So I was creating some characters and admittedly I’m a bit of an optimizer (I’m working on that) but I always come across the problem of well, if I’m going to be this class then I have to be this race and that is so limiting. So here is my idea: let’s take the Dragonborn for instance. They have a +2 STR and +1 CHA what if we kept the same bonuses of +2 and +1 but you could choose which stat to apply them to? If you’re an optimizer, most likely you’re going to choose the race that best fits your class anyway. Or maybe put a little restriction on it. For the Dragonborn you can apply the +2 to STR DEX or CON and the +1 to WIS INT or CHA. Or if your race only has a +2 and that’s it, you just get to pick any stat to apply it to.
How do you feel about racial stat bonuses and what would your solution be if you think one is required?
I think it makes more sense to decrease the +2 that most races get to one stat and allow the player to put that whereever they want it. And if the race only has +1 to several stats, to allow one of those to be put in another slot. While I don't think that the PC's race should determine their destiny, I also don't agree that everything should be swappable.
For instance: If all ability score increase are at the whim of the character, we're likely to see a lot more Mountain Dwarf Wizards with Dwarven Armor Training who apply their STR bonus to INT. From that point, a lot of people will gradually say that any Wizard who cannot wear medium armor is a suboptimal build or some such nonsense.
True, but still odd. “Character creation is too flexible” was certainly not one of the criticisms leveled at 4E. They didn’t throw the entire baby out with the bath water (e.g. Advantage), so it just surprises me that the went back to static modifiers.
Maybe it was part of a ploy to make releasing new races in source books more of a must-buy, but 5E has really released remarkably fewer race add ons compared to what I remember from prior editions.
Lots of people said “that’s not d&d!!” so they took it out, but now people want it back again. That’s the problem with WotC’s “design by committee” approach as a whole. Individual players may be good game designers, but “the playerbase” as a whole sucks at it. I don’t mean to say that most players suck at it, simply that when you get that many voices all saying different things the “loudest” or “most common” opinions are not always the best approaches from a game design standpoint.
Take Psionics for example. The common opinion is that it should be another form of spellcasting. There is a very vocal minority that says it shouldn’t be. That vocal minority can’t agree on how it should work either. But I guarantee that somewhere in there is an idea that people would love if they gave it a chance, but WotC probably won’t go that rout because it isn’t the most popular idea. When game design becomes a popularity contest, game design suffers.
I agree with Song of Blues. Optrimizers would still have very limited choice of Race because one (or maybe 2 ) races are thge best option/ Wizards and Sorcerers would feel compelled to be a mountain dwarf, they would have to run their clerics are hobgoblins or wood elves for the weapon proficiencies and so on. Also it makes sense that different races have different abilities. Having a kobold start with 17 strength (or even 20 if you roll for it) just doesn't seem right.
The players who think no Small species should ever have a ST score above 9, no elf should ever have a DX below 27, and no dragonborn should ever be good at being anything? They can stick with the 'default' species ability distributions.
People who want to play against type, do weird class/species combinations, and explore different facets of their game worlds without being punished for it by being significantly behind the optimizers? They can use a variant distribution system.
Frankly, how the game should have been designed if we're going to have fixed scores at all is that species determines ONE point of your starting bonus, class determines ONE point of your starting bonus, and background determines ONE point of your starting bonus. Everything being completely and utterly reliant on your race, forcing every single gnome or kobold or durganboi to be completely and utterly identical down to the very last strand of DNA across All Of Space And Time, is not just bad for optics, it's pretty bad for gameplay.
Maybe my slender, scrawny-for-her-species dragonborn lass who makes her living as a flashy, exotic stage magician for a traveling band of entertainers doesn't need to be a towering pillar of raw muscle? Maybe I'm playing the one elf in all of Faerun Exandria who doesn't "exude an air of ethereal, flawless grace" and is instead actually kind of a bookish bumblenut that gets by on smarts and meek affability? Maybe those things, among others, should be allowed?
Yeah, a system where race provided a single +1 bonus (Dex for elves, Con for dwarves, etc etc), and background provided another or the player could simply choose to place another whereever (since I honestly kind of dig that background is so un-optimizeable, encouraging folks to choose what's interesting instead of what they "have to"), would have been far less restrictive. I don't see a lot of good arguments against it, other than pearl clutching about not wanting to see another player have a certain attribute score across the table for their character.
