Historically I've been on board with "you get a point each from class, species, and background"; it's a very neat bowtied solution. I'd still be down with it, but honestly I think floating points are fine. If a DM wants to re-impose species restrictions on their world they can tell you how to assign those floating points. If the DM is fine with a player making their own decisions regarding the character they play, the player can decide. if the player is unsure what to do, the DM can help. The floating points allow for more granular control over the story one's numbers tell. I think it was actually you, Avenger, that said something earlier about how floating numbers can be used to more accurately align the numbers with the backstory re: eladrin noble with Charisma rather than Sexterity because, y'know...nobleman. Trained whole life in being charismatic, talky, and Good With People because that is literally a nobleman's job.
One-from-each is still better than the PHB default, and Coronet is also correct in that as appealing as this UA blurb is, it's still a half-assed job. Really, what this boils down to is that it's increasingly obvious Wizards is trying to overhaul character creation to better align with modern ideals and notions of how people work, but the 5e PHB is a Sacred Cow they refuse to declare outdated. So everything has to be awkwardly packed in around the PHB and declared "optional", which means there's no room to full-ass the implementation of an updated character construction engine. So we're all mostly going to have to wing it and put in the extra elbow grease to try and make shit work in the tools here.
Sad, really. A PHB 2.0 would solve so many problems, and not just character creation problems.
Wow. Just... wow. Read through the thread. The grognards are out in force for this one.
I like new stuff. I'll always give new stuff a shot. I don't see any downsides to the new stuff.
And this is what I'm talking about when I say its become acceptable to basically spit in the faces of those of us who were here first, who helped grow the game when it was under assault from the culture at large during The Satanic Panic and then during the horrific tenure of Lorraine Williams. Get stuffed. Its bad enough WotC treats us as morons who can't be trusted to not drown in a bowl of soup [REDACTED]
"I DEALTH WITH ROUGH STUFF SO EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE TO AND NOTHING SHOULD EVER GET BETTER"
Your history isn't the problem. Your intractable attitude today is.
I regret that you have to put up with Certain Users after my own patience finally snapped, but it looks like the fight is in good hands after all.
Nevertheless. Much as I suppose it was inevitable, the thread wasn't actually supposed to be Rehash of Why Moving Numbers Are Good/bad #4792. I shall make one attempt to course correct.
What do folks think of the idea of "Lineage", as opposed to "Race/Species", being an idea that encompasses your character's origin even beyond the possibility of what skin you were born in? That the species of your birth isn't necessarily the defining factor of your Heroic Origin, and that Lineages beyond Dude/Ork-with-a-K/Shortstack/Token Hottie can exist alongside or in place of the traditional idea of 'Race' i.e. Species?
I'd be vastly in favor of something I think I saw you propose earlier, wherein the three pillars become four, with a kind of lineage/biology option, class mostly as-is, then a background split into an occupation/training and a culture/upbringing thing. Actually, I'd love to see background beefed up in general. When they were first talking about messing with racial ASI pre-Tasha leaks, I actually kind of assumed they'd just move ASI to backgrounds instead of race, given that what you've done literally your entire life has more of an effect on who you are today than your genetics.
The problem with this is it makes a few assumptions. The first is that racial ability score increases are genetic, like alignment. They're not. It's reflective of the archetypal culture. In a culture where everyone is expected to be able to fight, strength or dexterity, and some kind of weapon training, makes sense. A society that embraces curiosity and values education is going to see a bump in Intelligence.
The second is that all ASIs should be reflective of a background. An elf noble, growing up in the comfort of Evereska, and an orc noble, leading a nomadic tribe across mountains or plains, likely have different cultural expectations thrust upon them. Their scores should reflect that as well.
To be fair here, the title of Noble in your example carries far less weight than the environments the Elf and Orc were raised in. That is why I am not completely against the idea of Culture being another selection in the character building process.
The difference is that the Queen was making a bad-faith argument to get her way while sitting in a position of powe
And this is different from now in what way? All I see is people making bad faith arguments to shut down older fans.
