Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
*I walk towards you and place my hands on your shoulders*
"You have my sword"
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
REMEMBER: Wizards Of The Coast does not own DDB, they are two different companies. When you buy a physical book, WotC receives the money you bought it for, not DDB and vice versa. If you want a digital key to get an online book for free because you have the hardcopy book then DDB makes no money because you don't buy off DDB you buy off WotC, so please stop making threads about this issue. DDB needs money to continue helping people and servers aren't cheap.
Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
I'm with you,
First of all, I get so many notifications with this thread, second of all, all I've seen in this thread are people arguing with each other, and third of all, If you wanna call races 'species' call it that, we aren't stopping you. But you can't force me to.
You have my bow.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced"- Soren Kierkgaard
Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
Well... it's not the last post but i agree with you... this has gone on long enough.
Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
I'm with you,
First of all, I get so many notifications with this thread, second of all, all I've seen in this thread are people arguing with each other, and third of all, If you wanna call races 'species' call it that, we aren't stopping you. But you can't force me to.
You have my bow.
The species/race discussion isn't this thread, and the point of having a debate is to argue, so *shrug*
If people want to keep arguing about an optional rule and how it's stupid or destroys the "realism" of D&D, I will still be here.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
You are of course right. The general feeling I get from not the only the proponents on this forum of this disaster, and from so many other forums on completely different issues is "The DM is supposed to give me everything I want to steamroll every challenge the DM puts in front of us." That, of course, is utterly wrong, and the sign of a poor player. As you said, a DM must create a world that the players can immerse themselves in, lose themselves in. That means the players may face challenges and obstacles that they can't deal with at lower levels, but later, succeed at. Fear of grand, terrible things should ALWAYS be part of a rich setting. The game is also about the decisions a player makes...tradeoffs. Do I follow this path that furthers the plot in some unknown way, or choose another path, that may be easier, at the beginning. Same with abilities. The 27 point buy, the species specific features, and feats, are all part of the same system that forces players to make tradeoffs.
The people that want this system are people who don't like tradeoffs, and want everything, now. Challenges are not something they enjoy. Or, they are driven by forces from outside the game, which is even worse.
Wow, you have a complete, utter misunderstanding of what we want. We don't want everything, you in fact want everything. Share D&D a bit, please. You don't own it. You don't own the mechanics. Let us have something we want without throwing a big tantrum about it, please.
Imagine a situation where the parent of 2 kids gives one of them a toy. The other has no such toy, and wants one, and asks nicely for one, and then the parent finally gives them a toy. The kid that already had a toy sees that the other kid now has a toy, and throws a tantrum about how it's not fair that they get a toy.
In this analogy, anyone throwing a fit over our side getting a new mechanic that has no effect on their own games is the kid who cannot handle the fact that they are no longer the only person with a toy. Do you really want to be that person? I mean, this has literally no effect on you, so who the hell cares if we get what we want?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
You are of course right. The general feeling I get from not the only the proponents on this forum of this disaster, and from so many other forums on completely different issues is "The DM is supposed to give me everything I want to steamroll every challenge the DM puts in front of us." That, of course, is utterly wrong, and the sign of a poor player. As you said, a DM must create a world that the players can immerse themselves in, lose themselves in. That means the players may face challenges and obstacles that they can't deal with at lower levels, but later, succeed at. Fear of grand, terrible things should ALWAYS be part of a rich setting. The game is also about the decisions a player makes...tradeoffs. Do I follow this path that furthers the plot in some unknown way, or choose another path, that may be easier, at the beginning. Same with abilities. The 27 point buy, the species specific features, and feats, are all part of the same system that forces players to make tradeoffs.
The people that want this system are people who don't like tradeoffs, and want everything, now. Challenges are not something they enjoy. Or, they are driven by forces from outside the game, which is even worse.
Wow, you have a complete, utter misunderstanding of what we want. We don't want everything, you in fact want everything. Share D&D a bit, please. You don't own it. You don't own the mechanics. Let us have something we want without throwing a big tantrum about it, please.
Imagine a situation where the parent of 2 kids gives one of them a toy. The other has no such toy, and wants one, and asks nicely for one, and then the parent finally gives them a toy. The kid that already had a toy sees that the other kid now has a toy, and throws a tantrum about how it's not fair that they get a toy.
