The thing about all this, is its about differences that are seen to be important because they are so easily measurable.
If you had two Fighters at the table, one with 14 Strength and one with 16, and all rolls and ability scores were kept secret so we only knew the final totals, how long would it take before an observer could say that one character was more effective than another? Especially if they were just watching and not trying to record and graph numbers or something like that.
Who cares if a third party can tell? DnD isn't exactly marketed as a spectator sport.
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I bolded the part where you seem to not understand the other side.
It is not how they got their stats, it is that the stats create a pattern. They do this by creating positive and negative outcomes of race/class combinations. The positive obviously attracts the majority of players. Now if you (which is what this entire debate is about) remove the negative then you remove the pattern. Hence, increase the likelihood of that race/class combination being played, ie. no longer unique.
That is what the people you are debating have been saying. You literally spell it out in your counter, yet somehow fail see it.
If this is what they mean, then I reject it as a problem. In fact, it seems to me to be the main benefit. We will see more combinations. Increasing the likelihood of characters that you rarely see at the table is a good thing.
Unless you can tell me how getting more diverse characters in more diverse roles is a negative for the game?
And for the record, it is not gimping the character. It's choosing to have that character focus on something other than their class's primary calling. Often, you find ways to do that by incorporating those non-patterned characters. Again, remove the negative, remove the pattern. C'est la vie uniqueness.
I'm not the one who started calling it gimping their character. I believe that was
@Oofta in one of his responses to me. Might have been
@Helldritch though. I just kept using their terminology.
But maybe they meant it was only gimping them to make the choice to move the scores.
I mean honestly, I think you understand all this. So I am unsure why you are debating. If you wanted to predict (just as the other side is doing) that the patterns will not go away, I would like to hear that. But this false façade and adding terms like gimping seem irrelevant.
And lastly, the part about harming the team really only applies to a handful of tables. Not very many tables are as precariously balanced as yours, where losing a +5% could mean a TPK or living. I get that, and commended it.
See, I wasn't arguing that the patterns would go away, because I didn't see this as a argument solely about how likely a race/class combo was to show up.
I saw this as a discussion on whether or not a character could still be unique.
A dwarf wizard is currently being seen as unique. I guess this is solely because dwarves make poor wizards. You can tell me it is, how did you phrase it, "choosing to have that character focus on something other than their class's primary calling" but if your Dwarf has the choice to move their stats to wizard stats, and instead chooses to keep their traditional dwarf stats, Oofta and others have told me that is gimping their character.
Instead, they want no choice. No ability to alter the dwarf at all, so their dwarf wizard is required to have the poorer stat array... and that makes them unique. Having the stats doesn't make them unique. Being a dwarf wizard doesn't make them unique. Being unique is solely a function (in the arguments being presented) of not having a choose in those stat numbers.
And that makes no sense to me. It makes no sense to me that they want to argue for their being fewer dwarf wizards so they can keep feeling unique. It makes no sense to me that they can only feel unique by having the choice withheld from them.
Will there be more dwarf wizards in the future? Yes. I guess that is bad though, because people who play dwarf wizards won't feel special anymore for not caring about the stat arrays that they don't care about. Or, like Oofta, they can no longer make a statement and point by playing their character.
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Size is a factor, but not everything. Mountain Dwarves are also dense and muscular, so they get the bonus despite being smaller than a Goliath. Tabaxi are not muscular or at least not extra muscular, but are more lithe and nimble. And look, they get a dex bonus. Then there's game balance to consider, so Firbolgs get +1 and not +2. It's not an exact science, but size and body type do play rolls in the stat bonuses.
So what is the body type for Wisdom bonuses?
Charisma?
I know it isn't an exact science, but we do have some answer right? I'm sure looking at Con and seeing that Orcs, Goliaths, Rock Gnomes and Stout Halflings all have the same con bonus of +1 makes perfect sense in this set-up of body type, correct?
The end result isn't relevant to whether or not you are playing against type. The stat bonus is what matters for that. It determines the average stat for that race, so if you have a strong race that doesn't get a bonus to int(Mountain Dwarf) and you choose wizard, you are playing against type even if your dwarf ends up smarter than that elf over there.
So, you can only play against type if in the process you aren't taking advantage of your numbers.
Guess Humans, Tielfings, Tritons, Warforged, and Half-Elves have no type to play against. Seeing as how they can cover such a wide range of stats with little issue.
Or you could have just used the rules on page 285 of the DMG that tell you how to create a subrace. No need to wait on them to release new stuff at all.
Or, instead of making a new subrace, we can represent things by moving the stats. No need to have a dozen statblocks when a few open ended options work just as well.
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As I've said before, flexibility was added, then it was clearly deliberately and consciously removed and now it's being added back in. I just think that context and the motives for both original backpedaling and the current backpedaling of the backpedaling are relevant. Did WOTC do research back in DND Next and find that the players overwhelmingly wanted the rules to reflect traditonal archetypes? Or was it purely the preference of the designers? Was it a kneejerk reaction to what they thought the player base wanted. And if enforcing racial archetypes was the player preference do they have any real reason to think that's changed?
But I don't know. Everytime lately I've suggested stepping back from an argument, looking at the context and considering a bit more nuance, people tell me that it's irrelevant. I guess a lot of people like being morally indignant and talking past each other endlessly.
Well, I don't think we could ever really know without being in the meetings when it was decided.
Did they get feedback seeing that races with floating ASI's were more popular because they were more flexible?
Did they see that in their video game properties ASIs were more often swapped?
Did they see responses in surveys about classes that had people saying "this would make a great archetype for [insert race] but they make poor [insert class] so can we make it for [insert second class] instead?
Was it partially a response to the firestorm kicked up a few months ago about orcs having negative intelligence?
Was it an optional rule they had always had on the back burner, but had never committed to because they figured DMs would just change it if they needed it changed themselves?
Did they get a lot of questions about how best to play odd combos?
Was it a combination of two, more, or all of these?
Without a transcript of meetings that took place, we literally have no way of being certain. So, I don't know if having a discussion about it is going to be fruitful. After all, we can only talk about what we saw, but there are a lot of factors we can't see, and they could have had just as big of a bigger impact than what we know about.
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Assuming we're talking about characters being played in the game's default setting (or a sufficiently similar setting), I'm interested in reinforcement and maintenance of the traditional stereotypes because they help support the shared 'D&D' experience.
I don't think there really is a very strong "shared DnD experience". I've talked to people from other sections of the county before, who find out I'm playing DnD and want to chat, and their stories are often as strange as my own.
I mean, I've got a post-apocalyptic game where my warlock is betrothed and running a city, while we search for magic nukes in ancient ruins. I doubt that is a shared experience.
And sure, our Orc (half-orc stats) is strong and tough, but she is a barbarian, so that is expected. She is also the High Priestess of our city, wears jazzercise outfits, and punched a disease to death in a magic pond. Twice.
I think she falls outside the bounds of anyones "shared experience" with DnD, and I think what makes her amazing would still be true if she was playing a gnome instead of an Orc. Especially if she was still able to fulfill the barbarian role of being tough and strong.