The background point could be part of the whole 'Customize A Background' system, which is just a cool feature of the game. At this point I use about as many customized backgrounds as I do regular backgrounds, and it'd be super easy to have a single stat point allocated in there too.
But yeah. Most of the backlash seems to be "but dorfs with ARMOR DX", which should be solved by taking armor and weapon proficiencies out of species traits and reassigning them elsewhere. Or "But species should mean something DX", to which I will only say that if species means nothing to you outside which numbers you get from it? That's a 'you' problem, not a game problem.
But yeah. Most of the backlash seems to be "but dorfs with ARMOR DX", which should be solved by taking armor and weapon proficiencies out of species traits and reassigning them elsewhere.
You could go that way but then all the optimisers will complain that their race choice s limited to Yuan ti for poison resistance or a flying race. With race not being tied to armor / weapon proficiencies or ability scores you are pretty much left with things that affect all characters pretty much equally, that would be almost impossible to balance so you would probably end up with race have very little mechanical impact (like background)
But yeah. Most of the backlash seems to be "but dorfs with ARMOR DX", which should be solved by taking armor and weapon proficiencies out of species traits and reassigning them elsewhere.
You could go that way but then all the optimisers will complain that their race choice s limited to Yuan ti for poison resistance or a flying race. With race not being tied to armor / weapon proficiencies or ability scores you are pretty much left with things that affect all characters pretty much equally, that would be almost impossible to balance so you would probably end up with race have very little mechanical impact (like background)
Which is I think where they would like to go with D&D.
It certainly takes more care and playtesting to design racial features that are evenly balanced, and not "must picks" for a certain class while being useless for others.... various 5E races do this better or worse. Half-Orc's crit enhancement, for example, is really only relevant to Hexblades, Champions, and Barbarians... so that's kind of bad. While Dragonborn's resistance to an element and breath weapon are useful on anybody and thus quite good (hampered slightly by tying the save to a specific attribute, but that could be okay if everybody's racial traits were always tied to Constitution, no matter what, since Con is otherwise a universally-respected but under-represented-in-saves/skills attribute). Honestly I'd rather see more races with features designed like the Gnome or Firbolg or the Kenku, with fun "ribbon" abilities that make that race truly unique with concrete roleplaying implications, but which aren't particularly combat useful for any one build at all. Racial features should be such that you're never "wasting" something by making a Half Orc wizard. Also, right now many racial features are wasted by playing into their archetype, such as Dwarves squandering their Combat Training as soon as they roll a martial character, meaning they make pretty fun and unique wizards but pretty boring and generic everything else.
I would personally rather see Racial features ties to Proficiency bonus than an Ability modifier. Ability mods work for Class/Subclass because players have to invest in it. But something you are born able to do should be tied to you “how good you are at doing stuff” number, which is proficiency.
Right, but if dwarves have proficiency in axes because they're "born" to be good with them, then all of a sudden dwarven wizards are good with axes (working as intended!) and dwarven fighters are completely average with them (not working as intended). Within a 5E framework, handing out proficiency that can turn into expertise if redundant, or a static modifier, would be necessary to ensure that dwarves are "good with axes"... and then you've fallen into the trap of giving a dwarf a mechanical combat advantage that means that they're on the short list of "best warrior races," pigeon holing race selection all over again in a new way.
Not every member of a race is a combatant, most aren't. It would be great if D&D could recognize that by making races cultural and physical differences manifest purely in non-combat features, and leave the combat implications to their class selection. A dwarven craftsman should be special and distinct from an elven craftsman, not because one has proficiency in axes and one with longbows, but because of.... something else, I dunno, I'm not a game designer :) . If D&D is committed to reframing fantasy races as being empowering and unique, rather than limiting and stereotypical, the first step is coming up with cool racial features that aren't tied to combat effectiveness in only one role. Stat bonuses and combat moves (unless universally applicable to all roles) aren't the way to do that.
I still maintain that species (because that is what we are really talking about when we refer to D&D races) are not the same when it comes to abilities. Minataurs are bull like which makes me think they should be strong, Tabaxi are catlike so they should be dexterious, Some minataurs will be stronger than others, and some will be more dexterious than others, the same goes for Tabaxi. A tabaxi which is naturally strong and grows up putting effort into it might be able to become stronger than the average minotaur (say 15 v 12) but they wont be as strong as as the stongest minataurs. The strongest creature in Faerun is not going to be a Tabaxi but there will be Tabaxi who join the army as a ffighter and wield a long sword.
