-twirling, self-destructively EvUlZ Olthian drow of the Forgotten Realms are the Sulatar, who believe it's their duty/destiny to cleanse the world with flames, but even then - they think that's because the world is broken and needs to be set to right. The Vulkoori are no more 'evil' than tribalistic wood elves in other settings are, and the Umbragen are actively a force for 'Good' depending on which interpretation you buy. Even the ones that fight monsters with the power of monsters are still fighting monsters, and they've kept some truly horrific things from breaking through to the surface to scourge Khorvaire more than once.
It's absolutely delightful, and so refreshing after fighting against the Forgotten Realms' endemic moral absolutism for so long.
Something worth pointing out is that characters going "against type" has been a thing in D&D for its whole existence. All the way back in the original Dragonlance material in the early 80's, there were different elf kingdoms with differing levels of tolerance of outsiders, but neither was particularly welcoming. One of them would allow non-elves to enter their lands, if they passed their Elf Border Patrol station and followed all the rules, but were still rather of rude. The other was straight up racist, and would kill people who came into their land, even other elves. All this while officially elves were considered a "Good" species. It's been a long road getting to a "shades of grey" setting, but it has always been around to some degree.
This is why my next campaign is going to be in Eberron, because it allows me to do some interesting things. I do plan on running the various races as generally near their stereotypical alignments, but they wouldn't necessarily be Evil or Good. For instance, I plan on having the goblin nation of Darguun as being perfectly willing to let their neighbors die when they could help (and happy to see them go), because those neighbors have always treated them terribly. But their domestic policy is to build their nation for the betterment of those who live there, and try and treat fairly those willing to work for the nation's benefit.
Sure, we can totally choose to add set bonuses for the races, that's still allowed as the DM and the player. However, making it the rule going forward that no race has set bonuses(that you can optionally allow to replace any bonus with Tasha's) takes away from the feeling of every race being different. If you can have the same bonuses as a halfling as an orc or goliath, it just feels very 'samey' and not as much sets them apart.
I think we must be coming from fundamentally different perspectives, because for me, the stats aren’t what defines the race. Even putting aside that PCs are rarely your average Joe even at level 1, Duregar and Leonin are both +2 con +1 Str. Tabaxi, Drow, swiftstride shifters and Hospitality Halflings all have +2 Dex +1 cha, but you’d be hard pressed to call them samey on that basis. The specific traits are to me what makes the differences - even if I used the exact same class, subclass and stat array, my drow can’t shapeshift, my shifter will never have Halfling luck, my tabaxi doesn’t have sunlight sensitivity, and my halfling doesn’t have claws and can’t effectively wield heavy weapons. Those are the differences that will affect them in play, especially once they’ve levelled up enough that they aren’t still at the stat baseline, and even more so if you’re rolling for stats. A half-orc rogue can become just as dexy as a half-elf rogue even if both start from different racial ASI starting blocks. The numbers matter, but for what you do with them, not innately.
I’m very saddened at the discontinuation of books with lore in it.
I do agree that they shouldn't have stopped printing the "older" books without an adequate replacement, but that lore would have been out of place in a book that is meant to be setting agnostic. I really think that we will see a new book that is specifically a Forgotten Realms Setting Book and hopefully that will provide the lore that people are looking for.
This new book just isn't meant to have that lore in it as it is predominantly FR lore and doesn't really apply to Eberron, Krynn or Exandria and I think a lot of people are really hung up on that at the moment. The responsibility for most of that confusion is on the shoulders of WotC.
I’m very saddened at the discontinuation of books with lore in it.
I do agree that they shouldn't have stopped printing the "older" books without an adequate replacement, but that lore would have been out of place in a book that is meant to be setting agnostic. I really think that we will see a new book that is specifically a Forgotten Realms Setting Book and hopefully that will provide the lore that people are looking for.
This new book just isn't meant to have that lore in it as it is predominantly FR lore and doesn't really apply to Eberron, Krynn or Exandria and I think a lot of people are really hung up on that at the moment. The responsibility for most of that confusion is on the shoulders of WotC.
I can see that it makes a fair amount of sense to split out ‘generic’ statblocks and detailed lore into separate resources, but a large part of my perturbation with the way this book has been presented is that I suspect I’m about to be asked to shell out more money to repurchase the lore in MTOF and Volo’s with a shiny setting-specific badge.
I’m very saddened at the discontinuation of books with lore in it.
I do agree that they shouldn't have stopped printing the "older" books without an adequate replacement, but that lore would have been out of place in a book that is meant to be setting agnostic. I really think that we will see a new book that is specifically a Forgotten Realms Setting Book and hopefully that will provide the lore that people are looking for.
