D&D 5E What To Do With Racial ASIs?

[DND_Reborn]

That, plus the feat, would make it possible to start with an 18. Nearly inevitable, maybe.

Well, for tables that allow a feat at level 1, you can already get an 18 even with point-buy. So, for groups with power-gamers and min/maxers, you're likely to see that anyway.

Of course, you can already get an 18 when rolling, so nothing new there. In fact, with rolling you can start with a 20, which IMO is horrible and leads to zero-growth--which is why we don't roll.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Well, for tables that allow a feat at level 1, you can already get an 18 even with point-buy. So, for groups with power-gamers and min/maxers, you're likely to see that anyway.

In my system, though, the only characters that could do that would be non-humans taking one of their archetypical classes. E.g., a half-orc gets his +1 in Str, assigns his floating +1 to Str, and then uses a half-orc feat that gives +1 to Str. One of my design goals was to max out all starting characters with a +3 bonus, with some races being able to do so with a 17.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This brings us to the dwarven monk. A dwarven monk would probably put the dump stat into charisma. The mountain dwarf will thus have between 12 or 14 in strength. A good thing for the athletic checks for grappling opponents. Constitution would high and it is ok. But the real surprise comes from... Armored Monk! For a few level, the mountain dwarf would be able to compensate his "lower" dex with a good medium armor. Nothing prevents him from being a monk and wearing armor save the way his AC would be calculated. Not a big loss. He would be able to put 14 in dexterity, 13 in constitution and 15 in wisdom. This would bring the mountain dwarf in a good spot for the time needed to get his dex higher with his next three ASI. No mobility for this dwarf but he would start with a better AC anyways. The hill dwarf would get a good wisdom, nice HP and would start with a higher wisdom. Giving him equivalent AC and raising the dex as the mountain dwarf would. Not bad. I'll suggest it next campaing just to see...

Armored monk means they lose martial arts, and the majority of their features. Not just AC.


You are essentially just playing a fighter that punches things instead of using weapons.

@Helldritch excellent stuff. These are exactly the sort of characters I want to see. Much more interesting than every race just defaulting to the same cookie-cutter builds.

Why do people keep frickin insisting that starting with a 16 means they are "cookie cutter builds". Isn't every Barbarian being a Half-Orc more of a cookie cutter than every barbarian having a higher to hit bonus.

I mean, how many of you guys are looking over each others shoulders, reading each other's character sheets and memorizing that stat arrays that this is such a problem for you guys?

I am sorry you took it that way. Bold my entire text and you will notice its context. Never in it do I say min/maxers do not care about role playing. I say they care about min/maxing more than role playing, which is directly related to the argument.

You still said they aren't the same people as the people who are playing DnD. I'm not sure how else I'm supposed to take that. But then again...

I never said character creation is a pillar of the game. I said that the mechanics of ASI is a pillar of the game. You see, I use the word pillar as in foundation, not exploration, combat and social. Sorry if there was confusion.

Again, lore is also associated with tropes. Sorry if my definition of lore and pillar was confusing, I thought it was obvious. Lore: Brunor Battlehammer - dwarf. Burly, Strong. Fighter. Drizzt Do'Urden: dark elf. Dual wield. Agile. Ranger. They are part of D&D's lore, right? They are now tropes, right? Their mechanical advantages can be found in the way players create characters, right?

To get rid of tropes is to get rid of lore.

Yeah, using words to mean things no one means is going to cause confusion.

I'm not going to bother talking about Racial ASI's as "foundational" to the game, since they change in most editions. That would mean we've changed the "foundation" of DnD quite a few times.

I do want to talk about lore, tropes, and fictional characters.

Yes, Brunor and Drizzt are fictional characters in DnD. And they even inspired other characters. Of course, Brunor isn't a trope, in so much as Thorin Oakenshield or Gimli is the archetype. And Archetypes aren't Tropes per se.