It isn't D&D which forces you into picking a race with ability bonus that match you class it is the fact you want to optimise.
You are not competing with the rest of your party you are working with them. If no-one optimises things work great, the DM just doesn't have to ramp up the CR of your combat becasue everyone is crazy powerful. You can have just as much fun against a green dragon as a blue one if the blue would be a little bit too much. If the rest of your party are optimizing maybe it is because they feel pressured to do so because you are? If not you can still play a tabaxi with a two handed sword, sure you will hit 5% less often than a minataur and do one damage less on a hit(until you catch up at strength 20), so you might do 10% less damage so the party does 2% less damage so what. And then the big bad throws a fireball at you and your catlike reflex mean you avoid the worst of the damage you will be glad of your choice. There are only problems when other players try to force your character choices to be optimised.
But a Tabaxi will be as strong as the strongest minotaur under the current rule system, because everyone is capped at 20. These supposedly inviolate rules about strength or dexterity or whatever being tied to racial identity are actually BS, because by level 8 or 12, anybody that wants a 20 Str has it (unless they're a kobold, in which case it took them to level 16), and nobody has 21. Has the Minotaur really lost his racial identity, just because the human fighter was able to hit 20 Str at level 8 at the exact same time he was, and the halfling Paladin was able to hit it at level 12?
What the stat bonuses have actually done is guaranteed that there aren't any low level multiclass Wizard/Bard minotaurs walking around, that Tiefling paladins are unusually prevalent, and that it's tough to find a dwarven fighter anywhere because they'e all become wizards and clerics. Instead of racial bonuses being used to enable players to say "not only am I a wizard, I'm a special wizard because of my race and background!", by and large they're used to limit players to "I want to play a wizard, which means I should really only be an x, y, or a z..."
Powerful Build is a great racial ribbon feature that ensures that the Minotaur is the Strong Guy in every party, regardless of class or build. If nobody had racial bonuses to Strength, Powerful Build would still clearly communicate that the Minotaur species are naturally strong. Why isn't that enough?
So I was creating some characters and admittedly I’m a bit of an optimizer (I’m working on that) but I always come across the problem of well, if I’m going to be this class then I have to be this race and that is so limiting.
So here is my idea: let’s take the Dragonborn for instance. They have a +2 STR and +1 CHA what if we kept the same bonuses of +2 and +1 but you could choose which stat to apply them to? If you’re an optimizer, most likely you’re going to choose the race that best fits your class anyway. Or maybe put a little restriction on it. For the Dragonborn you can apply the +2 to STR DEX or CON and the +1 to WIS INT or CHA. Or if your race only has a +2 and that’s it, you just get to pick any stat to apply it to.
How do you feel about racial stat bonuses and what would your solution be if you think one is required?
I would simply wait for the upcoming book from WotC which is supposed to have a Variant Race Features section to do exactly what you are describing.
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Sweeeeet, so how about that weather....whew!
I guess you would start getting seizures then, looking at the Highelf Paladin with STR as melee attribute in my group. xD
4th edition did that, and it was good. I honestly have no idea why they took a step back from it with 5E.
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Because so many people hated 4e that they wanted to put as much distance between it and 5e as they possibly could.
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I think it makes more sense to decrease the +2 that most races get to one stat and allow the player to put that whereever they want it. And if the race only has +1 to several stats, to allow one of those to be put in another slot. While I don't think that the PC's race should determine their destiny, I also don't agree that everything should be swappable.
For instance: If all ability score increase are at the whim of the character, we're likely to see a lot more Mountain Dwarf Wizards with Dwarven Armor Training who apply their STR bonus to INT. From that point, a lot of people will gradually say that any Wizard who cannot wear medium armor is a suboptimal build or some such nonsense.
True, but still odd. “Character creation is too flexible” was certainly not one of the criticisms leveled at 4E. They didn’t throw the entire baby out with the bath water (e.g. Advantage), so it just surprises me that the went back to static modifiers.
Maybe it was part of a ploy to make releasing new races in source books more of a must-buy, but 5E has really released remarkably fewer race add ons compared to what I remember from prior editions.
