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."

 

[Scott Christian]

Hey, maybe I'm projecting a few non-mechanical problems onto this. Maybe if I'd had a good experience with the story I really wanted I could have overlooked the fact that I neutered my character on the altar of that story. Maybe I wouldn't look and say, "Well, if I'd played a Hill Dwarf I would have had a better Wisdom, same con, better hp, more useful resistance, better weapons, better tools, and more useful abilities." Because Stonecunning would have actually been incredibly useful in that game, compared to clockwork toys and artificer's lore.

Chaos, sorry I used the term delusional. I meant it in the most informal sense as possible. It is a slang term amongst my friends. So I apologize.

And I agree with most of your sentiment, especially this one. I mean, the groups I play with take it seriously, but we play for fun. A min/maxed character is fun for us, but a sub-optimized character that is min/maxed in something else is even more fun. When you can surprise other players, it is cool. I mean, there are campaigns we haven't even told one another our classes or races prior to gameplay. That is fun. Sometimes you get two or three bards. But it is also fun to meta-plot the perfect party.

In the end, I just hope everyone finds a good table. One they are comfortable with. Because, in my personal belief, even with all this rhetoric in these messages, I doubt anyone from one side or the other would have a terrible time playing at a table on the other side.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Because while people here are focusing on the "horrors" of a halfling with a +2 bonus to Strength, what is actually happening is, because you want to deny that floating +2, you are also saying that halflings can't be anything but dexterous, and goliaths can't be anything but strong, and gnomes can't be anything but smart, and tieflings can't be anything but charismatic, and so on.

While this misrepresentation of what the people you disagree with are saying has been made before, it is probably worth reiterating:
No one seems to be suggesting, what you are trying to claim they are suggesting.
A weak goliath is still weaker than most humans Therefore to suggest that those people are saying that "goliaths can't be anything but strong" is . . . incorrect.
Likewise with the other races. A Halfling that is considered clumsy by other halflings only trips over as much as an average human.
A player character halfling Str-based fighter is an outlier: they are much stronger than the average goliath.

You are literally saying that all races need to remain in their little boxes and that all players need to limit themselves because some players are incapable of imagining that there's a strong halfling or a smart orc or a wise goliath.

Would you consider a person able to lift 450lbs to be 'strong'?
Would you consider a person the size of a child to be able to lift 10 times their body weight to be 'strong'?
Likewise with feats of intelligence, etc.
Your argument seems to be saying that a person who can lift that 450lbs cannot think of themselves as strong. Only if they can lift 480lbs are they actually 'strong'.

Here, I'll give you another example. My preference for medieval fantasy to be kind of low tech, or at the least, to have realistic levels of technology.

The Artificer completely flies in the face of that. It bugs the hell out of me that Artificers are able to make complex machinery in six seconds while in the middle of a tense situation like a combat. Even "fantasy realism" insists that wondrous devices should require at least days worth of work in a workshop somewhere, and more likely months, and should be limited to things like a weirdly complex and working clockwork device or maybe an ornithopter that really flies and simple distilled elixirs.

And yet, the artificer is a thing, and is capable of creating an equivalent of the Iron Man suit of armor in an hour--and not only in an hour, but while resting. Fighting for a minute or casting a spell or two ruins your ability to get the benefits of a rest, but creating gauntlets, by hand, without using magic to do so, that can shoot lightning bolts is easy-peasy! It would take a wizard months to do the same thing!

This completely destroys any logical sense of fantasy realism, it makes wizards look incompetent, and it destroys my sense of immersion.

If it helps, it is pointed out that the artificer isn't generally creating those gauntlets from scratch over a rest, but is simply making some finishing touches/charging up a project that they a currently had.

Likewise, while complex machinery could be a valid way of expressing an artificer, it isn't really what the class is about. Jabbing glowing needles into meridian points on the body, or waving a bone inscribed with runes at their foes can be closer to what it represents.

Honestly? Because I really want to hear reasons why people think pigeonholing all halflings as Dexterity-y or all tieflings as Charisma-y is better, either in-game or for meta-reasons, than letting players choose what their individual characters are like. There's a reason why I kept asking people, including you, that, and I'm sure there's a reason why nobody is giving me an answer. Call me petty or say I'm sealioning if you like, but I really want to know the reason. I mean, maybe you have a good reason, even if I can't think of one.