Additionally, tropes are not lore. That isn't how tropes work. A trope would be something like "The Love Triangle" Lore is how the game world is built and hung together.

All of the information in Volo's Guide, or Mordenkainen's? That is lore. None of that is changing. And, there can still be strong dwarves, it just isn't automatic that all dwarves are strong.

Forget the other scores. The lightfoot halfling barbarian will invariably and defenitely choose Str and Con for their +2. You just unkowingly proved my point. That halfling barbarian will be barely discernable from a half orc, a dwarf, a human, a dragon, a thiefling or whatever other race you care to put in the barbarian shoes. Ho yes, a small change here and there. Lucky trait, resitance to poison etc... but down the end, they will all be exactly the same.

Here's our take on the halfling barb that we had not so long ago. Halfling barbarian zerker. Dex 20, St 10, CN 16. The little bastard was quite a sight to behold. She had an amulet of health, ring +1 and a shield +1. She was at 23 AC. It could go higher with haste, shield of faith and warding bond. She was using a short sword as her main weapon. She might not have been the most effective damage dealer, but she was a terror to behold. She was a crit seeker and she was quite tanky. High AC, Zounds of HP and +5 to damage while not raging is not that abnormal. Even by giving advantage to the enemies, she still had high AC and would take half the damage. The little she devil was quite a surprise for her enemies and that group retired at level 15 right after OotA. She would have killed to get her hands on a flaming sword but she was still quite happy with her vicious short sword. With advantage, she was able to deal a lot of damage as she was a good crit seeker and this meant that the sword's ability would kick relatively often. She was often enlarged and would then used her rapier (vicious too...) for the same effect.

RP wise, she was playing as a timid candid little halfling. She did not look strong and she was not the type to lift a man in the air in anger. But boy could she clean a bar of bad clients! When she was raging, she would describe herself acting like Taz in looneytoons. The red hair halfling was a flaming tornado that you had to take into account. A dex base barb...

If she had had the choice of floating ASI, she would have made a plain old barb. St and CN enhanced. What is the surprise in that? Every Barbs will look the same, mechanically.

Right, so much better that instead we see Half-Orc Barbarian after Goliath Barbarian after Half-Orc Barbarian than possibly see Barbarians who are all different races but have 16 str and 16 con. How much better this is for us.

Because, at my table? No one would play a Barbarian with 10 strength. Even if I told them about how terrifying this one character was with her multiple magic items. They would just stick with the races that are designed to encourage barbarians.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

38 pages of arguing.

The poll shows that quite a few people are happy with the way it is. You can min/max and certainly races give the bonus your class needs.

or you can pick a sub-optimal race and role play it.

Seems that the current system has choices,

Or ...

WoTC has already said they have something coming that breaks the ASI to races bond. So that will be an option. I think it will lead to the same stats for different races Based on the class (a swing to too much min/max), but it is a design choice that will be laid out there.

Want to play a high selling example of that? Here’s the link again:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

Now, I vastly prefer the current system and think that the arguments for changing it are emotion-based stretches to find fault in a system that really does or exist. However, it costs me nothing for the choice to exist. So why not let WOTC create some rules and see. I am. It going to convince someone to lay aside their emotions on an internet message board and in this case, not my part to tell other people how to have fun.

I play a lot of 0e based D&D now and have fun. I have shelves of other systems. If WoTC messes it up, it is not like I don’t have years of 5e materials to play or tons of other systems to run.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Why do people keep frickin insisting that starting with a 16 means they are "cookie cutter builds". Isn't every Barbarian being a Half-Orc more of a cookie cutter than every barbarian having a higher to hit bonus.

Because really what we'd be looking at is mostly just that one attribute being the same, right? Sure, every Barbarian starts with a 16 or 17 Strength. But then they'll have varying Dex scores depending on their armor plan. Some will dump Cha, but some will want it for Intimidation. Some will have a wily, seasoned warrior in mind and will put points in Int or Wis; some will dump those, opting for the "dumb brute" build.