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Lots of people said “that’s not d&d!!” so they took it out, but now people want it back again. That’s the problem with WotC’s “design by committee” approach as a whole. Individual players may be good game designers, but “the playerbase” as a whole sucks at it. I don’t mean to say that most players suck at it, simply that when you get that many voices all saying different things the “loudest” or “most common” opinions are not always the best approaches from a game design standpoint.
Take Psionics for example. The common opinion is that it should be another form of spellcasting. There is a very vocal minority that says it shouldn’t be. That vocal minority can’t agree on how it should work either. But I guarantee that somewhere in there is an idea that people would love if they gave it a chance, but WotC probably won’t go that rout because it isn’t the most popular idea. When game design becomes a popularity contest, game design suffers.
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I agree with Song of Blues. Optrimizers would still have very limited choice of Race because one (or maybe 2 ) races are thge best option/ Wizards and Sorcerers would feel compelled to be a mountain dwarf, they would have to run their clerics are hobgoblins or wood elves for the weapon proficiencies and so on. Also it makes sense that different races have different abilities. Having a kobold start with 17 strength (or even 20 if you roll for it) just doesn't seem right.
Here's the thing.
The players who think no Small species should ever have a ST score above 9, no elf should ever have a DX below 27, and no dragonborn should ever be good at being anything? They can stick with the 'default' species ability distributions.
People who want to play against type, do weird class/species combinations, and explore different facets of their game worlds without being punished for it by being significantly behind the optimizers? They can use a variant distribution system.
Frankly, how the game should have been designed if we're going to have fixed scores at all is that species determines ONE point of your starting bonus, class determines ONE point of your starting bonus, and background determines ONE point of your starting bonus. Everything being completely and utterly reliant on your race, forcing every single gnome or kobold or durganboi to be completely and utterly identical down to the very last strand of DNA across All Of Space And Time, is not just bad for optics, it's pretty bad for gameplay.
Maybe my slender, scrawny-for-her-species dragonborn lass who makes her living as a flashy, exotic stage magician for a traveling band of entertainers doesn't need to be a towering pillar of raw muscle? Maybe I'm playing the one elf in all of
FaerunExandria who doesn't "exude an air of ethereal, flawless grace" and is instead actually kind of a bookish bumblenut that gets by on smarts and meek affability? Maybe those things, among others, should be allowed?Please do not contact or message me.
Yeah, a system where race provided a single +1 bonus (Dex for elves, Con for dwarves, etc etc), and background provided another or the player could simply choose to place another whereever (since I honestly kind of dig that background is so un-optimizeable, encouraging folks to choose what's interesting instead of what they "have to"), would have been far less restrictive. I don't see a lot of good arguments against it, other than pearl clutching about not wanting to see another player have a certain attribute score across the table for their character.
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The background point could be part of the whole 'Customize A Background' system, which is just a cool feature of the game. At this point I use about as many customized backgrounds as I do regular backgrounds, and it'd be super easy to have a single stat point allocated in there too.
But yeah. Most of the backlash seems to be "but dorfs with ARMOR DX", which should be solved by taking armor and weapon proficiencies out of species traits and reassigning them elsewhere. Or "But species should mean something DX", to which I will only say that if species means nothing to you outside which numbers you get from it? That's a 'you' problem, not a game problem.
Please do not contact or message me.
You could go that way but then all the optimisers will complain that their race choice s limited to Yuan ti for poison resistance or a flying race. With race not being tied to armor / weapon proficiencies or ability scores you are pretty much left with things that affect all characters pretty much equally, that would be almost impossible to balance so you would probably end up with race have very little mechanical impact (like background)
Which is I think where they would like to go with D&D.
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It certainly takes more care and playtesting to design racial features that are evenly balanced, and not "must picks" for a certain class while being useless for others.... various 5E races do this better or worse. Half-Orc's crit enhancement, for example, is really only relevant to Hexblades, Champions, and Barbarians... so that's kind of bad. While Dragonborn's resistance to an element and breath weapon are useful on anybody and thus quite good (hampered slightly by tying the save to a specific attribute, but that could be okay if everybody's racial traits were always tied to Constitution, no matter what, since Con is otherwise a universally-respected but under-represented-in-saves/skills attribute). Honestly I'd rather see more races with features designed like the Gnome or Firbolg or the Kenku, with fun "ribbon" abilities that make that race truly unique with concrete roleplaying implications, but which aren't particularly combat useful for any one build at all. Racial features should be such that you're never "wasting" something by making a Half Orc wizard. Also, right now many racial features are wasted by playing into their archetype, such as Dwarves squandering their Combat Training as soon as they roll a martial character, meaning they make pretty fun and unique wizards but pretty boring and generic everything else.