I think the reason that you're not getting an answer as to why it is better is that those people aren't claiming pigeon-holing is better. I think most of the optimisers who would pigeon-hole all halflings as Dexterity-y or Rogue-y based on a mere +1 to rolls are the same ones who want floating ASIs because of the the additional +1 to rolls.

So it is literally impossible that there is a single halfling who was blessed by the gods with great strength, even though gods regularly bless people with all sorts of benefits in D&D-land? It is literally impossible that there is a single halfling who, due to training, managed to become a weight-lifter?

I think you might not understand the argument here: That example, that you are claiming people are saying is "literally impossible"? That person taller than a halfling, and weighting three times more? Is lifting over 200lbs less than a halfling could pre-Tashas.
To claim that people are saying it is "literally impossible" when it falls well within the bounds of what they are requesting is . . . false.
Whether you made the claim due to not understanding the discussion, or understanding it and deliberately misrepresenting other's wishes, it is still false.

The discussion is closer to whether that dedicated weightlifter would be able to lift a bit total weight more if they had put in the same level of training but had not been born with dwarfism. But frankly its a bad example: they are human and thus within the bounds of human ability bonuses.

The pre-Tasha's system tells people who were so small that the doctor considered breaking their legs in order to make them tall enough to be normal that they couldn't be a strong hero.

That person went on to be competitive in 5k and 10k races, while completely the fitness and weapons standards of the Special Forces. That person is me.

Lets be clear: Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister in the Game of Thrones show) for example, is considerably taller and over twice the weight of a halfling.
The pre-Tasha's system tells people that unless your adult size is much smaller than Peter Dinklage's, you will not be able to lift more than 450lbs at the start of your career.

The problem isn’t Intelligence. The problem is that IRL football linebackers aren’t stupid, but their D&D equivalent (Barbarians) are.

Most barbarians are likely of average intelligence. A player of a Barbarian character that chooses to place their low score in Intelligence is simply playing an outlier.

 

[Don Durito]

You have always been consistent Don. But, this just rings of another: I want it now.

I want my barbarian to be just as smart as the wizard. There are, after all, real life examples of this; football linemen that have 4.0 GPAs or have off the charts mechanical aptitude.

Yet, the entire thing seems to just ring (to me) of I want my barbarian to be smart too. The game should let me have a smart barbarian, and a high con barbarian and a strong barbarian, etc.

Then you haven't been paying attention. I haven't been arguing that a Barbarian should have a 16 Int, I've been arguing that a Barbarian or Paladin with 8 or 10 Int should not have to be played as 'dumb'. They should only be played as bad at the things they are mechancially bad at. Being ignorant of history, religion and arcana shouldn't mean the character is dumb any more than being ignorant of Quantum Physics or Chinese Dynastic history is an indicator of a moron in real life.

The characterisation of a character should be consistent with the mechanics. It should not be overdetermined by them*. Especially when you look at some of the character classes and see, given what they need for the basic elements of their class, how little real choice there is.

I mean, for all these people that need the extra points, why not just increase the point buy by six or eight? It won't break the game, especially if your entire group does it. It actually will not change anything. Goes back to me wanting them to place different point buys in the DM's Guide's section of styles of play.

Well I do you use a different character generation system for my own games. I give an array of 15,15,14,13,12,9 (or 11,10) for players who don't want penalties, precisely to somewhat address this issue and allow more breadth (and slightly better save scaling). You really don't end up with noticeable more powerful characters but you do end up with characters with more breadth. But this isn't really the same issue anyway.


* If you are rolling 3d6 in order to see what you end up with and then playing a character whose abilities scores have relatively little influence on how the character works out in play then that's different. But 5e isn't designed to work like that - and it especially doesn't work like that if you are using point buy.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Most barbarians are likely of average intelligence. A player of a Barbarian character that chooses to place their low score in Intelligence is simply playing an outlier.

Absolutely irrelevant to the point in contention.

 

[Don Durito]

It always puzzles me that people see the difference between an ability score of 8 and 10 as some kind of cosmic leap.