This new book just isn't meant to have that lore in it as it is predominantly FR lore and doesn't really apply to Eberron, Krynn or Exandria and I think a lot of people are really hung up on that at the moment. The responsibility for most of that confusion is on the shoulders of WotC.
I can see that it makes a fair amount of sense to split out ‘generic’ statblocks and detailed lore into separate resources, but a large part of my perturbation with the way this book has been presented is that I suspect I’m about to be asked to shell out more money to repurchase the lore in MTOF and Volo’s with a shiny setting-specific badge.
Sadly that is the nature of business. We are coming to the end of the life of 5e with the new shiny coming in 2024 and they will be updating and changing everything between now and then. I would put money on the fact that the reason that MMM was made was to have more content that will be compatible with the 2024 revamp to pad content at release and give themselves time to alter course if things didn't go as planned. Also, much of the problem was created by WotC not starting out setting agnostic and painting themselves deeper and deeper into a corner with each subsequent book. I doubt that they will do the same thing again, with the new PHB, but who knows.
As someone who actively dislikes the Forgotten Realms and avoids playing there if I can? Volo's Guide to DM Headaches Monsters, in particular, has been a thornbush in my ******* basically ever since I started playing D&D. That book has actively gotten in my way so many times I've more-or-less already soft-banned it at my table. Individual stat blocks, PC species, and such might get cherry-picked out of it for specific games, but all of the Faerun-specific lore that tells me I'm a horrible DM/player who's doing everything wrong forever is beyond annoying. There's a reason I never call that book anything but VGtDMH.
Do I take satisfaction in it being pulled from publication and denied to Forgotten Realms enthusiasts? Not at all. It sucks, and I'd be much happier if the books remained available for purchase even if only in compendium format. The words were written, they should be able to be read. But I won't pretend I'm not gonna be a little thrilled at never having to shovel fifty years of crappy, contradictory, impossible-to-research Forgotten Realms backlore into any character/monster/NPC I create that has any contact at all with VGtDMH content.
Sure, we can totally choose to add set bonuses for the races, that's still allowed as the DM and the player. However, making it the rule going forward that no race has set bonuses(that you can optionally allow to replace any bonus with Tasha's) takes away from the feeling of every race being different. If you can have the same bonuses as a halfling as an orc or goliath, it just feels very 'samey' and not as much sets them apart.
I think we must be coming from fundamentally different perspectives, because for me, the stats aren’t what defines the race. Even putting aside that PCs are rarely your average Joe even at level 1, Duregar and Leonin are both +2 con +1 Str. Tabaxi, Drow, swiftstride shifters and Hospitality Halflings all have +2 Dex +1 cha, but you’d be hard pressed to call them samey on that basis. The specific traits are to me what makes the differences - even if I used the exact same class, subclass and stat array, my drow can’t shapeshift, my shifter will never have Halfling luck, my tabaxi doesn’t have sunlight sensitivity, and my halfling doesn’t have claws and can’t effectively wield heavy weapons. Those are the differences that will affect them in play, especially once they’ve levelled up enough that they aren’t still at the stat baseline, and even more so if you’re rolling for stats. A half-orc rogue can become just as dexy as a half-elf rogue even if both start from different racial ASI starting blocks. The numbers matter, but for what you do with them, not innately.
Exactly how I fee.
What makes elves elves isn't that they have a +2 to dex. That's a boring, though useful, number. What makes elves elves is their appearance, their other traits like trance and fey ancestry. For half orcs, savage attacks and relentless endurance are more defining to me than the +2 str +1 con.
The aesthetics/look, the culture and the unique racial traits of the races are not changing. They still make races unique. And to me at least, all of these are far more interesting and defining of a race than what numbers get a boost on the character sheet by default.
As someone who actively dislikes the Forgotten Realms and avoids playing there if I can? Volo's Guide to DM Headaches Monsters, in particular, has been a thornbush in my ******* basically ever since I started playing D&D. That book has actively gotten in my way so many times I've more-or-less already soft-banned it at my table. Individual stat blocks, PC species, and such might get cherry-picked out of it for specific games, but all of the Faerun-specific lore that tells me I'm a horrible DM/player who's doing everything wrong forever is beyond annoying. There's a reason I never call that book anything but VGtDMH.
Do I take satisfaction in it being pulled from publication and denied to Forgotten Realms enthusiasts? Not at all. It sucks, and I'd be much happier if the books remained available for purchase even if only in compendium format. The words were written, they should be able to be read. But I won't pretend I'm not gonna be a little thrilled at never having to shovel fifty years of crappy, contradictory, impossible-to-research Forgotten Realms backlore into any character/monster/NPC I create that has any contact at all with VGtDMH content.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Countershere(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
Sure, we can totally choose to add set bonuses for the races, that's still allowed as the DM and the player. However, making it the rule going forward that no race has set bonuses(that you can optionally allow to replace any bonus with Tasha's) takes away from the feeling of every race being different. If you can have the same bonuses as a halfling as an orc or goliath, it just feels very 'samey' and not as much sets them apart.