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I would personally rather see Racial features ties to Proficiency bonus than an Ability modifier. Ability mods work for Class/Subclass because players have to invest in it. But something you are born able to do should be tied to you “how good you are at doing stuff” number, which is proficiency.
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Right, but if dwarves have proficiency in axes because they're "born" to be good with them, then all of a sudden dwarven wizards are good with axes (working as intended!) and dwarven fighters are completely average with them (not working as intended). Within a 5E framework, handing out proficiency that can turn into expertise if redundant, or a static modifier, would be necessary to ensure that dwarves are "good with axes"... and then you've fallen into the trap of giving a dwarf a mechanical combat advantage that means that they're on the short list of "best warrior races," pigeon holing race selection all over again in a new way.
Not every member of a race is a combatant, most aren't. It would be great if D&D could recognize that by making races cultural and physical differences manifest purely in non-combat features, and leave the combat implications to their class selection. A dwarven craftsman should be special and distinct from an elven craftsman, not because one has proficiency in axes and one with longbows, but because of.... something else, I dunno, I'm not a game designer :) . If D&D is committed to reframing fantasy races as being empowering and unique, rather than limiting and stereotypical, the first step is coming up with cool racial features that aren't tied to combat effectiveness in only one role. Stat bonuses and combat moves (unless universally applicable to all roles) aren't the way to do that.
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I still maintain that species (because that is what we are really talking about when we refer to D&D races) are not the same when it comes to abilities. Minataurs are bull like which makes me think they should be strong, Tabaxi are catlike so they should be dexterious, Some minataurs will be stronger than others, and some will be more dexterious than others, the same goes for Tabaxi. A tabaxi which is naturally strong and grows up putting effort into it might be able to become stronger than the average minotaur (say 15 v 12) but they wont be as strong as as the stongest minataurs. The strongest creature in Faerun is not going to be a Tabaxi but there will be Tabaxi who join the army as a ffighter and wield a long sword.
It isn't D&D which forces you into picking a race with ability bonus that match you class it is the fact you want to optimise.
You are not competing with the rest of your party you are working with them. If no-one optimises things work great, the DM just doesn't have to ramp up the CR of your combat becasue everyone is crazy powerful. You can have just as much fun against a green dragon as a blue one if the blue would be a little bit too much. If the rest of your party are optimizing maybe it is because they feel pressured to do so because you are? If not you can still play a tabaxi with a two handed sword, sure you will hit 5% less often than a minataur and do one damage less on a hit(until you catch up at strength 20), so you might do 10% less damage so the party does 2% less damage so what. And then the big bad throws a fireball at you and your catlike reflex mean you avoid the worst of the damage you will be glad of your choice. There are only problems when other players try to force your character choices to be optimised.
But a Tabaxi will be as strong as the strongest minotaur under the current rule system, because everyone is capped at 20. These supposedly inviolate rules about strength or dexterity or whatever being tied to racial identity are actually BS, because by level 8 or 12, anybody that wants a 20 Str has it (unless they're a kobold, in which case it took them to level 16), and nobody has 21. Has the Minotaur really lost his racial identity, just because the human fighter was able to hit 20 Str at level 8 at the exact same time he was, and the halfling Paladin was able to hit it at level 12?
What the stat bonuses have actually done is guaranteed that there aren't any low level multiclass Wizard/Bard minotaurs walking around, that Tiefling paladins are unusually prevalent, and that it's tough to find a dwarven fighter anywhere because they'e all become wizards and clerics. Instead of racial bonuses being used to enable players to say "not only am I a wizard, I'm a special wizard because of my race and background!", by and large they're used to limit players to "I want to play a wizard, which means I should really only be an x, y, or a z..."
Powerful Build is a great racial ribbon feature that ensures that the Minotaur is the Strong Guy in every party, regardless of class or build. If nobody had racial bonuses to Strength, Powerful Build would still clearly communicate that the Minotaur species are naturally strong. Why isn't that enough?
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