That assumes that everyone disagrees with you is a liar. If you don't see the issue with that, you are a lost cause.
(they also aren't in positions of power of literal life and death or being aggravated by unseen third parties, but good job on clipping off a major part of my statement that makes you wrong)
And this is what I'm talking about when I say its become acceptable to basically spit in the faces of those of us who were here first, who helped grow the game when it was under assault from the culture at large during The Satanic Panic and then during the horrific tenure of Lorraine Williams. Get stuffed. Its bad enough WotC treats us as morons who can't be trusted to not drown in a bowl of soup [REDACTED]
I'm an older player. I played when 2e was out, and tried some old school original flavor for a campaign once too. No one spits in my face with new and shiny stuff.
No, its the people who hate new shiny stuff who spit in my face. So...yeah.
The difference is that the Queen was making a bad-faith argument to get her way while sitting in a position of powe
And this is different from now in what way? All I see is people making bad faith arguments to shut down older fans.
You think I was trying to shut down an older fan? No wonder I was so utterly confused as to your response to me, because shutting you down had absolutely nothing to do with it, I was just trying to educate you on the realities some of us face. Look, I've been gaming for ... oh geeze thirty years now. I'm not saying I'm the oldest of gamers, but I don't think I qualify as a new one. But throughout my thirty years of gaming I have definitely felt othered by various microaggressions as a queer gamer of color and this new stance that WOTC is taking is not some newfangled thing. For some of us it feels like, "Well duh" and "Finally."
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I am personally in favor of decoupling racial ASIs with race. I prefer more customization than less.
As for the negative comments about minmaxers abusing the system, then just do not play with them. There is nothing wrong with optimizers, just as there is nothing wrong with roleplayers. Roleplaying is not some holy grail that every table should care about nor strive for. There is nothing wrong with expanding RAW to support groups who care more about mechanics than roleplaying and lore. Groups who focus on mechanics want that RAW support without delving into homebrew, and there is nothing wrong with D&D catering to that. Not wanting RAW to support optimizers is gatekeeping in my opinion, and I find the desire to imprison RAW to support only roleplaying to be pretty conceited and snobby. Telling people to pick another TTRPG to play if they do not want to roleplay in D&D is no different from newcomers telling veterans to suck it up and accept the new direction or go back to older editions and OSRs.
If veteran GMs and players want every race to have preset racial ASIs like in pre-TCOE 5e, they can do so and assign preset racial ASIs to any new published races, and that is totally okay. No one is going to knock down your door to say that you cannot play that way. Veterans already tell people to just ignore RAW and encourage others to homebrew rules if they do not like how RAW works, so I do not see why veterans would be so upset about taking their own advice and homebrew as something as minor as preset racial ASIs.
Roleplayers already kick optimizers off out of their table, and that is fine. No body should be forced to play with people they do not like to play with. However, I see no reason for roleplayers to basically go to other tables and say RAW should not support how they play.
D&D is not about roleplaying and it never was, at least for 5e. D&D is about what you want it to be, and if that happens to be roleplaying, good for you. Some tables out there like to focus more on mechanics and combat. Some like to focus more on getting loot and magic items. Some like just ticking off a check list of tasks and quests. And based on my limited knowledge of historical D&D, D&D seemed to be originally mostly about looting dungeons and killing monsters; roleplay is an afterthought at best, if not outright ignored.
Really, what this boils down to is that it's increasingly obvious Wizards is trying to overhaul character creation to better align with modern ideals and notions of how people work, but the 5e PHB is a Sacred Cow they refuse to declare outdated. So everything has to be awkwardly packed in around the PHB and declared "optional", which means there's no room to full-ass the implementation of an updated character construction engine. So we're all mostly going to have to wing it and put in the extra elbow grease to try and make shit work in the tools here.
Sad, really. A PHB 2.0 would solve so many problems, and not just character creation problems.
I think that hits the nail on the head.
However, even if they recognize that, WOTC would be very reluctant to change the core of D&D so much. To quote someone from the wired article, “Those two praise this god of D&D, and the image they have of this god is very specific and they can not anger this god. Anything they can change, they have to work through their concept of faith and do some mental gymnastics.”