I think we must be coming from fundamentally different perspectives, because for me, the stats aren’t what defines the race. Even putting aside that PCs are rarely your average Joe even at level 1, Duregar and Leonin are both +2 con +1 Str. Tabaxi, Drow, swiftstride shifters and Hospitality Halflings all have +2 Dex +1 cha, but you’d be hard pressed to call them samey on that basis. The specific traits are to me what makes the differences - even if I used the exact same class, subclass and stat array, my drow can’t shapeshift, my shifter will never have Halfling luck, my tabaxi doesn’t have sunlight sensitivity, and my halfling doesn’t have claws and can’t effectively wield heavy weapons. Those are the differences that will affect them in play, especially once they’ve levelled up enough that they aren’t still at the stat baseline, and even more so if you’re rolling for stats. A half-orc rogue can become just as dexy as a half-elf rogue even if both start from different racial ASI starting blocks. The numbers matter, but for what you do with them, not innately.
Exactly how I fee.
What makes elves elves isn't that they have a +2 to dex. That's a boring, though useful, number. What makes elves elves is their appearance, their other traits like trance and fey ancestry. For half orcs, savage attacks and relentless endurance are more defining to me than the +2 str +1 con.
The aesthetics/look, the culture and the unique racial traits of the races are not changing. They still make races unique. And to me at least, all of these are far more interesting and defining of a race than what numbers get a boost on the character sheet by default.
I mean, the aesthetics and look of the races are changing if you look at MotM. Goblinoids are now fey and friendly, and a ton of lore is being stripped out for the other races, and the books that had those races in them are being pulled. But overall, I understand there's a disconnect between our viewpoints. All I would like to ask is that you understand that we are not against flexibility in ability scores, we just like set ability score improvements. We're open to allowing those to change in our own specific games, but would just like to ask that future races might have an optional set ability scores. That's it. Not a "Oh this is technically optional but really ever game and Adventurer's league will make you take it." Not, "We'll leave it vague so you don't know if you actually need to use it." Just optional, so that people who do use them, can use them.
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Countershere(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
As someone who actively dislikes the Forgotten Realms and avoids playing there if I can? Volo's Guide to DM Headaches Monsters, in particular, has been a thornbush in my ******* basically ever since I started playing D&D. That book has actively gotten in my way so many times I've more-or-less already soft-banned it at my table. Individual stat blocks, PC species, and such might get cherry-picked out of it for specific games, but all of the Faerun-specific lore that tells me I'm a horrible DM/player who's doing everything wrong forever is beyond annoying. There's a reason I never call that book anything but VGtDMH.
Do I take satisfaction in it being pulled from publication and denied to Forgotten Realms enthusiasts? Not at all. It sucks, and I'd be much happier if the books remained available for purchase even if only in compendium format. The words were written, they should be able to be read. But I won't pretend I'm not gonna be a little thrilled at never having to shovel fifty years of crappy, contradictory, impossible-to-research Forgotten Realms backlore into any character/monster/NPC I create that has any contact at all with VGtDMH content.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, having to separate the lore from the game is a pain when it comes to players. Having everything in the books FR centric sets certain tropes in the minds of the player that don't exist in my campaign world. It isn't that they aren't open to the changes, just that I have to constantly fight against the "default" lore. It is something that I have personally got pretty good at after 40 years of practice, but newer DMs shouldn't have to fight that battle.
As someone who actively dislikes the Forgotten Realms and avoids playing there if I can? Volo's Guide to DM Headaches Monsters, in particular, has been a thornbush in my ******* basically ever since I started playing D&D. That book has actively gotten in my way so many times I've more-or-less already soft-banned it at my table. Individual stat blocks, PC species, and such might get cherry-picked out of it for specific games, but all of the Faerun-specific lore that tells me I'm a horrible DM/player who's doing everything wrong forever is beyond annoying. There's a reason I never call that book anything but VGtDMH.
Do I take satisfaction in it being pulled from publication and denied to Forgotten Realms enthusiasts? Not at all. It sucks, and I'd be much happier if the books remained available for purchase even if only in compendium format. The words were written, they should be able to be read. But I won't pretend I'm not gonna be a little thrilled at never having to shovel fifty years of crappy, contradictory, impossible-to-research Forgotten Realms backlore into any character/monster/NPC I create that has any contact at all with VGtDMH content.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, having to separate the lore from the game is a pain when it comes to players. Having everything in the books FR centric sets certain tropes in the minds of the player that don't exist in my campaign world. It isn't that they aren't open to the changes, just that I have to constantly fight against the "default" lore. It is something that I have personally got pretty good at after 40 years of practice, but newer DMs shouldn't have to fight that battle.