In this analogy, anyone throwing a fit over our side getting a new mechanic that has no effect on their own games is the kid who cannot handle the fact that they are no longer the only person with a toy. Do you really want to be that person? I mean, this has literally no effect on you, so who the hell cares if we get what we want?
I think you're wrong, and i respectfully disagree that we don't want you to have the toys, we are just saying (a.) if it's not broke, don't fix it and it isn't broke, (b.) we don't want to have to deal with the confusion of having to deal with multiple ways of creating a character and (c.) it is unrealistic, and somewhat stupid for mods to be given in stats that the creature isn't built for, such as giving a lightfoot halfling +2 strength instead of +2 Dexterity for the sake of building a barbarian.
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Cult of Sedge
Rangers are the best, and have always been the best
I think you're wrong, and i respectfully disagree that we don't want you to have the toys, we are just saying (a.) if it's not broke, don't fix it and it isn't broke, (b.) we don't want to have to deal with the confusion of having to deal with multiple ways of creating a character and (c.) it is unrealistic, and somewhat stupid for mods to be given in stats that the creature isn't built for, such as giving a lightfoot halfling +2 strength instead of +2 Dexterity for the sake of building a barbarian.
The short answer is "yes it is broke, it's unlikely to be more complicated than any other set of optional rules, and D&D is not a reality simulation."
I think you're wrong, and i respectfully disagree that we don't want you to have the toys, we are just saying (a.) if it's not broke, don't fix it and it isn't broke, (b.) we don't want to have to deal with the confusion of having to deal with multiple ways of creating a character and (c.) it is unrealistic, and somewhat stupid for mods to be given in stats that the creature isn't built for, such as giving a lightfoot halfling +2 strength instead of +2 Dexterity for the sake of building a barbarian.
I will respectfully disagree, but also still will prove you wrong.
A) It's not broke for your playstyle, but it is for mine. B) We already have multiple ways of creating a character. We have 3 ways to get your ability scores, dozens of races, 13 classes (with class feature variants coming out in the future), multiclassing, and feats vs. ASIs. Adding one other minor optional rule is not going to overcomplicate character generation. C) Who cares if it's realistic? This is freaking D&D! A clay golem can kill the Tarrasque! Magic exists. My general excuse for something that doesn't make sense in D&D is, "magic, I guess".
But it's not broke. And even fantasy needs some realism.
(I'm going to go off on you, but I don't mean this personally, I'm just really tired of hearing this argument.)
"It's not broke." Says the person that is fine with the current situation. If you are fine the status quo, you don't see a problem with it. That's generally true for every situation ever in the history of the universe.
"Needs some realism." Give me a break. Seriously, give me a break. I like realism in my games, but my mind isn't so closed off that letting a gnome have higher charisma than a tiefling by their racial ability score increase is not overly unrealistic in a world where you can literally do anything.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Players want realism where it matters to the players. Not every player covets the same types of realism.
One of my brother's biggest pet peeves in D&D is the fact that nobody grounds their kit when they fit. The first time he ever played a battle at our table, his first action was to drop his character's backpack and arm his weapons. It confused folks and he stopped doing it, but he's never stopped being bothered by someone wading voluntarily into a fight wearing three hundred pounds of random adventuring gear. He was military for a few years, he cannot figure out why nobody in an adventuring party ever shucks their trail gear before a fracas.
The DM for our current campaign, Grave of Saints, insisted that everyone in the campaign have a job. Some manner of earning money and supporting themselves outside of being Adventurers, because Adventurers in Tursk have a habit of ending up dead or arrested. My character is an archaeologist; her sister is a bodyguard who moonlights as a paid assassin when they're not archaeology-ing. Two of the other PCs are soldiers with the most aggressive and expansionist of the world's national governments. The final PC used to have a job as a priest before he got the absolute Everlasting Gobstopper Banana-Blaster Hizzell cursed out of him; now he's a jobless bum traveling with the party hoping to get back into his goddess' good graces. It was critically important to the DM that every character have standing and history in the world and a means of supporting themselves beyond murder (despite the assassin) because that was the only way his story made sense.
