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."

 

[Guest 6801328]

Yes. But not by brute force. The fact is halflings can make excellent combatants in D&D 5E, they have many advantages there. They just need to go with a dex build, just like David. And for me this is a feature, not a bug. It is not that some species should be better, it is that they need to approach things differently. (I think barbarian should be altered slightly to better support dex builds.)

Great. More rapiers. :-/

 

[Guest 6801328]

I really wouldn't want to play in a campaign in which that was true.

Interesting that you choose 5e.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Interesting that you choose 5e.

Why? It has simple and easy to use skill system and a good selection of spells that are useful outside of combat. Certainly far better for exploration pillar than 4e. Now if I wouldn't want any combat or just minimal amount of it, I wouldn't choose any iteration of D&D, but if I want to focus mainly on combat I would just play some miniature wargame such as Warhammer 40K or Necromunda. And if for some reason I wanted mainly focus on tactical combat and had to use some edition of D&D for that, then I would choose 4e. But that's not what I seek in an RPG in the first place.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

being penalized by the fact they want something unusual. But if it is unusual there are reasons. In italy we say "drunken wife and full barrel". Something like "have the cake and eat it too".

I strongly disagree that it's true that "If it is unusual there are reasons".

That's not true, or certainly there aren't good or sane reasons in most cases. It's usually just arbitrary and often quite lazy/thoughtless-seeming choices by the developers. In most cases the developers seem to have simply gone "What is it most obvious this being might be good at?" and mindlessly slapped a +2 on that. This is why we have way too many +2 CHA races, a fair chunk of +2 STR races (but all of them with a fairly narrow range of concepts), and a decent number of +2 DEX, but far fewer with +2 INT, WIS, or CHA.

This isn't some well-organised, well-considered decision by WotC. This is just a lot races being slapped together somewhat arbitrarily.

So that idea just doesn't work. This isn't wanting to have your cake and eat it. This is just simply wanting to eat your cake at all.

I've been passing the time making characters. The thing that happens, is if you were predisposed to build toward a 'logical' race/class due to the bonus, now you just look at what additional rules are on that race, and see if they still matter.

It just punts the min/max consideration down the road a bit, it will still happen, and ultimately the only change is.

"If you desired an official link between ASI and Race, with restrictions, you no longer get that."

I accept that that's your experience, but that's not been my experience, doing much the same.

Racial abilities tend to impact your choice of race a huge amount less than the ASIs, that's my experience, and that's largely reflected in what I see from players in the groups I'm in. It seems to me that the average 5E player, once they got their ASIs locked in, is pretty comfortable with taking a race that doesn't great racials, but is pretty cool. I even see min-maxers do this. For example, one min-maxer I know is running a Goliath Fighter. He picked it for the +2 STR, +1 CON, which obviously great, but he picked it despite the actual racial abilities - as he said at the time - not being particularly good, because he liked the style of Goliaths.

So I don't think it just kicks the choice down the road, especially not when you're creating characters for an actual campaign, which you'd want to play, rather than idly creating characters, where you don't care about playing them. I think it also raises the bar on min-maxing of race. A lot of players are just going to sigh with relief and pick whatever they think is cool, rather than scrabbling through dozens of races to find the most OP racial abilities. And I think the number who actually say "I'm willing to play a Yuan-Ti for the entire campaign, just to get that sweet, sweet Magic Resistance!" or whatever is going to be pretty tiny.

I know for example, my current most-played character in a campaign, I would have picked a different race if it wasn't for the ASIs. It's not like I dislike this one, but they're a compromise candidate - they have the right ASIs, and I'm okay with the style. Racial-wise, they're actually great, which also helped, but I'd pick objectively worse racials for a race where I wasn't only "okay" with the style. Whereas another character, he has pretty crap racials, but had right ASIs, and more importantly, I loved his style, and I wouldn't change even for a character with way better racials.

And I think I'm like about an 8/10 on the "degree of min-maxing" scale. Pretty much no-one I've ever played with min-maxes as hard in D&D (in other games, sure - like in Cyberpunk 2020 I was only ever about 6/10 on the min-max scale, whereas one of the other players was like 11/10).

 

[Charlaquin]

Yes. But not by brute force. The fact is halflings can make excellent combatants in D&D 5E, they have many advantages there. They just need to go with a dex build, just like David. And for me this is a feature, not a bug. It is not that some species should be better, it is that they need to approach things differently. (I think barbarian should be altered slightly to better support dex builds.)

Yes, and I’m in support of the goal of different races being good at being different classes in different ways. But at least with the way 5e is currently set up, my opinion is that racial ability score adjustments are the least interesting and least effective way to enable that. Lucky is useful to characters of any class. Brave is useful to characters of any class. Stone’s Endurance is useful to characters of any class. Strength is only useful to characters of some classes. A Goliath wizard isn’t a good wizard in a different way than a gnome is, it’s just a worse wizard.