The first is that racial ability score increases are genetic, like alignment. They're not. It's reflective of the archetypal culture.
You see, I'm not completely in agreement with this for ASIs.
As I said before, races in 5e are more like different species. A Bear is always going to be stronger than a Frog, a Cheetah is always going to be faster than a Snail, and a Human is always going to be more intelligent than a worm (except in very rare cases 😂).
When it comes to the 5e races/species, they will be closer and some will buck the trend. There may be some Orcs who are more intelligent than some Gnomes and some Gnomes who are stronger than some Orcs, but the average Gnome will be more intelligent than the average Orc and the average Orc will be stronger than the average Gnome. This is because of genetics/species, not because of upbringing, and is why modifiers probably should exist on "races"/species. It means that, where an average Orc has Int 10, the average Gnome has Int 12. In the same way, the average Gnome has Str 10, but the average Orc has Str 12.
However, due to historical baggage we are stuck with these species being called "races". This makes racial ASIs evoke inappropriate and offensive racial stereotypes from the real world. It is entirely appropriate (and right) for WotC to attempt to fix this issue to avoid causing offence.
You think I was trying to shut down an older fan? No wonder I was so utterly confused as to your response to me, because shutting you down had absolutely nothing to do with it, I was just trying to educate you on the realities some of us face.
Don't patronize me to try and get around the flame-bait rule
Guys, lets calm down. This topic is already decisive enough for people without the bickering and insulting on both sides. Yurei has already attempted to steer the conversation back to the discussion at hand. Let's not spiral into us vs them arguing.
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"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Wow. Just... wow. Read through the thread. The grognards are out in force for this one.
I like new stuff. I'll always give new stuff a shot. I don't see any downsides to the new stuff.
And this is what I'm talking about when I say its become acceptable to basically spit in the faces of those of us who were here first, who helped grow the game when it was under assault from the culture at large during The Satanic Panic and then during the horrific tenure of Lorraine Williams. Get stuffed. Its bad enough WotC treats us as morons who can't be trusted to not drown in a bowl of soup [REDACTED]
"I DEALTH WITH ROUGH STUFF SO EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE TO AND NOTHING SHOULD EVER GET BETTER"
Your history isn't the problem. Your intractable attitude today is.
Well that's a strawman argument. Please, find where I said things shouldn't change? Go on. I dare you. I'm more concerned with needless and thoughtless retcons of lore for "reasons" than I am changing game mechanics.
That's pretty elegant. Would there be any way for something like Variant Human to still exist, some way for them to get that feat that makes everyone love them so much? Maybe skip the +1 racial entirely, and just get one from class and one from background?
Yep, that would be how variant human would work.
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A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
The first is that racial ability score increases are genetic, like alignment. They're not. It's reflective of the archetypal culture.
You see, I'm not completely in agreement with this for ASIs.
As I said before, races in 5e are more like different species. A Bear is always going to be stronger than a Frog, a Cheetah is always going to be faster than a Snail, and a Human is always going to be more intelligent than a worm (except in very rare cases 😂).
When it comes to the 5e races/species, they will be closer and some will buck the trend. There may be some Orcs who are more intelligent than some Gnomes and some Gnomes who are stronger than some Orcs, but the average Gnome will be more intelligent than the average Orc and the average Orc will be stronger than the average Gnome. This is because of genetics/species, not because of upbringing, and is why modifiers probably should exist on "races"/species. It means that, where an average Orc has Int 10, the average Gnome has Int 12. In the same way, the average Gnome has Str 10, but the average Orc has Str 12.
However, due to historical baggage we are stuck with these species being called "races". This makes racial ASIs evoke inappropriate and offensive racial stereotypes from the real world. It is entirely appropriate (and right) for WotC to attempt to fix this issue to avoid causing offence.
While a bear might always be stronger than a cheetah, that's not true of player characters in 5th Edition. Everyone has the same maximum potential. And the d20 adds an element of randomness that can shift things dramatically. You can out-wrestle a brown bear while having a Strength score of only 3. It's not likely, but it's possible.