Me, personally? I heckin' DETEST "Magic Video Game Inventory". While I was running my own campaign, I informed every player that they needed to keep track of what was in their backpack, what was on them via belt pouch, weapon sheathes, scabbards or quivers, and the like, and what was stored in bulk on the donkey. Were I ever to run a game again, variant encumbrance would be in force and DDB had best have Inventory Containers ready, because it bothers me to no end that players just shove three hundred pounds of gear into a Standard Adventurer Backpack and fail to care. Everybody claims to love it when they get Bags of Holding and the like these days, but frankly I can't imagine why when DMs so rarely enforce any sort of logical limits on what people can schlep around.
The table as a collective group has spent the last few weeks poking at an upgrade and rebuild of the Injury Table system in the DMG, building out a set of Lingering Injury rules because it makes absolutely no bloody sense to us that no form of combat wound ever survives contact with one single night's sleep. Lingering injuries, and even permanent injuries, are a very real threat in our games now. They can take days or even weeks to clear up, especially with the Aggravation rules I wrote to ensure that ignoring a wound meant it stuck around more or less indefinitely. If DDB actually supported it, the Grave of Saints game would've run with Slow Natural Healing for the same reason. The fact that each and every single Adventurer is a super mutant with a Wolverine-like healing factor that completely restores them from even the most severe trauma overnight breaks verisimilitude for us, often pretty badly. Players have voluntarily not restored HP after a long rest from a particularly awful fight, roleplaying their character slowly and painfully attempting to recover from injuries.
Not a single cotton-pickin' one of us cares about the "realism" of species stats, because the Six Sacred Ability Scores of D&D are already so inaccurate and unrealistic that using them as the sole determinant of what your character is makes no sense. At least, to any of us. That particular bit of "realism" is meaningless and annoying to us. Just as I imagine actual logistics such as grounding one's trail kit or suffering heavy penalties in combat, tracking what one is carrying where, and determining your background, job training and income is completely meaningless and mostly just annoying to basically everyone else in this thread. And just as I imagine many people actively avoid things like lingering injuries because it breaks the Hero Fantasy and gets in the way of Adventure when a character has to spend a week - and half a session - convalescing rather than Adventuring.
Y'all are doing just fine ignoring the Encumbrance and Lifestyle rules, ne? Those are Official Optional Rules, printed in the PHB which every single 5e player is supposed to venerate as the Sacred Book, but nobody ever seems to really care that people don't use them. I'm willing to bet that a number of folks in this thread weren't even aware that an Injury Table existed in the DMG, nor that rolling on it stands a very good chance of inflicting a permanently debilitating wound on your character. It's a rule so optional most people aren't even aware of it to turn it on.
Everybody has different desires. Everybody has a different conception of "realism". The Six Sacred Ability Scores are such a poor depiction of reality that I will admit, I mostly just want them to get out of my way when I'm making a character. They don't matter to me, they don't depict any sort of "realism" I care about. They're functional, if not all that well put together anymore, as a game mechanics, but they're such a piss-miserable model of a living thing and the rules surrounding them so antiquated and annoying that the only time they add anything to the game is when a player voluntarily takes a score low enough to represent a deeply debilitating personal flaw they then play to the hilt, i.e. Grog Strongjaw's 6 Intelligence. The Six Sacred Scores simply don't matter to me outside of ensuring I have enough numbers in the right places for my character to successfully play the way I would like her to play. This Optional Rulefrom an Optional Bookaccommodates my desire to get these rotten, aggravating numbers OUT OF MY WAY.
For people to whom the Six Sacred Scores are an absolutely fundamental part of roleplaying, and for whom one's six numbers is the primary and dominant determinant of who and what a character is? They are absolutely free to dispense with this Optional Rule from the Optional Book the way the vast majority of tables dispense with rules such as encumbrance, lifestyle, injuries, or frankly most of the DMG period. Optional rules clearly stay that way more often than not. So settle y'all's shit, let us have our new Optional Rule from the Optional Book, and play to the aspects of "Realism" we enjoy in our fantasy make-believe game about pretend elves.
If you and the alliance of weapon offerings feel this thread has run its course, you can bow out of the conversation. No one is "winning" anything by sticking it out to the end. I would argue it stay here and open. This matter is a rhetorical hydra, if the mods shut it down, the topic will pop up again, and again, and again. There's no dishonor in seeing the arguments run its course and walking away from the discussion. Or would you rather the thread get shut down, let it pop up again, so everyone can weigh in with the exact same position they did the past at least three times this topic has snowballed?
