So your argument is "arbitrary restricting character concepts to a small number of archetypes" is a good thing?
I am sorry that you are so upset by this change that you are not even trying to argue it in good faith. That sucks. I don't agree with your reasoning, I don't see why having all the things you want, just on the DM's side, is a bad thing. I don't understand why you need the power to tell the DM to get bent if they want to play the options that are in the PHB just to enjoy the game. You aren't doing a lot to help me understand your perspective either. Your comments are nothing but belligerence, as if it is my fault the rules are this way. I am sorry the 2024 rules are not a good fit for you. I don't know what else to say to you.
I am sorry that you are so upset by this change that you are not even trying to argue it in good faith. That sucks. I don't agree with your reasoning, I don't see why having all the things you want, just on the DM's side, is a bad thing.
It's because there's nothing about backgrounds that requires DM intervention, it's just adding extra busywork for the DM.
I am sorry that you are so upset by this change that you are not even trying to argue it in good faith. That sucks. I don't agree with your reasoning, I don't see why having all the things you want, just on the DM's side, is a bad thing.
It's because there's nothing about backgrounds that requires DM intervention, it's just adding extra busywork for the DM.
"Busywork" implies it takes effort to customize them if that's what you really want to do, and they really don't.
I am sorry that you are so upset by this change that you are not even trying to argue it in good faith. That sucks. I don't agree with your reasoning, I don't see why having all the things you want, just on the DM's side, is a bad thing.
It's because there's nothing about backgrounds that requires DM intervention, it's just adding extra busywork for the DM.
No it does not. For the DMs who are open to customization, they are going to go about allowing customization in one of two ways: telling the player to come up with a concept for their approval, or they will dig into it with the player because it will be fun for them to help the player. Both are good options that do not harm the player or DM at all.
I believe that customization is awesome and have allowed it to some degree in every game I have run for all the nearly seven years I have played. Every one. I just also think customization needs to be approved by the DM and understand that some DMs are not so comfortable with it. I think the DMs needs are important too, same as the player's. This change encourages better communication and allows the DM to maintain the role of and increase the opportunities to be the facilitator of the game, which is their role.
No it does not. For the DMs who are open to customization.
Which they should be. Honestly, what they should have done is removed both ability scores and feats from backgrounds (the skills and tool proficiencies are reasonable) and made those bonuses part of general character creation, because it's really the skills and tools that define whether you can effectively RP your background (this does mean you probably won't use the key stats for those skills as dump stats, since it makes the skills useless, but... that's a reasonable 'concept tax').
No it does not. For the DMs who are open to customization.
Which they should be. Honestly, what they should have done is removed both ability scores and feats from backgrounds (the skills and tool proficiencies are reasonable) and made those bonuses part of general character creation, because it's really the skills and tools that define whether you can effectively RP your background (this does mean you probably won't use the key stats for those skills as dump stats, since it makes the skills useless, but... that's a reasonable 'concept tax').
I would have loved that. There is a game I will be playing after Christmas break that this kind of reminds me of - Crown and Skull. It is quite a bit different in how things look, but you have a set amount of starting points and you buy skills with those points.
It's not about creating the most powerful character? It is called min maxing for a reason. It is called power-gaming for a reason.
Power gaming and character optimization are not the same thing. My experience is that a lot of power gamers aren't even min-maxers, because a real power-gamer doesn't use point buy, they roll stats and whine until allowed to reroll if the result is bad.
Powergaming (also known as power gaming, min maxing, or optimization) ...
You do not own the language and you do not get to change the meanings of words to suit yourself.
You know very well when you are "optimizing" a character you are consciously assigning the highest of your scores to particular abilities for purposes of optimal performance. That is what it means to min max. It is what it means to be a power gamer. And contrary to your post many who do min max favor point buy so they can just pour everything into "useful" abilities and treat everything else as a dump stat.
As I said before: someone said a Fighter with a good STR but a below average CON is "unusable." It isn't. Unless you are a power gamer.
I feel like you have observed a correlation at some point and assumed causality.
A player's ability to optimize and their ability to roleplay are in no ways mutually exclusive. Optimization does not limit imagination. It does not limit story telling or roleplaying.