Agreed, I have to do it all the time since I run games in Mystara.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
No one actively being obtuse. More the fact that people read Volo's Guide to DM Headaches, get a bellyful of the Forgotten Realms lore, and then assume that's how everything is everywhere forever. I have to straighten people out and remind them that they're not in Faerun and maybe Volo doesn't know a damned thing about a world he's never seen or been in before. The people I play with are good about it, and they've learned over time, but it's still been a lot of wasted time and a lot of snarls arising from uncaught lingering assumptions from Faerunian lore I've never played with.
I will also say, to your point of asking why the fixed scores cannot be an optional rule: One discussion point that arose back when this was a half-the-forum tire fire of a D&D culture war was that part of the point of eliminating fixed scores was to reduce bioessentialism and lessen the idea that certain people cannot do certain things because they simply have no aptitude for it. Whatever you think of that particular mindset, it was and is a very real issue a lot of people have, and it's one of the reasons a lot of folks were uncomfortable with fixed species-wide scores in the first place. Leaving the fixed scores in and saying "you can change them if you're able to convince your DM you have a good enough reason", or even leaving the fixed scores in as a theoretically-optional table, defeats the entire purpose of excising bioessential modifiers in the first place. It still says "orcs are strong but stupid so they'll never make good spellcasters, elves are graceful but flimsy so they'll never make good martial characters, halflings are quick but puny so they'll never be able to lift anything larger than a turkey leg," so on and so forth. The mere existence of the table retains and reinforces all of the reasons people wanted the fixed modifiers gone in the first place. Individual DMs imposing a fixed modifier set on their own tables is not an issue, what you do at your table has no impact on me and mine, but a lot of folks simply don't want to see it in the books anymore.
Heh...an anecdote you may find interesting: back when this was fresher, I posed a challenge to some folks in a similar discussion thread asking them to identify the species/class of the HeroForge mini I built for a character I've had in the wings for a few years now. About half at best of the handful of respondents correctly identified her species (wood elf), very few people correctly identified her class (barbarian), and no one got them both right. Most folks thought she was an earth genasi, and the smaller number that guessed class trended towards fighter or ranger. The idea of a tall, physically imposing elven woman who fought with fury and power rather than grace and arrows/magic apparently never entered anyone's mind, and when I revealed what Tigerlily there was I got a question or two asking me A.) why I thought any of this mattered, or B.) asking why I would bother making such a 'weird' elf when elves sucked at being barbarians and there were much better species (and genders) to make Angry Bois out of. It was rather telling, though admittedly I had few overall takers on my challenge so it's hardly definitive.
Still. It stuck with me, and clarified a few things pretty cleanly as well.
I’m very saddened at the discontinuation of books with lore in it.
I do agree that they shouldn't have stopped printing the "older" books without an adequate replacement, but that lore would have been out of place in a book that is meant to be setting agnostic. I really think that we will see a new book that is specifically a Forgotten Realms Setting Book and hopefully that will provide the lore that people are looking for.
This new book just isn't meant to have that lore in it as it is predominantly FR lore and doesn't really apply to Eberron, Krynn or Exandria and I think a lot of people are really hung up on that at the moment. The responsibility for most of that confusion is on the shoulders of WotC.
Separating out the setting-specific lore would be fine, but I don't think they should have stopped selling selling/printing the books that had lore until they had a replacement. On that note, I'm not as confident as you that they will come out with a lore book covering things that weren't included in these. That's partially because this book isn't really all that setting-agnostic... The physical descriptions of the races are setting-specific. The racial traits that they left are still setting-specific. I really don't know how you could have a truly setting-agnostic list of races and monsters. You have setting specific races and monsters that you can tweak to put in another setting. I think they removed the content for a different reason, and are unlikely to reprint it for that same reason... But let's hope I'm wrong. I usually do.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
No one actively being obtuse. More the fact that people read Volo's Guide to DM Headaches, get a bellyful of the Forgotten Realms lore, and then assume that's how everything is everywhere forever. I have to straighten people out and remind them that they're not in Faerun and maybe Volo doesn't know a damned thing about a world he's never seen or been in before. The people I play with are good about it, and they've learned over time, but it's still been a lot of wasted time and a lot of snarls arising from uncaught lingering assumptions from Faerunian lore I've never played with.