D&D Beyond doesn't have a dog in this fight. At the end of the day, they're going to have to adapt the Beyond toolset to accommodate the options presented in Tasha's Cauldron, regardless of whatever anyone's saying in this discussion or its successors.
Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
No one is forcing you to be here. Many of us enjoy the discussion. If you don’t, click on a different link.
D&D Beyond doesn't have a dog in this fight. At the end of the day, they're going to have to adapt the Beyond toolset to accommodate the options presented in Tasha's Cauldron, regardless of whatever anyone's saying in this discussion or its successors.
Yeah, pretty much that. But people as a whole rarely are collectively happy about the same thing.
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I'm going to apologize from now for starting this convo again after 30 pages. I don't know if I missed this exact point and though I want to clarify that I am not for or against this particular optional rule I want to counter some of the points for example that a feral halfling will be stronger than an orc who was locked in a library all their life. Or the goliath that was shunned and learned wizardry.
YES, the halfling will be stronger than the orc BUT that will be translates through standard array/point buy/rolled stats and ASIs. NOT racial stats. A feral halfling that survived in jumanji for 15 years WILL have a 17 str and an orc studying scrolls dor 25 years WILL have a 17 in int.. BUT put an orc in jumanji for 15 years and it will have a 19 str and the gnome 25 years in the library will have a 19 int.
The examples given (at least in the first 10 pages of this thread) are all 'backstory' stat changes. No biological or physiological reasons for 'racial' stat changes.
And in all honesty this happens in real life! Look at the Olympics? Why are the majority of Kenyans the olympic gold medal runners and white people Olympic gold medal swimmers? because they have a 'racial' affinity for these sports. Sure, someone of a different race can be good or better but with the same exact training and same length of training they are at biological disadvantage.
Just to clarify, I'm not against this optional new rule but the arguments all for it, tend to be more of an optimizing perspective, despite claiming otherwise.. Which isn't a bad reason. In a game with numbers that are just as valuable if not more so than the RP, its not a bad thing to request
And in all honesty this happens in real life! Look at the Olympics? Why are the majority of Kenyans the olympic gold medal runners and white people Olympic gold medal swimmers? because they have a 'racial' affinity for these sports. Sure, someone of a different race can be good or better but with the same exact training and same length of training they are at biological disadvantage.
your other parts are valid in an dnd setting but i highly doubt this is an genetic component irl, it probably has more to do with geography, culture, economics and sheer coincidence more than anything else
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
l, If you wanna call races 'species' call it that, we aren't stopping you. But you can't force me to.
The more you know....
A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.
Therefore elves, humans, orcs, etc are different species, not different races.
Good people of D&D Beyond--we can do it. We can kill this thread. If we work together, we can dream of a better future where these stupid arguments about 100% optional rules don't result in ~30 pages of wasted bytes and bruised fingertips. We can live in a cyberspace free of circular and perpendicular arguments based on rules that we haven't yet seen. I believe that each and every one of you has the courage to do the right thing... to unsubscribe from this thread... to stop posting clones of it... to let the last post be the last post, and walk away. We can show the mods that we're capable of locking a thread all on our own!
Who's with me!? <crickets chirping>
l, If you wanna call races 'species' call it that, we aren't stopping you. But you can't force me to.
The more you know....
A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.
Therefore elves, humans, orcs, etc are different species, not different races.
It is actually quite an interesting topic from a scientific point of view. Grizzly and Polar bears are considered distinct species, but thanks to Global Warming, their territories now overlap, and there is at least one known hybrid. Various whales have been known to cross breed (Fin-Blue's have been documented various times). No one questions that the various bears and whales are not separate species, but I am betting that a zoologist could rhyme off a ton of examples of cross species breeding in many many different Genus, perhaps even Family.
Within the confines of accepted D&D species (PHB primarily, guess we can stretch that to MM, Mord's, Volo's and one case in Eberron), Humans are quite fecund. I think they are the ones that can cross-breed with the most species. I would love to know how an evolutionary biologist would quantify/ qualify Yaun-Ti, given all the presentations within one species.
And from a cultural point of view, I am loathe to think of all the fantastic work in Mord's that is going to be erased in the inevitable re-write.