This is psychological, but part of the weirdness of ability scores. Some players will think that an 8 means they should play their characters as "Me Ug. Me Dumb" but a 10 is a perfectly normal person. And from what I've seen on the net at least, some GMs will even go so far as to ignore the 10 but that insist that players should feel the full weight of their "choice" of an 8.

In real practical terms a 10 or an 8 are both dump stats. Once you've put an ability score there you have little hope of passing saves beyond a certain point and you will generally try to avoid rolling anything that depends on that ability score.

This is why you see so many PCs with an 8 in Strength. Why not? You've already decided your character is a bookish spell caster or a small agile rogue, you're already vulnerable to grapples and strength saves, why shore up something that you can't really shore up when you're best strategy is to avoid situations that call for those rolls anyway?

 

[Faolyn]

While this misrepresentation of what the people you disagree with are saying has been made before, it is probably worth reiterating:
No one seems to be suggesting, what you are trying to claim they are suggesting.
A weak goliath is still weaker than most humans Therefore to suggest that those people are saying that "goliaths can't be anything but strong" is . . . incorrect.
Likewise with the other races. A Halfling that is considered clumsy by other halflings only trips over as much as an average human.
A player character halfling Str-based fighter is an outlier: they are much stronger than the average goliath.

Using the old rules, an average goliath is stronger than an average human, and an average halfling is more agile than an average human. However, the point I've been making isn't about average people of any race. I haven't been talking about the halfling species or the goliath species at all. I've been talking about, as you say, the outliers, the unusual ones, the freaks of nature, the people who've been blessed or cursed by the gods: the PCs.

Yes, I agree: halflings, as a people, are on average biologically more agile than humans, mysteriously as strong as humans, and not as strong as goliaths. But your halfling PC is not an average member of their species. By definition, PCs extraordinary people who are generally physically and mentally more capable of surviving the monster-filled world of D&Dland than anyone else and are among the few people in the world who can use magic or fight demons and survive.

But there are people who in fact claiming that no halfling (or human, or elf, or aasimar, or triton) should be extraordinary statwise because... somehow it's wrong. It doesn't make sense to them, and they can't seem to understand or don't care, no matter how many times I've said it, that I'm talking about PCs and not entire races.

And you should also know that I'm not just talking about Strength. I'm talking about all the stats: why can't a halfling be as wise as or wiser than a firbolg, or as healthy as or healthier than a dwarf, or as smart or smarter than a gnome?

Would you consider a person able to lift 450lbs to be 'strong'?
Would you consider a person the size of a child to be able to lift 10 times their body weight to be 'strong'?
Likewise with feats of intelligence, etc.
Your argument seems to be saying that a person who can lift that 450lbs cannot think of themselves as strong. Only if they can lift 480lbs are they actually 'strong'.

I fail to understand how anything I've said even comes close to that.

If it helps, it is pointed out that the artificer isn't generally creating those gauntlets from scratch over a rest, but is simply making some finishing touches/charging up a project that they a currently had.

My entire point with the artificer is that just because I don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of D&D.

I think the reason that you're not getting an answer as to why it is better is that those people aren't claiming pigeon-holing is better. I think most of the optimisers who would pigeon-hole all halflings as Dexterity-y or Rogue-y based on a mere +1 to rolls are the same ones who want floating ASIs because of the the additional +1 to rolls.

I disagree, in large part because I was never talking about optimizers. I was talking about making the characters you want and not being stuck with racial clichés.

There are people who are claiming that, if I want to put my +2 in a stat that supports my class, that means I'm minmaxing. These same people are also indicating that it's not minmaxing to play a race that has a fixed stat that supports the class. In other words, if you want to play a Strength-based fighter, you should go for orc or goliath, not halfling, or else you should suck it up and play a weaker Strength-based halfling.

In terms of minmaxing, there is no difference between playing a race with a fixed ASI that benefits your class and playing a race with a floating ASI that you can put in the stat that benefits your class. The only difference is, if you play a race with a fixed ASI solely to get that ASI, you're playing a clichéd character.

I think you might not understand the argument here:

My argument is: just because someone is short doesn't mean they can't be strong. Especially in magical D&Dland.

I have not watched GoT--I tried to read the books and gave up--but from what I've read, Peter Dinklage is a good actor. This suggests that, if he were a D&D character, that he put his +2 bonus in Charisma. Which he couldn't do if he were a D&D character.