But, yeah, "cookie cutter" because they start with a 16 or 17 in Strength. Cry me a river.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Because really what we'd be looking at is mostly just that one attribute being the same, right? Sure, every Barbarian starts with a 16 or 17 Strength. But then they'll have varying Dex scores depending on their armor plan. Some will dump Cha, but some will want it for Intimidation. Some will have a wily, seasoned warrior in mind and will put points in Int or Wis; some will dump those, opting for the "dumb brute" build.

But, yeah, "cookie cutter" because they start with a 16 or 17 in Strength. Cry me a river.

Exactly, we can mess with other scores via order, or something else.

And Floating ASI's retain the possibility of doing something interesting. Heck, you could do a +2/+1 and do a Dex/Con Barbarian, which is currently only possible with a V. Human taking the proper feat.

Or make an Wis/Int build, or any number of possibilities. It is literally giving us the option to be less cookie cutter.

 

[Maxperson]

Well, for tables that allow a feat at level 1, you can already get an 18 even with point-buy. So, for groups with power-gamers and min/maxers, you're likely to see that anyway.

Of course, you can already get an 18 when rolling, so nothing new there. In fact, with rolling you can start with a 20, which IMO is horrible and leads to zero-growth--which is why we don't roll.

This just happened. I DM most of the time, but every so often one of the guys gives me a break and DMs for a while. We just rolled up characters last week and my stats for my Elven Bladedancer are S:13, D:20, C:15, I:17, W:14, and CH:11. My dice were on fire. Now in full disclosure, we do use a variant where you get to pick two stats to roll 5d6-2L, two stats at 4d6-L, and two stats at 3d6. Even so, I rolled VERY well.

That said, growth to me is more about the character than the stats, so I disagree with you about zero growth.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

A bit like PF2. I might be ok with something like that.

Is that how they do it?

I could even see allowing any two stats but you still only get the ribbon in your favored attributes. The point, for me, is that simply having part of the writeup for a race be a static, simple, easy to understand and apply broadly, sign that says “gnomes are smart and halflings nimble and orcs strong” without having to read the details of the features is an important part of the game.

The at a glance understanding of the basic trope or theme or niche of the race matters. And it’s good for the game. But it also matters that it have some actual mechanical weight, so long as that weight isn’t overwhelming.

Yes but that can happen one of two ways:

The tiny minority of people who currently roll halfling barbarians (etc.) start with higher strength, but based on Doc’s thesis we can ignore them because “most” people don’t make that combo.

Or, the result of a floating ASI is that more people start playing oddball combos, but that undermines the theory that ASIs aren’t a significant factor in race decision.

Which is it?

Please don’t invent dichotomies based on arguments I didn’t make.

 

[Charlaquin]

Is that how they do it?

More or less. In PF2, each ability starts out at 10. Each race grants +2 to two ability scores, -2 to one ability score, and a floating +2 which you can put in any ability score that did not receive a +2 from your race (except humans and half-humans, which just get two floating +2s.) Your background gives you a +2 in one of two ability scores and a floating +2 that can go in any other ability score. Your Class gives you a +2 in its primary ability score (or your choice of its primary ability scores for classes like monk and rogue that can have different primaries depending on how you build them). And finally, you get four floating +2s that can go in any four different ability scores (no doubling up). It’s pretty neat.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That, plus the feat, would make it possible to start with an 18. Nearly inevitable, maybe.

Yeah, the danger here is that if you make it possible to start you with a 18, then in an environment where bonuses pigeonhole classes people will perceive it as the new baseline and feel that they 'must' have that. We already discussed this when I suggested point buy allowing 16 so that everybody could always get at least that. However since the last time this was mentioned, one thing has occurred to me. Changelings actually already allow to start with Cha 18. How large percentage of charisma based classes are changelings?