Race, as we use it colloquially, is an unofficial classification. Every humanoid, as far as I know, can still breed together. (Half-dragons notwithstanding.) Whether that's because of genetics or magic, I don't know or care. It just is. But I refuse to believe the ASIs are solely inherrent. They're not called out as such. That's a projection. And if people spent more time reading the fiction, whether they agree with it or not, they'd see why things are the way they are. I'm not saying they're perfect, and I'm not defending previous bad writing. But this goes back to some people wanting things to be bad so they can feel better about picking things apart. I mentioned Arcanist Press's Ancestry and Culture series, and it's good. They recognize the differences. But they also get some stuff blatantly wrong, like assuming Orcs are supposedly genetically evil. As if it's baked into their DNA or something, and that's just bull hockey.
At best, racial ASIs give you a temporary leg up on the competition. Taken all the way to their limit, the differences in Ability Scores between the different races, in the same class, are minor; if even discernable.
You think I was trying to shut down an older fan? No wonder I was so utterly confused as to your response to me, because shutting you down had absolutely nothing to do with it, I was just trying to educate you on the realities some of us face.
Don't patronize me to try and get around the flame-bait rule
Oh no, you were wrong in your assumptions. Time to deflect and strawman.
People love to throw out the "a gnome should always be weaker than an orc and an orc should always be dumber than a gnome!" thing as "proof" that genetic ASIs are a thing and we should all shut up and let our DM assign us our stat arrays for us. This is, however, incorrect. The "Strength" stat in D&D is, as with everything else in the game, a loose approximation at best of physical power, and its primary goal is determining how good you are at physical tasks.
The problem is that "physical tasks" come in two distinct types that the game makes no distinction between: 'Power' and 'Athleticism'. Power is a character's ability to use their muscles to affect the world around them - lifting things, dragging things, moving rocks, hauling bodies, and other Man Vs. Set External Mass tasks. Yes, orcs will always have an advantage over gnomes in this case because 'Power' is a factor of size. The bigger you are, the more power you have, with almost no real exceptionA seven-foot mountain man of a human will have more power than a scrawny six-foot-two runt-of-the-tribe orc, because the biological/physical concept of Power is tied so intrinsically to size that only gross structural changes that disqualify one from the 'Humanoid' creature type can change it.
The other aspect of Strength is Athleticism - the character's ability to run, jump, climb, swim, exert themselves and otherwise perform feats of athletics. There is no fixed external mass to overcome for athletics - the character needs to defeat their own body weight, not the weight of Mr. Rock or Mr. Owlbear Corpse. In terms of athleticism, gnomes are better than orcs - the Square-Cube Law means a Small creature has more muscle power per kilogram of body weight than a larger creature does. Not just 'more', but significantly more - pound for pound, your gnomes, gobbos and Legally Distinct Hobbits are twice the athlete you'll ever be. At least.
But because Athleticism and Power are both tied to the same number - your Strength score - a character that is good at one is also, by default, good at the other. A player who puts their points into Strength for their gnome because they want to be an excellent athlete also has a lot of Power, and a player who puts their points into Strength for their orc because they want to be able to move stuff and break things is also an excellent athlete. The orc player feels offended because this little thirty-pound shortstack is as good at moving stuff and breaking things as their seven-foot mini-Hulk, but the thing is? The gnome is just as entitled to being an excellent athlete as the orc is to being a powerhouse, and they both need the same damn number to do it.
So either you dispense with the Six Sacred Scores and come up with much more rich, complex and engaging character creation (please? Pretty please?) or you accept that gnomes and orcs can both have high Strength and be physically gifted in different ways for different reasons. And also it's a fantasy game about magic and pretend elves, and sometimes the needs of the game outweigh scientific reality we're not bound to anyways.
Wow. Just... wow. Read through the thread. The grognards are out in force for this one.
I like new stuff. I'll always give new stuff a shot. I don't see any downsides to the new stuff.