I will also say, to your point of asking why the fixed scores cannot be an optional rule: One discussion point that arose back when this was a half-the-forum tire fire of a D&D culture war was that part of the point of eliminating fixed scores was to reduce bioessentialism and lessen the idea that certain people cannot do certain things because they simply have no aptitude for it. Whatever you think of that particular mindset, it was and is a very real issue a lot of people have, and it's one of the reasons a lot of folks were uncomfortable with fixed species-wide scores in the first place. Leaving the fixed scores in and saying "you can change them if you're able to convince your DM you have a good enough reason", or even leaving the fixed scores in as a theoretically-optional table, defeats the entire purpose of excising bioessential modifiers in the first place. It still says "orcs are strong but stupid so they'll never make good spellcasters, elves are graceful but flimsy so they'll never make good martial characters, halflings are quick but puny so they'll never be able to lift anything larger than a turkey leg," so on and so forth. The mere existence of the table retains and reinforces all of the reasons people wanted the fixed modifiers gone in the first place. Individual DMs imposing a fixed modifier set on their own tables is not an issue, what you do at your table has no impact on me and mine, but a lot of folks simply don't want to see it in the books anymore.
Heh...an anecdote you may find interesting: back when this was fresher, I posed a challenge to some folks in a similar discussion thread asking them to identify the species/class of the HeroForge mini I built for a character I've had in the wings for a few years now. About half at best of the handful of respondents correctly identified her species (wood elf), very few people correctly identified her class (barbarian), and no one got them both right. Most folks thought she was an earth genasi, and the smaller number that guessed class trended towards fighter or ranger. The idea of a tall, physically imposing elven woman who fought with fury and power rather than grace and arrows/magic apparently never entered anyone's mind, and when I revealed what Tigerlily there was I got a question or two asking me A.) why I thought any of this mattered, or B.) asking why I would bother making such a 'weird' elf when elves sucked at being barbarians and there were much better species (and genders) to make Angry Bois out of. It was rather telling, though admittedly I had few overall takers on my challenge so it's hardly definitive.
Still. It stuck with me, and clarified a few things pretty cleanly as well.
Ah, man. That's rough, because even though I like tropes, I personally have been totally open to changing those tropes for different games, and my players don't even know that FR is the default setting. I've never played with anyone who assumed we were playing in the Forgotten Realms, and really, the only game I've ever played in the Forgotten Realms is Lost Mine of Phandelver. I really only use FR as a base point to build my own worlds out of, and it's really saddening to see that people assume that every game has to be FR.
I can definitely understand the idea behind bioessentialism making the idea that certain races can't do certain things. I have just always been under the understanding that it simply makes it harder to play a certain combination, and that is something I actually enjoy doing for my characters, choosing a combination of race and class that is harder to play, but not impossible, because you can play any class with any race. Yes, some are way harder than they need to be, like with a Kobold Barbarian or an orc wizard(for the record, I didn't like the minuses to scores and have removed them for my game), but that can be part of the fun. Again, though, I do totally understand why people don't want it in the books any more.
Ah, having the stereotypes be that strong is rough. Just my two cents, though. An elf barbarian is amazingly cool to me, because it goes against the norms of the typical culture. The idea of having a group or culture of elf barbarians is extremely cool as well. I would love to hear the backstory for her if you have it available. I hope she was fun to play!
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Countershere(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
All I would like to ask is that you understand that we are not against flexibility in ability scores, we just like set ability score improvements. We're open to allowing those to change in our own specific games, but would just like to ask that future races might have an optional set ability scores. That's it. Not a "Oh this is technically optional but really ever game and Adventurer's league will make you take it." Not, "We'll leave it vague so you don't know if you actually need to use it." Just optional, so that people who do use them, can use them.
Then... use them? The fact that they're no longer printed in a book doesn't mean they don't exist. There's still a chart on DDB listing the original ASIs for the PHB races you can just copy and edit if you want them in your campaign, and finding the rest of the ASIs is a Google search away if you don't have access to the discontinued books
I see people in this thread pointing out how much work it's been to disentangle setting-specific lore from their homebrew worlds, and preset ASIs were part of that package. Now the shoe's on the other foot, I guess, only the work's mostly already been done for you
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
As someone who actively dislikes the Forgotten Realms and avoids playing there if I can? Volo's Guide to DM Headaches Monsters, in particular, has been a thornbush in my ******* basically ever since I started playing D&D. That book has actively gotten in my way so many times I've more-or-less already soft-banned it at my table. Individual stat blocks, PC species, and such might get cherry-picked out of it for specific games, but all of the Faerun-specific lore that tells me I'm a horrible DM/player who's doing everything wrong forever is beyond annoying. There's a reason I never call that book anything but VGtDMH.
