D&D 5E Unearthed Arcana: Gothic Lineages & New Race/Culture Distinction

The latest Unearthed Arcana contains the Dhampir, Reborn, and Hexblood races. The Dhampir is a half-vampire; the Hexblood is a character which has made a pact with a hag; and the Reborn is somebody brought back to life.

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Perhaps the bigger news is this declaration on how race is to be handled in future D&D books as it joins other games by stating that:

"...the race options in this article and in future D&D books lack the Ability Score Increase trait, the Language trait, the Alignment trait, and any other trait that is purely cultural. Racial traits henceforth reflect only the physical or magical realities of being a player character who’s a member of a particular lineage. Such traits include things like darkvision, a breath weapon (as in the dragonborn), or innate magical ability (as in the forest gnome). Such traits don’t include cultural characteristics, like language or training with a weapon or a tool, and the traits also don’t include an alignment suggestion, since alignment is a choice for each individual, not a characteristic shared by a lineage."

 

[Scribe]

The existence of some stories where people do this doesn't negate the fact that many, many people choose race purely based on ASIs. So I was making the point that with floating ASIs both kinds of people get what they want

They don't.

Are you familiar with the MTG concept of Spike, Johnny and Timmy?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I guess I will never agree with you that limiting a PC halfling to a 15STR at character creation is zero to hero acceptable, but allowing them to have a 17STR turns the world into superheroic from the first day on the job. The fundamental reasoning is the hard 20 cap which very unrealistically levels everyone off to the same point (about midgame for a full 1-20 campaign) and makes it odd for me to consider that 15 vs. 17 is crazy as 1st level but 20 vs. 20 is doable at 12th.

I would prefer there to be differnt max caps an abilities based on the species. But still, the super strong halflings bother me less at higher levels, as high level D&D characters become increasingly unmoored from limitations of 'normal people' anyway, and I view them more as mythic heroes. I want low level characters to be pretty mundane though. I like that contrast.

 

[Faolyn]

Sorry, I should clarify. Bean Dad is a reference to a recent event where the frontman of a fairly well-known band posted a story on Twitter about a time when he “taught” his daughter to use a manual can opener by telling her neither of them could eat until she figured out how to open a can of beans by herself. He thought this was an amusing story about an innocent parenting moment, but a lot of people thought it was abusive, and couldn’t believe he would share such a story in such a public way.

To expand, he forced her to keep trying to open it for six hours, even though she was in tears, and wouldn't let her stop.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So, I think this is pretty revealing. I honestly struggle to understand why people are so attached to racial ASIs, and so resistant to change, and the only reason I find persuasive is that it's just knee-jerk resistance to anything that smells of political correctness. Certainly none of the attempts at "logical" support for racial ASIs that I've read are very convincing.

Bro I’m a socialist progressive who wears “see a Nazi, punch a Nazi” shirts because I’m not blind to the threat of neo-fascist white supremacist movements in the US, and I’d rather my metaphorical bar close for good than ever for a single day become a Nazi bar.

So, in short, no. It’s not just resistance to political correctness. I have vanishingly little respect or patience for anti-PC mentalities.
It’s about not wanting the game to make lineage into soemthing that IMO the game would be better just making cosmetic and entirely up to the imagination of the players and DM, with only ribbon-level mechanical impact.

the latter characters are stuck being a step behind the former.

Behind, no. Just different.

no class that makes prominent use of Strength needs the armor proficiency, and conversely, no class that lacks the armor proficiency demands a high Strength.

I think this isn’t true, but I don’t have time ATM to dig into it.

But yeah I’ve definitely made and seen Strength based gish characters that don’t get medium armor from their class. Sorcerer and Bard for sure, and non Hexblade Warlocks.

Strength is also very useful in the games I run regardless of your attack stat.

 

[cbwjm]

Aasimar and Genasi, too. That would be amazing. I want to play a dwarven Aasimar or Halfling Fire Genasi.

An easy way to do this currently, for some races at least, is to replace the subrace. A dwarf tiefling could get the resistance and spellpowers of a tiefling instead of picking Hill or mountain dwarf. I'd probably also grant +1 Cha as the ASI.

 

[Scott Christian]

@TwoSix Yeah I think its a given. The question to me that remains open, is will Wizards put distinction between the races into special rules that do not dictate class choice as heavily, but are still mechanically meaningful.

They can't. It is impossible to make a race good at something, and then not have that lend itself to a class. That is the comical part of this entire debate. It is what I said earlier. Once ASI is no longer a problem , but then they make a new elf that has a clutch memory and can memorize spells with no spellbook, their will be a vocal group that wants that for their human or dragonborn or something else. Rinse and repeat. There are only so many dials. Only so many knobs. If they turn one, it automatically helps a class or group of classes more than others.

Here is the litmus test. Look at feats. Most feats could just as easily be explained as racial or cultural. How many of them help a specific class or class group more than others. The answer is almost all of them.

Such will be the same when one tries to make races unique by using tons of feats.

 

[Faolyn]

I actually agree that the climbing rules do not make much sense, and I think climbing being dex-based would probably yield more intuitive results. Elephants or squirrels, which are better climbers?

In 3rd edition, dire elephants (MMII) got +23 to their climb skill. I am not joking.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

They can't. It is impossible to make a race good at something, and then not have that lend itself to a class. That is the comical part of this entire debate. It is what I said earlier. Once ASI is no longer a problem , but then they make a new elf that has a clutch memory and can memorize spells with no spellbook, their will be a vocal group that wants that for their human or dragonborn or something else. Rinse and repeat. There are only so many dials. Only so many knobs. If they turn one, it automatically helps a class or group of classes more than others.

Here is the litmus test. Look at feats. Most feats could just as easily be explained as racial or cultural. How many of them help a specific class or class group more than others. The answer is almost all of them.

Such will be the same when one tries to make races unique by using tons of feats.

Yep. And it is also pretty weird that there has been so much talk about halflings needing to be able to start with strength 16 to be able to be good fighters and barbarians, yet certainly them being unable to use heavy weapons is a far greater detriment? I fully expect people to start demanding that this limitation is removed next.

 

[Scott Christian]

What, primarily, does the STR score provide in 5e?

• How well you melee things
• How strong your melee hits are
• How well you athletic (running, climbing, jumping, playing dragonball)
• How much you can lift
• How much you can carry

As a martial artist, rock climber, tough mudderer, and etc, I will say that the first three are not entirely dependent on the amount of meat you have (ie, how big or dense you are). Here, how well you use your body is more important than how much of your body there is. A big person who hasn’t learned how to recruit their muscles well is carrying around more dead weight than anything else. (In certain cases, like in climbing, the more meat you have the worst off you often are, though height can be a counterbalancing factor.)

Very true about climbing. But as far as hitting things, it is assumed we have adventurers, not commoners. They practice those muscles. So you can't compare the commoner to the adventurer. You can compare MMA fighters to each other. And I can tell you any day that I would rather be hit by the 155lb guy below

Than the 265 lb guy here

But I agree with everything else you said about strength. In the end, using only six attributes, as opposed to 12 or minimizing it to 3, really does make it fall in the middle of simulationism and fantasy.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Point buy, roll a dX and divide those extra points to your stats as you decide.

That just gives you more opportunities to min-max. I meant "middle ground" in the sense of some balance between picking ability score exactly the way you want, and being giving some scores and told "play that".