Level Up (A5E) Changes to race (species?)

[Minigiant]

"I would like culture and species to be separated during character creation.”

I was thinking just separating the High from the Elf and Rock from the Gnome. Then being to swap it to High Gnomes and Rock Elf, But maybe I'm thinking of something different from you all.

 

[clearstream]

No ability score adjustments. You choose those yourself with point buy.

Does this mean literally no ability score adjustments, or is it intended to imply those adjustments shift into point buy? If so, how? And what happens if one is rolling? Or using some other system that might be introduced in Level Up?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think all this discussion is extremely premature, because WotC is working on material which does this.

My understanding is that Level Up wants to remain substantially compatible with 5E, yes? That all WotC material should essentially remain usable. Given WotC are working in exactly this design space, I think it's an outright bad idea to even start working on stuff here, until what WotC is doing becomes clear.

There is not much worse, for my money, when you get a third-party product which covers the same ground as an official one, but does it differently, and often both have hard-incompatible or significantly incompatible approaches (which is extremely likely to be the case here), so you have to pick one, and they probably both have serious weaknesses or things you wish the other had. Whereas if you just wait for the official material, you can work from there, and do a better job - support whatever areas it is weak on, expand areas where more material would be good, and so on.

Chucking around ideas is fine, but locking yourself into them or getting a really fixed idea of what Level Up "should" do in this space at this point seems like a very bad plan.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

But WotC is working more in modules and in the lore/backround to use D&D as multimedia franchise and not so much about the crunch. 3.5 was the golden age of the crunch. Years after the corebook we only have got a new base class, the artificier. 3PPs have published lots of new or updated classes.

There is an empty space in the market, the crunch, but to sell more books, the publishes need enough prestige or truth by the players who buy.

And publishers have to offer something interesting when the own players can create, literally hundred, new PC races, or adapting ersatz versions of famous IPs.

But if you buy a sourcebook where the new PC races have got their own list of racial feats, then to find new racial feats in other titles will be harder.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If this is actually supposed to be some extra crunchy version then I would want the species to be more differentiated and not less.

And as the balance is concerned, redoing the rules in more crunchy format is a good opportunity change the classes so that they're not so dependent on single stat so that everyone playing that class has to have the same score in that. And I'm not just talking about some lame 'just choose which ability to use for your attack/casting' but options that bring meaty benefits other than those raw attack numbers. For example a sorcerer variant that has a con based ability to channel their own health to more sorcery points, a battle wizard that benefits from physical stats and enhance their melee attacks with their spells, a tactician fighter whose stratagems benefits from int or a commander fighter that has cha based features etc.

 

[CubicsRube]

I think the path taken by Ancestry & Culture is the way to go. Keep ability adjustments (on the culture side), let people have the same options they've always had, but split ancestry and culture so people can mix and match if they want.

I think there's a lot of value to this.

If for example at character creation you choose:

Your ancestry
Your culture
Your background
Your class

Then you have a number of interesting modular choices. By adding a fourth element you increase the diversity of characters remarkably. You can have 2 dwarves in the party but maybe one grew up with elves and was an acolyte, while the other grew up in a traditional dwarven clan and became a blacksmith.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think there's a lot of value to this.

If for example at character creation you choose:

Your ancestry
Your culture
Your background
Your class

Then you have a number of interesting modular choices. By adding a fourth element you increase the diversity of characters remarkably. You can have 2 dwarves in the party but maybe one grew up with elves and was an acolyte, while the other grew up in a traditional dwarven clan and became a blacksmith.

Tying mechanical benefits to a culture is frankly a terrible idea. Once you try to do that with human cultures or with non-human cultures that resemble real world cultures it gets super unfortunate really fast.

 

[Haldrik]

I think all this discussion is extremely premature, because WotC is working on material which does this.

My understanding is that Level Up wants to remain substantially compatible with 5E, yes? That all WotC material should essentially remain usable. Given WotC are working in exactly this design space, I think it's an outright bad idea to even start working on stuff here, until what WotC is doing becomes clear.

There is not much worse, for my money, when you get a third-party product which covers the same ground as an official one, but does it differently, and often both have hard-incompatible or significantly incompatible approaches (which is extremely likely to be the case here), so you have to pick one, and they probably both have serious weaknesses or things you wish the other had. Whereas if you just wait for the official material, you can work from there, and do a better job - support whatever areas it is weak on, expand areas where more material would be good, and so on.

Chucking around ideas is fine, but locking yourself into them or getting a really fixed idea of what Level Up "should" do in this space at this point seems like a very bad plan.

True that WotC appears to be working on a product that allows players to customize the species of their character.

It is worth seeing what that looks like.

 

[ThatGuySteve]

Ditch ASIs based on species, or limit them to +1 physical only. Add two +1 ASIs to background (effectively floating since you can mix and match background bonuses). I can better believe a Scholar being smarter than a Street Urchin, than saying High Elves are intrinsically smarter than Dwarves.

You could double up your species +1 with a background +1, giving a slight edge to martial types, maybe?

Culture should be more RP than mechanical, such as determining languages, bonds, ideals, etc. Could also suggest preferred weapon or tool choices, working with a background like Soldier, to determine which weapon proficiency is granted by the background. Arcanis 5e campaign does this very well.

 

[TwoSix]

There is not much worse, for my money, when you get a third-party product which covers the same ground as an official one, but does it differently, and often both have hard-incompatible or significantly incompatible approaches (which is extremely likely to be the case here), so you have to pick one, and they probably both have serious weaknesses or things you wish the other had. Whereas if you just wait for the official material, you can work from there, and do a better job - support whatever areas it is weak on, expand areas where more material would be good, and so on.

Just a tangent, but I've never understood this concept re: third party overlap. Just use both! There's nothing wrong with multiple mechanical expressions of an in-game concept. I have 3 different rangers I allow in my game, 2 different druids and 2 different artificers.