You are take a very specific and narrow view of the players who examine the optimal choices and applying it to all players. Not everyone who optimizes characters needs their wizard to have an 18 Intelligence out of the gate, but they probably don't want an 8 Intelligence. If you want to play an 8 Intelligence Wizard fancy.
What I want is for my choices to matter. If I play a Criminal Rogue that feels like a great combination, except that the Thieves Tools proficiency is redundant and maybe I should pick something else.
WotC never should have backtracked on Tasha's attribute allocation and they should have never backtracked on the replacing proficiencies from 2014.
So what are your thoughts on another poster's calling a Fighter with a good STR but a below average CON "unusable"?
That is a Fighter with a story to tell. Perhaps he is an aged veteran. Perhaps he is sickly. But he can still fight.
Thousands of stories do not get told at our tables when so many players prioritize how well a character will perform in combat over all else. There is no denying that.
You want to accuse me of only caring about combat optimization and not roleplaying? Dude, you don't even know me. Right now my current PC is a Rogue (Inquisitive) - such an OP combat class [sarcasm]
Is it safe to assume this Rogue of yours has a high DEX and wields a Finesse weapon? Meaning it can hit as easily as any Fighter? And do as much damage?
The Rogue is an overpowered combat class. Every class has become that. Now that even casters can just spam damage round after round. This is the obvious influence of MMORPGs. Where every character can just do damage. On repeat. How "odd" that this might see so many players prioritizing performance in combat over all else when rolling up their characters! It doesn't feel or look remotely like D&D used to feel or look. Hence why so many games have come along that restore the classes to their original purpose. Any newcomer coming from Stranger Things or similar and wanting that retro experience would be far better served playing one of those games than playing modern D&D.
And contrary to your post many who do min max favor point buy so they can just pour everything into "useful" abilities and treat everything else as a dump stat.
Point buy produces much lower stats than 'roll and whine'. And rolling dice and then putting the high rolls in your important stats and your low rolls in dump stats is just as much minmaxing.
You have continued to completely ignore every time I asked how it is somehow powergaming or min-maxing for a Merchant background, bookstore-owning, history-book reading Wizard to substitute a proficiency in History for for the default Merchant's "Animal Handling," and instead are moving the goalposts to increasingly unrelated other tangents. That means that this is no longer a discussion, so I'm done participating.
I feel like you have observed a correlation at some point and assumed causality.
A player's ability to optimize and their ability to roleplay are in no ways mutually exclusive. Optimization does not limit imagination. It does not limit story telling or roleplaying.
You are take a very specific and narrow view of the players who examine the optimal choices and applying it to all players. Not everyone who optimizes characters needs their wizard to have an 18 Intelligence out of the gate, but they probably don't want an 8 Intelligence. If you want to play an 8 Intelligence Wizard fancy.
What I want is for my choices to matter. If I play a Criminal Rogue that feels like a great combination, except that the Thieves Tools proficiency is redundant and maybe I should pick something else.
WotC never should have backtracked on Tasha's attribute allocation and they should have never backtracked on the replacing proficiencies from 2014.
So what are your thoughts on another poster's calling a Fighter with a good STR but a below average CON "unusable"?
That is a Fighter with a story to tell. Perhaps he is an aged veteran. Perhaps he is sickly. But he can still fight.
Thousands of stories do not get told at our tables when so many players prioritize how well a character will perform in combat over all else. There is no denying that.
You first. Why don't you tell us why you are obsessively against other people being good at their jobs?
I want my choices to matter when making my character. Maybe, I want a candlestick maker who is also an acrobat, but don't want to be locked into one path to that goal.
I want options to tell the story I want to tell. You can tell the story you want with your character. You want character optimization choices to limit characters to bring them down to where you want to play. That still puts you in the Min/max crowd. Taking away options and impairing characters doesn't actually create interesting characters. It's a story-telling crutch and you should be able to craft an interesting character that has a personality that's not draped over a flaw.
So your argument is "arbitrary restricting character concepts to a small number of archetypes" is a good thing?