Do I take satisfaction in it being pulled from publication and denied to Forgotten Realms enthusiasts? Not at all. It sucks, and I'd be much happier if the books remained available for purchase even if only in compendium format. The words were written, they should be able to be read. But I won't pretend I'm not gonna be a little thrilled at never having to shovel fifty years of crappy, contradictory, impossible-to-research Forgotten Realms backlore into any character/monster/NPC I create that has any contact at all with VGtDMH content.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, having to separate the lore from the game is a pain when it comes to players. Having everything in the books FR centric sets certain tropes in the minds of the player that don't exist in my campaign world. It isn't that they aren't open to the changes, just that I have to constantly fight against the "default" lore. It is something that I have personally got pretty good at after 40 years of practice, but newer DMs shouldn't have to fight that battle.
I think I may have found the disconnect between our two camps, and I'm envious of you. My players tend to be the type who read (some of) the stuff they get and just show up to the game expecting me to tell them how their characters work. But as much as you hate it, FR lore is pretty similar to the generic fantasy that is everywhere. If someone who has never played D&D before sat down with just setting-agnostic information, they would have mostly the same general ideas for how things work as they would have with FR information.
Well, you mostly just seemed to be arguing with yourself, since you were the one who initially said, "Now the average orc has a strength of 10, just like humans. The average elf has a dex of 10, just like humans. The average gnome has intelligence of 10, just like a human", so I didn't see the need to interrupt. If you now disagree with that statement, cool! So did I.
The average orc combatant is the average orc in the average/common campaign setting. Non-combatant orcs, whether PC or NPC, are basically a rounding error in number compared to all the cannon fodder enemies
You seem to be trying to have it both ways. You assume DMs will be tweaking their world (by, say, adding to the commoner stat block depending on what race the NPC is, even though the stat block clearly says it can be used for all humanoids) when it's convenient for your argument, and assuming they won't when it isn't
The basic gist of your complaint, as I understood it, was that taking away pre-set ASIs made it more difficult for players to "play against type" when making characters. But the original stat blocks for all those monster races still exist, and the writeups of the basic races still contain descriptions like "Bold and hardy, dwarves are known as skilled warriors... Their courage and endurance are also easily a match for any of the larger folk." There's still a "type" to play against as a PC, even without the ASIs
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Reminder to be civil to each other. I don't want to have to call a mod over since they're probably tired of arguing threads. Again, not pointing this at either of you specifically, I'd just like there to be a little more understanding of each other.
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My statblock. Fear me!
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AlumniYes, stepping in here to briefly remind everyone to remain courteous and respectful in your discourse. Thank you!
Something worth pointing out is that characters going "against type" has been a thing in D&D for its whole existence. All the way back in the original Dragonlance material in the early 80's, there were different elf kingdoms with differing levels of tolerance of outsiders, but neither was particularly welcoming. One of them would allow non-elves to enter their lands, if they passed their Elf Border Patrol station and followed all the rules, but were still rather of rude. The other was straight up racist, and would kill people who came into their land, even other elves. All this while officially elves were considered a "Good" species. It's been a long road getting to a "shades of grey" setting, but it has always been around to some degree.
This is why my next campaign is going to be in Eberron, because it allows me to do some interesting things. I do plan on running the various races as generally near their stereotypical alignments, but they wouldn't necessarily be Evil or Good. For instance, I plan on having the goblin nation of Darguun as being perfectly willing to let their neighbors die when they could help (and happy to see them go), because those neighbors have always treated them terribly. But their domestic policy is to build their nation for the betterment of those who live there, and try and treat fairly those willing to work for the nation's benefit.
I’m very saddened at the discontinuation of books with lore in it.
I think we must be coming from fundamentally different perspectives, because for me, the stats aren’t what defines the race. Even putting aside that PCs are rarely your average Joe even at level 1, Duregar and Leonin are both +2 con +1 Str. Tabaxi, Drow, swiftstride shifters and Hospitality Halflings all have +2 Dex +1 cha, but you’d be hard pressed to call them samey on that basis. The specific traits are to me what makes the differences - even if I used the exact same class, subclass and stat array, my drow can’t shapeshift, my shifter will never have Halfling luck, my tabaxi doesn’t have sunlight sensitivity, and my halfling doesn’t have claws and can’t effectively wield heavy weapons. Those are the differences that will affect them in play, especially once they’ve levelled up enough that they aren’t still at the stat baseline, and even more so if you’re rolling for stats. A half-orc rogue can become just as dexy as a half-elf rogue even if both start from different racial ASI starting blocks. The numbers matter, but for what you do with them, not innately.
I do agree that they shouldn't have stopped printing the "older" books without an adequate replacement, but that lore would have been out of place in a book that is meant to be setting agnostic. I really think that we will see a new book that is specifically a Forgotten Realms Setting Book and hopefully that will provide the lore that people are looking for.