Also, you're falling into the same trap that the others have: I am not talking about the Race of Halflings. I am talking about individuals. From what little I remember of the book and a third I read, I don't recall him being a Strength-based fighter. Which meant that, if he were an actual halfling and not a human with dwarfism, he put his bonus into something else. Which could be Dexterity, I don't know, and that's fine if it was his player's choice.

Again: just because I think that halflings should be able to put their ASI in Strength doesn't mean I think that every halfling should or even will do so.

(This is just like the mountain dwarf wizards. Everyone was afraid they'd take over and it never happened. Yes, maybe a few players decided on mountain dwarf wizards for the bonus they'd get, but most people haven't.)

That example, that you are claiming people are saying is "literally impossible"? That person taller than a halfling, and weighting three times more? Is lifting over 200lbs less than a halfling could pre-Tashas.

Yes, there are some people saying that it should be literally impossible for any halfling to be stronger than average, no matter what the circumstances or the weird magic in their background or anything else.

 

[Faolyn]

I've been thinking about shrinking the attribute list down to Fitness, Wits, and Will, but I haven't decided yet if I want to.

I'd add Agility, because that is sufficiently different from Fitness to work.

Anyway, yeah, Numenara just...it's a sci-fi setting pretending to be a fantasy setting, and to me, that hook only works about once in a given world. From then on, we all know it's all tech, but the world keeps trying to act like it's magic, and I just would rather play star wars or something at that point.

I agree. Numenera has a lot of interesting bits, but they're the type of bits I'd much rather file the serial numbers off of and stick 'em on any other world, rather than use the entire 9th World setting. I like what I've played of the Cypher System and will likely use it for my next setting, but I'm not a fan of their canonical campaign settings.

(Also, for a world that's all about exploration and diplomacy, Numenera has an awful lot of creatures that are supposedly intelligent but whose only motivation is "hungers for flesh."

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'd add Agility, because that is sufficiently different from Fitness to work.

The idea of fitness is to simply encompass athleticism and health, which agility is part of, but yeah no model is gonna be perfect.

I agree. Numenera has a lot of interesting bits, but they're the type of bits I'd much rather file the serial numbers off of and stick 'em on any other world, rather than use the entire 9th World setting. I like what I've played of the Cypher System and will likely use it for my next setting, but I'm not a fan of their canonical campaign settings.

(Also, for a world that's all about exploration and diplomacy, Numenera has an awful lot of creatures that are supposedly intelligent but whose only motivation is "hungers for flesh."

 

[Don Durito]

In terms of setting I found the Torment: Tides of Numenera Explorers Guide to be the best setting book for the game. It's developed a lot more than the rest of the line (as it was developed for the computer game) and is about the right size for a campaign, without being overdeveloped. It's also relatively seperate from the rest of the setting.

I was never really happy with the way 'magic' worked in Numenera, just making it nanotech didn't really work for me. Personally I'd go with a situation in which some past civilisation 'cracked' the world in some way by opening it up to other dimensions and that's why magic works.

 

[JEB]

Having a few more where there is no recommended isn't going to suddenly make those 30 options disappear.

Let's presume that Wizards produces a sourcebook that has, say, several brand new character races - not the lineages in the UA, but something new to 5E, like (random choices) Mystara's lupin and diabolus. And those writeups don't have any ability score suggestions. Are you arguing that there's nothing unfortunate about my friend having a harder time figuring out how to play these character races in a way he thinks is unusual and interesting? When a single sidebar with non-binding suggestions would solve all these problems for him and players like him?

See, but they don't want to choose to play an unoptimized combo. If that were the case they would have no problem choosing to put their ASIs in unoptimized places. They want the game devs to box them into a single choice, that forces them to put the ASIs in an assigned place, then play it as an unoptimized combo.

You're partly correct, they aren't choosing, specifically, to play an unoptimized combo. They're choosing to play a halfling that is a barbarian. They like having guidelines that say "halflings are usually like this" and playing within those guidelines, but combining it with an unexpected class choice (the barbarian). It's a role-playing decision, made so he can play against expectations, so he can struggle against those limits and make his victories all the more interesting and creative. That's what makes that character fun for him. But for him to continue making characters like that, he needs to have expectations to play against. That's what will be lost if Wizards doesn't have recommended defaults.