And this is what I'm talking about when I say its become acceptable to basically spit in the faces of those of us who were here first, who helped grow the game when it was under assault from the culture at large during The Satanic Panic and then during the horrific tenure of Lorraine Williams. Get stuffed. Its bad enough WotC treats us as morons who can't be trusted to not drown in a bowl of soup [REDACTED]
"I DEALTH WITH ROUGH STUFF SO EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE TO AND NOTHING SHOULD EVER GET BETTER"
Your history isn't the problem. Your intractable attitude today is.
Well that's a strawman argument. Please, find where I said things shouldn't change? Go on. I dare you. I'm more concerned with needless and thoughtless retcons of lore for "reasons" than I am changing game mechanics.
I mean, if you wanna play the "pull the exact quote" game, you can start by pulling the exact quotes where people spit in the faces of older gamers just because they're older gamers.
I've said my piece, your nonsense about "retcons of lore" was refuted before you said it, and I am done engaging with people unable or unwilling to confront the flaws in their own reasoning or the blatantly untrue assumptions they're basing their arguments on. As Coronet said, this is spiraling.
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Historically I've been on board with "you get a point each from class, species, and background"; it's a very neat bowtied solution. I'd still be down with it, but honestly I think floating points are fine. If a DM wants to re-impose species restrictions on their world they can tell you how to assign those floating points. If the DM is fine with a player making their own decisions regarding the character they play, the player can decide. if the player is unsure what to do, the DM can help. The floating points allow for more granular control over the story one's numbers tell. I think it was actually you, Avenger, that said something earlier about how floating numbers can be used to more accurately align the numbers with the backstory re: eladrin noble with Charisma rather than Sexterity because, y'know...nobleman. Trained whole life in being charismatic, talky, and Good With People because that is literally a nobleman's job.
One-from-each is still better than the PHB default, and Coronet is also correct in that as appealing as this UA blurb is, it's still a half-assed job. Really, what this boils down to is that it's increasingly obvious Wizards is trying to overhaul character creation to better align with modern ideals and notions of how people work, but the 5e PHB is a Sacred Cow they refuse to declare outdated. So everything has to be awkwardly packed in around the PHB and declared "optional", which means there's no room to full-ass the implementation of an updated character construction engine. So we're all mostly going to have to wing it and put in the extra elbow grease to try and make shit work in the tools here.
Sad, really. A PHB 2.0 would solve so many problems, and not just character creation problems.
Please do not contact or message me.
"I DEALTH WITH ROUGH STUFF SO EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE TO AND NOTHING SHOULD EVER GET BETTER"
Your history isn't the problem. Your intractable attitude today is.
And this is different from now in what way? All I see is people making bad faith arguments to shut down older fans.
To be fair here, the title of Noble in your example carries far less weight than the environments the Elf and Orc were raised in. That is why I am not completely against the idea of Culture being another selection in the character building process.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
That assumes that everyone disagrees with you is a liar. If you don't see the issue with that, you are a lost cause.
(they also aren't in positions of power of literal life and death or being aggravated by unseen third parties, but good job on clipping off a major part of my statement that makes you wrong)
I'm an older player. I played when 2e was out, and tried some old school original flavor for a campaign once too. No one spits in my face with new and shiny stuff.
No, its the people who hate new shiny stuff who spit in my face. So...yeah.
You think I was trying to shut down an older fan? No wonder I was so utterly confused as to your response to me, because shutting you down had absolutely nothing to do with it, I was just trying to educate you on the realities some of us face. Look, I've been gaming for ... oh geeze thirty years now. I'm not saying I'm the oldest of gamers, but I don't think I qualify as a new one. But throughout my thirty years of gaming I have definitely felt othered by various microaggressions as a queer gamer of color and this new stance that WOTC is taking is not some newfangled thing. For some of us it feels like, "Well duh" and "Finally."
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I would agree that a PHB 2.0 might be a good idea if they are really committed to changing the system. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to it.
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Characters for Tenebris Sine Fine
RoughCoronet's Greater Wills
I am personally in favor of decoupling racial ASIs with race. I prefer more customization than less.