This new book just isn't meant to have that lore in it as it is predominantly FR lore and doesn't really apply to Eberron, Krynn or Exandria and I think a lot of people are really hung up on that at the moment. The responsibility for most of that confusion is on the shoulders of WotC.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I can see that it makes a fair amount of sense to split out ‘generic’ statblocks and detailed lore into separate resources, but a large part of my perturbation with the way this book has been presented is that I suspect I’m about to be asked to shell out more money to repurchase the lore in MTOF and Volo’s with a shiny setting-specific badge.
Sadly that is the nature of business. We are coming to the end of the life of 5e with the new shiny coming in 2024 and they will be updating and changing everything between now and then. I would put money on the fact that the reason that MMM was made was to have more content that will be compatible with the 2024 revamp to pad content at release and give themselves time to alter course if things didn't go as planned. Also, much of the problem was created by WotC not starting out setting agnostic and painting themselves deeper and deeper into a corner with each subsequent book. I doubt that they will do the same thing again, with the new PHB, but who knows.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
As someone who actively dislikes the Forgotten Realms and avoids playing there if I can? Volo's Guide to
DM HeadachesMonsters, in particular, has been a thornbush in my ******* basically ever since I started playing D&D. That book has actively gotten in my way so many times I've more-or-less already soft-banned it at my table. Individual stat blocks, PC species, and such might get cherry-picked out of it for specific games, but all of the Faerun-specific lore that tells me I'm a horrible DM/player who's doing everything wrong forever is beyond annoying. There's a reason I never call that book anything but VGtDMH.Do I take satisfaction in it being pulled from publication and denied to Forgotten Realms enthusiasts? Not at all. It sucks, and I'd be much happier if the books remained available for purchase even if only in compendium format. The words were written, they should be able to be read. But I won't pretend I'm not gonna be a little thrilled at never having to shovel fifty years of crappy, contradictory, impossible-to-research Forgotten Realms backlore into any character/monster/NPC I create that has any contact at all with VGtDMH content.
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Exactly how I fee.
What makes elves elves isn't that they have a +2 to dex. That's a boring, though useful, number. What makes elves elves is their appearance, their other traits like trance and fey ancestry. For half orcs, savage attacks and relentless endurance are more defining to me than the +2 str +1 con.
The aesthetics/look, the culture and the unique racial traits of the races are not changing. They still make races unique. And to me at least, all of these are far more interesting and defining of a race than what numbers get a boost on the character sheet by default.
Out of curiosity, why has the book been a pain to you? Have you had DMs or players that are gatekeepey and refuse to allow you to change the race to fit your personal likings? If you're a DM, are the players mad if you change how the races work in your world? If so, I'm very sorry you got a party like that.
If you're in a home-brew game, you don't have to use Forgotten Realms lore, you use the lore for that world. If you've had a lot of FR games and no one wants to do anything else, I'm sorry they did that to you.
Subclass Evaluations So Far:
Sorcerer
Warlock
My statblock. Fear me!
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I mean, the aesthetics and look of the races are changing if you look at MotM. Goblinoids are now fey and friendly, and a ton of lore is being stripped out for the other races, and the books that had those races in them are being pulled. But overall, I understand there's a disconnect between our viewpoints. All I would like to ask is that you understand that we are not against flexibility in ability scores, we just like set ability score improvements. We're open to allowing those to change in our own specific games, but would just like to ask that future races might have an optional set ability scores. That's it. Not a "Oh this is technically optional but really ever game and Adventurer's league will make you take it." Not, "We'll leave it vague so you don't know if you actually need to use it." Just optional, so that people who do use them, can use them.
Subclass Evaluations So Far:
Sorcerer
Warlock
My statblock. Fear me!
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Counters here(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, having to separate the lore from the game is a pain when it comes to players. Having everything in the books FR centric sets certain tropes in the minds of the player that don't exist in my campaign world. It isn't that they aren't open to the changes, just that I have to constantly fight against the "default" lore. It is something that I have personally got pretty good at after 40 years of practice, but newer DMs shouldn't have to fight that battle.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Agreed, I have to do it all the time since I run games in Mystara.
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No one actively being obtuse. More the fact that people read Volo's Guide to DM Headaches, get a bellyful of the Forgotten Realms lore, and then assume that's how everything is everywhere forever. I have to straighten people out and remind them that they're not in Faerun and maybe Volo doesn't know a damned thing about a world he's never seen or been in before. The people I play with are good about it, and they've learned over time, but it's still been a lot of wasted time and a lot of snarls arising from uncaught lingering assumptions from Faerunian lore I've never played with.