 

[Charlaquin]

I really wouldn't want to play in a campaign in which that was true.

I’m not talking about in any given campaign, I’m talking about in the rules. Combat gets much more attention in the rules, particularly the player-facing rules, than any other part of the game. You can certainly run a campaign where combat is not a major focus, that just means you won’t be interacting with the majority of the player-facing rules the majority of the time. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. Hell, I love a good combat-light campaign. But to pretend combat doesn’t have a special place among the rules in D&D is silly.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why? It has simple and easy to sue skill system and a good selection of spells that are useful outside of combat. Certainly far better for exploration pillar than 4e. Now if I wouldn't want any combat or just minimal amount of it, I wouldn't choose any iteration of D&D, but if I want to focus mainly on combat I would just play some miniature wargame such as Warhammer 40K or Necromunda. And if for some reason I wanted mainly focus on tactical combat and had to use some edition of D&D for that, then I would choose 4e. But that's not what I seek in an RPG in the first place.

I find this odd, because D&D is objectively designed to focus on combat. Maybe relatively speaking, 5E is slightly less laser-focused on it than 4E (though ditching Skill Challenges and changing rituals actually means it 5E failed to gain as much ground as it could, exploration/social-wise), but by RPG standards, 5E is still extremely focused on combat, and the balancing of the entire game centers around that.

5E also has a pretty terrible skill system, because of the high degree of RNG combined with no margin of and no built-in fail-forwards support and so on. It is simple and easy to use, but guess what? Tons of other games also have that, and they have ones that also actually work well. Dungeon World and Spire/Heart spring immediately to mind as being as simple and easy to use as D&D, skill-wise (or moreso), yet also working a hell of a lot better and producing better results more reliably. And they're the tip of the iceberg.

So it's totally valid to question why you'd pick 5E on that basis. I can think of loads of reasons to pick 5E, but it seems really wild to pick the skill system.

Comparisons with 40K/Necromunda make absolutely no sense at all unless you play D&D 1 on 1. Do you? Otherwise that's entirely different category of experience.

 

[Don Durito]

Yes, it would indeed be absurd if people were insisting that halflings and Minotaurs had the same stats. If, for instance, they demanded that all npc halflings and Minotaurs had the same six attributes.

If you see anybody doing that, let me know so that I can mock them.

Well if you go back and read my post in the context of the ones before them it should be clear.

I might have offered more but...well passive aggression gets what it gets.

 

[Charlaquin]

I strongly disagree that it's true that "If it is unusual there are reasons".

That's not true, or certainly there aren't good or sane reasons in most cases. It's usually just arbitrary and often quite lazy/thoughtless-seeming choices by the developers. In most cases the developers seem to have simply gone "What is it most obvious this being might be good at?" and mindlessly slapped a +2 on that. This is why we have way too many +2 CHA races, a fair chunk of +2 STR races (but all of them with a fairly narrow range of concepts), and a decent number of +2 DEX, but far fewer with +2 INT, WIS, or CHA.

This isn't some well-organised, well-considered decision by WotC. This is just a lot races being slapped together somewhat arbitrarily.

So that idea just doesn't work. This isn't wanting to have your cake and eat it. This is just simply wanting to eat your cake at all.



I accept that that's your experience, but that's not been my experience, doing much the same.

Racial abilities tend to impact your choice of race a huge amount less than the ASIs, that's my experience, and that's largely reflected in what I see from players in the groups I'm in. It seems to me that the average 5E player, once they got their ASIs locked in, is pretty comfortable with taking a race that doesn't great racials, but is pretty cool. I even see min-maxers do this. For example, one min-maxer I know is running a Goliath Fighter. He picked it for the +2 STR, +1 CON, which obviously great, but he picked it despite the actual racial abilities - as he said at the time - not being particularly good, because he liked the style of Goliaths.

So I don't think it just kicks the choice down the road, especially not when you're creating characters for an actual campaign, which you'd want to play, rather than idly creating characters, where you don't care about playing them. I think it also raises the bar on min-maxing of race. A lot of players are just going to sigh with relief and pick whatever they think is cool, rather than scrabbling through dozens of races to find the most OP racial abilities. And I think the number who actually say "I'm willing to play a Yuan-Ti for the entire campaign, just to get that sweet, sweet Magic Resistance!" or whatever is going to be pretty tiny.