As for the negative comments about minmaxers abusing the system, then just do not play with them. There is nothing wrong with optimizers, just as there is nothing wrong with roleplayers. Roleplaying is not some holy grail that every table should care about nor strive for. There is nothing wrong with expanding RAW to support groups who care more about mechanics than roleplaying and lore. Groups who focus on mechanics want that RAW support without delving into homebrew, and there is nothing wrong with D&D catering to that. Not wanting RAW to support optimizers is gatekeeping in my opinion, and I find the desire to imprison RAW to support only roleplaying to be pretty conceited and snobby. Telling people to pick another TTRPG to play if they do not want to roleplay in D&D is no different from newcomers telling veterans to suck it up and accept the new direction or go back to older editions and OSRs.
If veteran GMs and players want every race to have preset racial ASIs like in pre-TCOE 5e, they can do so and assign preset racial ASIs to any new published races, and that is totally okay. No one is going to knock down your door to say that you cannot play that way. Veterans already tell people to just ignore RAW and encourage others to homebrew rules if they do not like how RAW works, so I do not see why veterans would be so upset about taking their own advice and homebrew as something as minor as preset racial ASIs.
Roleplayers already kick optimizers off out of their table, and that is fine. No body should be forced to play with people they do not like to play with. However, I see no reason for roleplayers to basically go to other tables and say RAW should not support how they play.
D&D is not about roleplaying and it never was, at least for 5e. D&D is about what you want it to be, and if that happens to be roleplaying, good for you. Some tables out there like to focus more on mechanics and combat. Some like to focus more on getting loot and magic items. Some like just ticking off a check list of tasks and quests. And based on my limited knowledge of historical D&D, D&D seemed to be originally mostly about looting dungeons and killing monsters; roleplay is an afterthought at best, if not outright ignored.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >
I think that hits the nail on the head.
However, even if they recognize that, WOTC would be very reluctant to change the core of D&D so much. To quote someone from the wired article, “Those two praise this god of D&D, and the image they have of this god is very specific and they can not anger this god. Anything they can change, they have to work through their concept of faith and do some mental gymnastics.”
You see, I'm not completely in agreement with this for ASIs.
As I said before, races in 5e are more like different species. A Bear is always going to be stronger than a Frog, a Cheetah is always going to be faster than a Snail, and a Human is always going to be more intelligent than a worm (except in very rare cases 😂).
When it comes to the 5e races/species, they will be closer and some will buck the trend. There may be some Orcs who are more intelligent than some Gnomes and some Gnomes who are stronger than some Orcs, but the average Gnome will be more intelligent than the average Orc and the average Orc will be stronger than the average Gnome. This is because of genetics/species, not because of upbringing, and is why modifiers probably should exist on "races"/species. It means that, where an average Orc has Int 10, the average Gnome has Int 12. In the same way, the average Gnome has Str 10, but the average Orc has Str 12.
However, due to historical baggage we are stuck with these species being called "races". This makes racial ASIs evoke inappropriate and offensive racial stereotypes from the real world. It is entirely appropriate (and right) for WotC to attempt to fix this issue to avoid causing offence.
Don't patronize me to try and get around the flame-bait rule
Guys, lets calm down. This topic is already decisive enough for people without the bickering and insulting on both sides. Yurei has already attempted to steer the conversation back to the discussion at hand. Let's not spiral into us vs them arguing.
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Characters for Tenebris Sine Fine
RoughCoronet's Greater Wills
Well that's a strawman argument. Please, find where I said things shouldn't change? Go on. I dare you. I'm more concerned with needless and thoughtless retcons of lore for "reasons" than I am changing game mechanics.
Yep, that would be how variant human would work.
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
My Improved Lineage System
While a bear might always be stronger than a cheetah, that's not true of player characters in 5th Edition. Everyone has the same maximum potential. And the d20 adds an element of randomness that can shift things dramatically. You can out-wrestle a brown bear while having a Strength score of only 3. It's not likely, but it's possible.