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*I walk towards you and place my hands on your shoulders*
"You have my sword"
REMEMBER: Wizards Of The Coast does not own DDB, they are two different companies. When you buy a physical book, WotC receives the money you bought it for, not DDB and vice versa. If you want a digital key to get an online book for free because you have the hardcopy book then DDB makes no money because you don't buy off DDB you buy off WotC, so please stop making threads about this issue. DDB needs money to continue helping people and servers aren't cheap.
I'm with you,
First of all, I get so many notifications with this thread, second of all, all I've seen in this thread are people arguing with each other, and third of all, If you wanna call races 'species' call it that, we aren't stopping you. But you can't force me to.
You have my bow.
"Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced"- Soren Kierkgaard
Well... it's not the last post but i agree with you... this has gone on long enough.
You have my Warhamm...I mean Axe
Cult of Sedge
Rangers are the best, and have always been the best
I love Homebrew
I hate paladins
Warrior Bovine
The species/race discussion isn't this thread, and the point of having a debate is to argue, so *shrug*
If people want to keep arguing about an optional rule and how it's stupid or destroys the "realism" of D&D, I will still be here.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Boycott this thread.
Cult of Sedge
Rangers are the best, and have always been the best
I love Homebrew
I hate paladins
Warrior Bovine
Wow, you have a complete, utter misunderstanding of what we want. We don't want everything, you in fact want everything. Share D&D a bit, please. You don't own it. You don't own the mechanics. Let us have something we want without throwing a big tantrum about it, please.
Imagine a situation where the parent of 2 kids gives one of them a toy. The other has no such toy, and wants one, and asks nicely for one, and then the parent finally gives them a toy. The kid that already had a toy sees that the other kid now has a toy, and throws a tantrum about how it's not fair that they get a toy.
In this analogy, anyone throwing a fit over our side getting a new mechanic that has no effect on their own games is the kid who cannot handle the fact that they are no longer the only person with a toy. Do you really want to be that person? I mean, this has literally no effect on you, so who the hell cares if we get what we want?
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I think you're wrong, and i respectfully disagree that we don't want you to have the toys, we are just saying (a.) if it's not broke, don't fix it and it isn't broke, (b.) we don't want to have to deal with the confusion of having to deal with multiple ways of creating a character and (c.) it is unrealistic, and somewhat stupid for mods to be given in stats that the creature isn't built for, such as giving a lightfoot halfling +2 strength instead of +2 Dexterity for the sake of building a barbarian.
Cult of Sedge
Rangers are the best, and have always been the best
I love Homebrew
I hate paladins
Warrior Bovine
The short answer is "yes it is broke, it's unlikely to be more complicated than any other set of optional rules, and D&D is not a reality simulation."
I will respectfully disagree, but also still will prove you wrong.
A) It's not broke for your playstyle, but it is for mine.
B) We already have multiple ways of creating a character. We have 3 ways to get your ability scores, dozens of races, 13 classes (with class feature variants coming out in the future), multiclassing, and feats vs. ASIs. Adding one other minor optional rule is not going to overcomplicate character generation.
C) Who cares if it's realistic? This is freaking D&D! A clay golem can kill the Tarrasque! Magic exists. My general excuse for something that doesn't make sense in D&D is, "magic, I guess".
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
But it's not broke. And even fantasy needs some realism.
Let's just agree to disagree and let this thread die.
I Summon Sedge to close the thread (or any Mod really)
Cult of Sedge
Rangers are the best, and have always been the best
I love Homebrew
I hate paladins
Warrior Bovine
(I'm going to go off on you, but I don't mean this personally, I'm just really tired of hearing this argument.)
"It's not broke." Says the person that is fine with the current situation. If you are fine the status quo, you don't see a problem with it. That's generally true for every situation ever in the history of the universe.
"Needs some realism." Give me a break. Seriously, give me a break. I like realism in my games, but my mind isn't so closed off that letting a gnome have higher charisma than a tiefling by their racial ability score increase is not overly unrealistic in a world where you can literally do anything.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
plz close the thread.
Cult of Sedge
Rangers are the best, and have always been the best
I love Homebrew
I hate paladins
Warrior Bovine
Players want realism where it matters to the players. Not every player covets the same types of realism.