Remember when Tasha’s origins system was first revealed, and everyone was freaking out over how OP mountain dwarves were gonna be? I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I haven’t seen an explosion in players playing mountain dwarves yet. Granted, the book hasn’t been out for that long, but even so, the mountain dwarf hype has already died down, exactly like I figured it would. The fact of the matter is, even players who aren’t dedicated min-maxers tend to look to races with ASIs in their primary class abilities first, unless they have a compelling reason to do otherwise. Removing that concern has mostly just opened up more viable race/class combos in most players’ eyes. Min-maxers may well latch on to other racial abilities, but that just isn’t how most people play the game.

 

[Don Durito]

I strongly disagree that it's true that "If it is unusual there are reasons".

That's not true, or certainly there aren't good or sane reasons in most cases. It's usually just arbitrary and often quite lazy/thoughtless-seeming choices by the developers. In most cases the developers seem to have simply gone "What is it most obvious this being might be good at?" and mindlessly slapped a +2 on that. This is why we have way too many +2 CHA races, a fair chunk of +2 STR races (but all of them with a fairly narrow range of concepts), and a decent number of +2 DEX, but far fewer with +2 INT, WIS, or CHA.

This isn't some well-organised, well-considered decision by WotC. This is just a lot races being slapped together somewhat arbitrarily.

So that idea just doesn't work. This isn't wanting to have your cake and eat it. This is just simply wanting to eat your cake at all.



I accept that that's your experience, but that's not been my experience, doing much the same.

Racial abilities tend to impact your choice of race a huge amount less than the ASIs, that's my experience, and that's largely reflected in what I see from players in the groups I'm in. It seems to me that the average 5E player, once they got their ASIs locked in, is pretty comfortable with taking a race that doesn't great racials, but is pretty cool. I even see min-maxers do this. For example, one min-maxer I know is running a Goliath Fighter. He picked it for the +2 STR, +1 CON, which obviously great, but he picked it despite the actual racial abilities - as he said at the time - not being particularly good, because he liked the style of Goliaths.

So I don't think it just kicks the choice down the road, especially not when you're creating characters for an actual campaign, which you'd want to play, rather than idly creating characters, where you don't care about playing them. I think it also raises the bar on min-maxing of race. A lot of players are just going to sigh with relief and pick whatever they think is cool, rather than scrabbling through dozens of races to find the most OP racial abilities. And I think the number who actually say "I'm willing to play a Yuan-Ti for the entire campaign, just to get that sweet, sweet Magic Resistance!" or whatever is going to be pretty tiny.

I know for example, my current most-played character in a campaign, I would have picked a different race if it wasn't for the ASIs. It's not like I dislike this one, but they're a compromise candidate - they have the right ASIs, and I'm okay with the style. Racial-wise, they're actually great, which also helped, but I'd pick objectively worse racials for a race where I wasn't only "okay" with the style. Whereas another character, he has pretty crap racials, but had right ASIs, and more importantly, I loved his style, and I wouldn't change even for a character with way better racials.

And I think I'm like about an 8/10 on the "degree of min-maxing" scale. Pretty much no-one I've ever played with min-maxes as hard in D&D (in other games, sure - like in Cyberpunk 2020 I was only ever about 6/10 on the min-max scale, whereas one of the other players was like 11/10).

I'm somewhat torn on this.

If I wanted to play a Half-Orc Wizard I would. I wouldn't be too bothered about the lack of a +2 in Intelligence - I feel it's overrated.

What I probably wouldn't do if I wasn'treally sure what race to pick is go "Why not a Half-Orc?". The thing that would annoy me most I think is less that I was 5% less effective as a wizard initially (that mostly gets lost in the wash - and if I'm the only wizard in the party who cares anyway?) But that the compensating factors were basically useless. A half-orc wizard could theorectically play against type for a wizard and get a 14 Strength without too much trouble but that doesn't really mean a lot in practice. It might be actually fun if I was the only Strength based character in the party, but if not well it seems just a waste. (And If I'm optimising I have Strength 10 rather than 8 which is pretty much no difference as it falls under the category of - try to avoid rolling ever). And the Half-Orc racial ablities, while not completely useless for a wizard also don't really give much of any worth either). Basically I'm not sure the issue is that I don't start with 16 Int, it's that I don't get anything that makes me effective in a different way. A Hill Dwarf with a 14 Strength and a 16 Con (with +1 Hit point) is different, the ability scores make a different style of Fighter, one that is less accurate and hits slightly less hard but is much tougher. Even the Wisdom bonus is useful as picking up Resilient Wisdom is always a good move for Fighters.

At the same time, it bothered me when playing 4E, that when I played a Mul Fighter and had to choose between human and dwarven racial features. I chose human for some fluff feats that really fit my character, but it really annoyed me that that meant I was making the obviously inferior choice as I was missing out on Dwarven Weapon training which was a racial feature which was clearly better than anything I could get as a human. (Of course this was in 4e when builds mattered a lot more).