I will also say, to your point of asking why the fixed scores cannot be an optional rule: One discussion point that arose back when this was a half-the-forum tire fire of a D&D culture war was that part of the point of eliminating fixed scores was to reduce bioessentialism and lessen the idea that certain people cannot do certain things because they simply have no aptitude for it. Whatever you think of that particular mindset, it was and is a very real issue a lot of people have, and it's one of the reasons a lot of folks were uncomfortable with fixed species-wide scores in the first place. Leaving the fixed scores in and saying "you can change them if you're able to convince your DM you have a good enough reason", or even leaving the fixed scores in as a theoretically-optional table, defeats the entire purpose of excising bioessential modifiers in the first place. It still says "orcs are strong but stupid so they'll never make good spellcasters, elves are graceful but flimsy so they'll never make good martial characters, halflings are quick but puny so they'll never be able to lift anything larger than a turkey leg," so on and so forth. The mere existence of the table retains and reinforces all of the reasons people wanted the fixed modifiers gone in the first place. Individual DMs imposing a fixed modifier set on their own tables is not an issue, what you do at your table has no impact on me and mine, but a lot of folks simply don't want to see it in the books anymore.
Heh...an anecdote you may find interesting: back when this was fresher, I posed a challenge to some folks in a similar discussion thread asking them to identify the species/class of the HeroForge mini I built for a character I've had in the wings for a few years now. About half at best of the handful of respondents correctly identified her species (wood elf), very few people correctly identified her class (barbarian), and no one got them both right. Most folks thought she was an earth genasi, and the smaller number that guessed class trended towards fighter or ranger. The idea of a tall, physically imposing elven woman who fought with fury and power rather than grace and arrows/magic apparently never entered anyone's mind, and when I revealed what Tigerlily there was I got a question or two asking me A.) why I thought any of this mattered, or B.) asking why I would bother making such a 'weird' elf when elves sucked at being barbarians and there were much better species (and genders) to make Angry Bois out of. It was rather telling, though admittedly I had few overall takers on my challenge so it's hardly definitive.
Still. It stuck with me, and clarified a few things pretty cleanly as well.
Please do not contact or message me.
Separating out the setting-specific lore would be fine, but I don't think they should have stopped selling selling/printing the books that had lore until they had a replacement. On that note, I'm not as confident as you that they will come out with a lore book covering things that weren't included in these. That's partially because this book isn't really all that setting-agnostic... The physical descriptions of the races are setting-specific. The racial traits that they left are still setting-specific. I really don't know how you could have a truly setting-agnostic list of races and monsters. You have setting specific races and monsters that you can tweak to put in another setting. I think they removed the content for a different reason, and are unlikely to reprint it for that same reason... But let's hope I'm wrong. I usually do.
Ah, man. That's rough, because even though I like tropes, I personally have been totally open to changing those tropes for different games, and my players don't even know that FR is the default setting. I've never played with anyone who assumed we were playing in the Forgotten Realms, and really, the only game I've ever played in the Forgotten Realms is Lost Mine of Phandelver. I really only use FR as a base point to build my own worlds out of, and it's really saddening to see that people assume that every game has to be FR.
I can definitely understand the idea behind bioessentialism making the idea that certain races can't do certain things. I have just always been under the understanding that it simply makes it harder to play a certain combination, and that is something I actually enjoy doing for my characters, choosing a combination of race and class that is harder to play, but not impossible, because you can play any class with any race. Yes, some are way harder than they need to be, like with a Kobold Barbarian or an orc wizard(for the record, I didn't like the minuses to scores and have removed them for my game), but that can be part of the fun. Again, though, I do totally understand why people don't want it in the books any more.
Ah, having the stereotypes be that strong is rough. Just my two cents, though. An elf barbarian is amazingly cool to me, because it goes against the norms of the typical culture. The idea of having a group or culture of elf barbarians is extremely cool as well. I would love to hear the backstory for her if you have it available. I hope she was fun to play!
Subclass Evaluations So Far:
Sorcerer
Warlock
My statblock. Fear me!
Hosted a battle between the Cult of Sedge and the Forum Counters here(Done now). I_Love_Tarrasques has won the fight, scoring a victory for the fiendish Moderators.
Then... use them? The fact that they're no longer printed in a book doesn't mean they don't exist. There's still a chart on DDB listing the original ASIs for the PHB races you can just copy and edit if you want them in your campaign, and finding the rest of the ASIs is a Google search away if you don't have access to the discontinued books
I see people in this thread pointing out how much work it's been to disentangle setting-specific lore from their homebrew worlds, and preset ASIs were part of that package. Now the shoe's on the other foot, I guess, only the work's mostly already been done for you
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I think I may have found the disconnect between our two camps, and I'm envious of you. My players tend to be the type who read (some of) the stuff they get and just show up to the game expecting me to tell them how their characters work. But as much as you hate it, FR lore is pretty similar to the generic fantasy that is everywhere. If someone who has never played D&D before sat down with just setting-agnostic information, they would have mostly the same general ideas for how things work as they would have with FR information.
Edit: not sure why it quoted everything twice