I am sorry that you are so upset by this change that you are not even trying to argue it in good faith. That sucks. I don't agree with your reasoning, I don't see why having all the things you want, just on the DM's side, is a bad thing. I don't understand why you need the power to tell the DM to get bent if they want to play the options that are in the PHB just to enjoy the game. You aren't doing a lot to help me understand your perspective either. Your comments are nothing but belligerence, as if it is my fault the rules are this way. I am sorry the 2024 rules are not a good fit for you. I don't know what else to say to you.
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It's because there's nothing about backgrounds that requires DM intervention, it's just adding extra busywork for the DM.
"Busywork" implies it takes effort to customize them if that's what you really want to do, and they really don't.
No it does not. For the DMs who are open to customization, they are going to go about allowing customization in one of two ways: telling the player to come up with a concept for their approval, or they will dig into it with the player because it will be fun for them to help the player. Both are good options that do not harm the player or DM at all.
I believe that customization is awesome and have allowed it to some degree in every game I have run for all the nearly seven years I have played. Every one. I just also think customization needs to be approved by the DM and understand that some DMs are not so comfortable with it. I think the DMs needs are important too, same as the player's. This change encourages better communication and allows the DM to maintain the role of and increase the opportunities to be the facilitator of the game, which is their role.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
Which they should be. Honestly, what they should have done is removed both ability scores and feats from backgrounds (the skills and tool proficiencies are reasonable) and made those bonuses part of general character creation, because it's really the skills and tools that define whether you can effectively RP your background (this does mean you probably won't use the key stats for those skills as dump stats, since it makes the skills useless, but... that's a reasonable 'concept tax').
I would have loved that. There is a game I will be playing after Christmas break that this kind of reminds me of - Crown and Skull. It is quite a bit different in how things look, but you have a set amount of starting points and you buy skills with those points.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
Powergaming (also known as power gaming, min maxing, or optimization) ...
You do not own the language and you do not get to change the meanings of words to suit yourself.
You know very well when you are "optimizing" a character you are consciously assigning the highest of your scores to particular abilities for purposes of optimal performance. That is what it means to min max. It is what it means to be a power gamer. And contrary to your post many who do min max favor point buy so they can just pour everything into "useful" abilities and treat everything else as a dump stat.
As I said before: someone said a Fighter with a good STR but a below average CON is "unusable." It isn't. Unless you are a power gamer.
So what are your thoughts on another poster's calling a Fighter with a good STR but a below average CON "unusable"?
That is a Fighter with a story to tell. Perhaps he is an aged veteran. Perhaps he is sickly. But he can still fight.
Thousands of stories do not get told at our tables when so many players prioritize how well a character will perform in combat over all else. There is no denying that.
Is it safe to assume this Rogue of yours has a high DEX and wields a Finesse weapon? Meaning it can hit as easily as any Fighter? And do as much damage?
The Rogue is an overpowered combat class. Every class has become that. Now that even casters can just spam damage round after round. This is the obvious influence of MMORPGs. Where every character can just do damage. On repeat. How "odd" that this might see so many players prioritizing performance in combat over all else when rolling up their characters! It doesn't feel or look remotely like D&D used to feel or look. Hence why so many games have come along that restore the classes to their original purpose. Any newcomer coming from Stranger Things or similar and wanting that retro experience would be far better served playing one of those games than playing modern D&D.
Point buy produces much lower stats than 'roll and whine'. And rolling dice and then putting the high rolls in your important stats and your low rolls in dump stats is just as much minmaxing.
That no-one said that?
You have continued to completely ignore every time I asked how it is somehow powergaming or min-maxing for a Merchant background, bookstore-owning, history-book reading Wizard to substitute a proficiency in History for for the default Merchant's "Animal Handling," and instead are moving the goalposts to increasingly unrelated other tangents. That means that this is no longer a discussion, so I'm done participating.
You first. Why don't you tell us why you are obsessively against other people being good at their jobs?
I want my choices to matter when making my character. Maybe, I want a candlestick maker who is also an acrobat, but don't want to be locked into one path to that goal.
I want options to tell the story I want to tell. You can tell the story you want with your character. You want character optimization choices to limit characters to bring them down to where you want to play. That still puts you in the Min/max crowd. Taking away options and impairing characters doesn't actually create interesting characters. It's a story-telling crutch and you should be able to craft an interesting character that has a personality that's not draped over a flaw.
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