Race, as we use it colloquially, is an unofficial classification. Every humanoid, as far as I know, can still breed together. (Half-dragons notwithstanding.) Whether that's because of genetics or magic, I don't know or care. It just is. But I refuse to believe the ASIs are solely inherrent. They're not called out as such. That's a projection. And if people spent more time reading the fiction, whether they agree with it or not, they'd see why things are the way they are. I'm not saying they're perfect, and I'm not defending previous bad writing. But this goes back to some people wanting things to be bad so they can feel better about picking things apart. I mentioned Arcanist Press's Ancestry and Culture series, and it's good. They recognize the differences. But they also get some stuff blatantly wrong, like assuming Orcs are supposedly genetically evil. As if it's baked into their DNA or something, and that's just bull hockey.
At best, racial ASIs give you a temporary leg up on the competition. Taken all the way to their limit, the differences in Ability Scores between the different races, in the same class, are minor; if even discernable.
Oh no, you were wrong in your assumptions. Time to deflect and strawman.
I what now? I seriously have no idea what you're talking about. Like ... sincerely. I'm honestly confused.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Sigh.
OTL
It was nice while it lasted.
Okay.
People love to throw out the "a gnome should always be weaker than an orc and an orc should always be dumber than a gnome!" thing as "proof" that genetic ASIs are a thing and we should all shut up and let our DM assign us our stat arrays for us. This is, however, incorrect. The "Strength" stat in D&D is, as with everything else in the game, a loose approximation at best of physical power, and its primary goal is determining how good you are at physical tasks.
The problem is that "physical tasks" come in two distinct types that the game makes no distinction between: 'Power' and 'Athleticism'. Power is a character's ability to use their muscles to affect the world around them - lifting things, dragging things, moving rocks, hauling bodies, and other Man Vs. Set External Mass tasks. Yes, orcs will always have an advantage over gnomes in this case because 'Power' is a factor of size. The bigger you are, the more power you have, with almost no real exceptionA seven-foot mountain man of a human will have more power than a scrawny six-foot-two runt-of-the-tribe orc, because the biological/physical concept of Power is tied so intrinsically to size that only gross structural changes that disqualify one from the 'Humanoid' creature type can change it.
The other aspect of Strength is Athleticism - the character's ability to run, jump, climb, swim, exert themselves and otherwise perform feats of athletics. There is no fixed external mass to overcome for athletics - the character needs to defeat their own body weight, not the weight of Mr. Rock or Mr. Owlbear Corpse. In terms of athleticism, gnomes are better than orcs - the Square-Cube Law means a Small creature has more muscle power per kilogram of body weight than a larger creature does. Not just 'more', but significantly more - pound for pound, your gnomes, gobbos and Legally Distinct Hobbits are twice the athlete you'll ever be. At least.
But because Athleticism and Power are both tied to the same number - your Strength score - a character that is good at one is also, by default, good at the other. A player who puts their points into Strength for their gnome because they want to be an excellent athlete also has a lot of Power, and a player who puts their points into Strength for their orc because they want to be able to move stuff and break things is also an excellent athlete. The orc player feels offended because this little thirty-pound shortstack is as good at moving stuff and breaking things as their seven-foot mini-Hulk, but the thing is? The gnome is just as entitled to being an excellent athlete as the orc is to being a powerhouse, and they both need the same damn number to do it.
So either you dispense with the Six Sacred Scores and come up with much more rich, complex and engaging character creation (please? Pretty please?) or you accept that gnomes and orcs can both have high Strength and be physically gifted in different ways for different reasons. And also it's a fantasy game about magic and pretend elves, and sometimes the needs of the game outweigh scientific reality we're not bound to anyways.
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I mean, if you wanna play the "pull the exact quote" game, you can start by pulling the exact quotes where people spit in the faces of older gamers just because they're older gamers.
I've said my piece, your nonsense about "retcons of lore" was refuted before you said it, and I am done engaging with people unable or unwilling to confront the flaws in their own reasoning or the blatantly untrue assumptions they're basing their arguments on. As Coronet said, this is spiraling.