One of my brother's biggest pet peeves in D&D is the fact that nobody grounds their kit when they fit. The first time he ever played a battle at our table, his first action was to drop his character's backpack and arm his weapons. It confused folks and he stopped doing it, but he's never stopped being bothered by someone wading voluntarily into a fight wearing three hundred pounds of random adventuring gear. He was military for a few years, he cannot figure out why nobody in an adventuring party ever shucks their trail gear before a fracas.
The DM for our current campaign, Grave of Saints, insisted that everyone in the campaign have a job. Some manner of earning money and supporting themselves outside of being Adventurers, because Adventurers in Tursk have a habit of ending up dead or arrested. My character is an archaeologist; her sister is a bodyguard who moonlights as a paid assassin when they're not archaeology-ing. Two of the other PCs are soldiers with the most aggressive and expansionist of the world's national governments. The final PC used to have a job as a priest before he got the absolute Everlasting Gobstopper Banana-Blaster Hizzell cursed out of him; now he's a jobless bum traveling with the party hoping to get back into his goddess' good graces. It was critically important to the DM that every character have standing and history in the world and a means of supporting themselves beyond murder (despite the assassin) because that was the only way his story made sense.
Me, personally? I heckin' DETEST "Magic Video Game Inventory". While I was running my own campaign, I informed every player that they needed to keep track of what was in their backpack, what was on them via belt pouch, weapon sheathes, scabbards or quivers, and the like, and what was stored in bulk on the donkey. Were I ever to run a game again, variant encumbrance would be in force and DDB had best have Inventory Containers ready, because it bothers me to no end that players just shove three hundred pounds of gear into a Standard Adventurer Backpack and fail to care. Everybody claims to love it when they get Bags of Holding and the like these days, but frankly I can't imagine why when DMs so rarely enforce any sort of logical limits on what people can schlep around.
The table as a collective group has spent the last few weeks poking at an upgrade and rebuild of the Injury Table system in the DMG, building out a set of Lingering Injury rules because it makes absolutely no bloody sense to us that no form of combat wound ever survives contact with one single night's sleep. Lingering injuries, and even permanent injuries, are a very real threat in our games now. They can take days or even weeks to clear up, especially with the Aggravation rules I wrote to ensure that ignoring a wound meant it stuck around more or less indefinitely. If DDB actually supported it, the Grave of Saints game would've run with Slow Natural Healing for the same reason. The fact that each and every single Adventurer is a super mutant with a Wolverine-like healing factor that completely restores them from even the most severe trauma overnight breaks verisimilitude for us, often pretty badly. Players have voluntarily not restored HP after a long rest from a particularly awful fight, roleplaying their character slowly and painfully attempting to recover from injuries.
Not a single cotton-pickin' one of us cares about the "realism" of species stats, because the Six Sacred Ability Scores of D&D are already so inaccurate and unrealistic that using them as the sole determinant of what your character is makes no sense. At least, to any of us. That particular bit of "realism" is meaningless and annoying to us. Just as I imagine actual logistics such as grounding one's trail kit or suffering heavy penalties in combat, tracking what one is carrying where, and determining your background, job training and income is completely meaningless and mostly just annoying to basically everyone else in this thread. And just as I imagine many people actively avoid things like lingering injuries because it breaks the Hero Fantasy and gets in the way of Adventure when a character has to spend a week - and half a session - convalescing rather than Adventuring.
Y'all are doing just fine ignoring the Encumbrance and Lifestyle rules, ne? Those are Official Optional Rules, printed in the PHB which every single 5e player is supposed to venerate as the Sacred Book, but nobody ever seems to really care that people don't use them. I'm willing to bet that a number of folks in this thread weren't even aware that an Injury Table existed in the DMG, nor that rolling on it stands a very good chance of inflicting a permanently debilitating wound on your character. It's a rule so optional most people aren't even aware of it to turn it on.
Everybody has different desires. Everybody has a different conception of "realism". The Six Sacred Ability Scores are such a poor depiction of reality that I will admit, I mostly just want them to get out of my way when I'm making a character. They don't matter to me, they don't depict any sort of "realism" I care about. They're functional, if not all that well put together anymore, as a game mechanics, but they're such a piss-miserable model of a living thing and the rules surrounding them so antiquated and annoying that the only time they add anything to the game is when a player voluntarily takes a score low enough to represent a deeply debilitating personal flaw they then play to the hilt, i.e. Grog Strongjaw's 6 Intelligence. The Six Sacred Scores simply don't matter to me outside of ensuring I have enough numbers in the right places for my character to successfully play the way I would like her to play. This Optional Rule from an Optional Book accommodates my desire to get these rotten, aggravating numbers OUT OF MY WAY.
For people to whom the Six Sacred Scores are an absolutely fundamental part of roleplaying, and for whom one's six numbers is the primary and dominant determinant of who and what a character is? They are absolutely free to dispense with this Optional Rule from the Optional Book the way the vast majority of tables dispense with rules such as encumbrance, lifestyle, injuries, or frankly most of the DMG period. Optional rules clearly stay that way more often than not. So settle y'all's shit, let us have our new Optional Rule from the Optional Book, and play to the aspects of "Realism" we enjoy in our fantasy make-believe game about pretend elves.
Ne?
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If you and the alliance of weapon offerings feel this thread has run its course, you can bow out of the conversation. No one is "winning" anything by sticking it out to the end. I would argue it stay here and open. This matter is a rhetorical hydra, if the mods shut it down, the topic will pop up again, and again, and again. There's no dishonor in seeing the arguments run its course and walking away from the discussion. Or would you rather the thread get shut down, let it pop up again, so everyone can weigh in with the exact same position they did the past at least three times this topic has snowballed?
D&D Beyond doesn't have a dog in this fight. At the end of the day, they're going to have to adapt the Beyond toolset to accommodate the options presented in Tasha's Cauldron, regardless of whatever anyone's saying in this discussion or its successors.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
No one is forcing you to be here. Many of us enjoy the discussion. If you don’t, click on a different link.
Yeah, pretty much that. But people as a whole rarely are collectively happy about the same thing.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I'm going to apologize from now for starting this convo again after 30 pages. I don't know if I missed this exact point and though I want to clarify that I am not for or against this particular optional rule I want to counter some of the points for example that a feral halfling will be stronger than an orc who was locked in a library all their life. Or the goliath that was shunned and learned wizardry.
YES, the halfling will be stronger than the orc BUT that will be translates through standard array/point buy/rolled stats and ASIs. NOT racial stats. A feral halfling that survived in jumanji for 15 years WILL have a 17 str and an orc studying scrolls dor 25 years WILL have a 17 in int.. BUT put an orc in jumanji for 15 years and it will have a 19 str and the gnome 25 years in the library will have a 19 int.
The examples given (at least in the first 10 pages of this thread) are all 'backstory' stat changes. No biological or physiological reasons for 'racial' stat changes.
And in all honesty this happens in real life! Look at the Olympics? Why are the majority of Kenyans the olympic gold medal runners and white people Olympic gold medal swimmers? because they have a 'racial' affinity for these sports. Sure, someone of a different race can be good or better but with the same exact training and same length of training they are at biological disadvantage.
Just to clarify, I'm not against this optional new rule but the arguments all for it, tend to be more of an optimizing perspective, despite claiming otherwise.. Which isn't a bad reason. In a game with numbers that are just as valuable if not more so than the RP, its not a bad thing to request
your other parts are valid in an dnd setting but i highly doubt this is an genetic component irl, it probably has more to do with geography, culture, economics and sheer coincidence more than anything else
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
The more you know....
A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.
Therefore elves, humans, orcs, etc are different species, not different races.
It is actually quite an interesting topic from a scientific point of view. Grizzly and Polar bears are considered distinct species, but thanks to Global Warming, their territories now overlap, and there is at least one known hybrid. Various whales have been known to cross breed (Fin-Blue's have been documented various times). No one questions that the various bears and whales are not separate species, but I am betting that a zoologist could rhyme off a ton of examples of cross species breeding in many many different Genus, perhaps even Family.
Within the confines of accepted D&D species (PHB primarily, guess we can stretch that to MM, Mord's, Volo's and one case in Eberron), Humans are quite fecund. I think they are the ones that can cross-breed with the most species. I would love to know how an evolutionary biologist would quantify/ qualify Yaun-Ti, given all the presentations within one species.
And from a cultural point of view, I am loathe to think of all the fantastic work in Mord's that is going to be erased in the inevitable re-write.