D&D 5E Ability Score Increases (I've changed my mind.)

[Scribe]

So DnD should only cater to a single taste? Then how can DnD contain Eberron? You are contradicting yourself.

No, I'm not. The contradiction is your response here to what you quoted.

I won't play your game either, you can keep dancing in circles with Max.

Take care.

 

[Maxperson]

Resembling is not irrelevant. Resembling is a connection, the thing you have claimed that you have none of towards real life.

No it's not a connection. If I write up a murder in the game and it says, "A woman murdered a 16 year old girl who was placed in her care," it has no connection to the Gertrude Baniszewski murder despite it's similarity. Especially since I didn't even know about that murder until I just googled it. You don't get to forge a connection that isn't present, just because you find some random similarity with something in real life.

You've never directly Custer's Last Stand? Fine. Have you referenced any last stand ever? Congrats, you have made a connection between fantasy and reality. Is it a direct connection that paints a point by point picture? No, but it is a connection.

It's not a connection. Any last stand I've done has nothing at all to do with Custer.

I legitimately don't understand how you don't see connections. Nothing you bolded connects to a real world thing? Well, let me think, talking about guilt and innocence. Do you think that might connect to the theory of "Innocent until proven guilty"? The cornerstone of the American legal system? Does this mean you need to have an in-depth discussion of legal theory and how it applies in the American Legal System? No, obviously not. But just because we aren't having a 30 hour dissertation on legal philosophy doesn't mean that there is no connections that could be drawn.

A connection connects to things together. Two telephone poles are unconnected without the wire, despite their similarities. If I don't actually connect my fantasy creation with a real world instance of something, there is no connection.

No. They aren't, and you have never demonstrated that an effective +1 to a stat is somehow important.

Sure I have. You just don't agree with it.

A half dozen that have the exact same ability scores you think that might have been important?

No. Not to my point anyway.

I'm not applying my perspective to your words, I'm applying it to your theory. And proving it false. We have exactly the scenario you describe, and the result is not what you describe. Yes, I know, "exactly" isn't right because it is only six races that should be seen as identical and not a hundred, but if it doesn't work for six, why should it work for a hundred?

I haven't presented any theories.

 

[Maxperson]

So DnD should only cater to a single taste?

That isn't what he said. But why should I be the only person you twist arguments with.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yes. Many times. Heck, I still cry when I see Gandalf sigh after Frodo volunteers to take the ring. But, your points to Max were about violence. Hence my comments.

No, my point to Max was that you can't talk about "Good and Evil" without talking about the ideas of good and evil in the real world. He now seems to be saying that as long as he isn't citing murder scenes from the NYPD then murder in the fantasy world has no possible connection in any way shape or form with murder in the real world. Ignoring that the ideas of murder apply to both, hence a connection.

And you stepped in to assert that I can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Of course.

Nope, it sadly does happen. And they can tell the difference.

There is no doubt in my mind you can tell the difference and do see real-world parallels.

What would be the point of storytelling indeed? Thanos wipes out half of humanity - hopefully you feel for those that are lost. Hopefully, poor teenage Spidey gets the viewer to be sad.

But, there is also another side. Escapism. One that watches Legolas and Gimili hack through orcs and feel nothing for them. One that watches Black Panther and Captain America kill all those demon-dogs and not feel a thing. One that watches Lethal Weapon and watches Riggs be a cowboy cop and shoot all those bad guys, and again, feel blank or maybe even cheer.

That is why I feel there is a disconnect in your argument. You don't seem to be able to believe both sides can exist. You can make players feel for characters in a story. You can also make them feel nothing. All within the same campaign.

I guess the question is do you believe both sides can exist within the same story? Or is it always some layer of grey, that hinges of one definition of violence, one that must be attached to real-world characteristics?

Of course both can exist. But that's the point. BOTH EXIST.

Yeah, I can sit back and watch Riggs cowboy it up and shoot the bad guys, and it can be great entertainment. But that doesn't mean that there is no possible connection that can be drawn between that and a trigger happy cop in the real world. Not a connection like Lethal Weapon caused that. Or that Lethal Weapon was crime scene accurate to a police shooting. Or that they stopped and had a 30 minute PSA in the movie about police shootings... but that both things happened. There are cowboy cops who shoot people. There are people who lose everything in an instant because some powerful entity pressed the button. Wars are fought. People are hurt. People die.

Saying that you can portray anything you want in fantasy, and its fine because it isn't real and has no connection to reality is naive at best. I'm not saying we need to rewrite every piece of fantasy ever, I'm not even saying we have to stop portraying violence. I enjoy fight scenes in movies. They are great. But, I can also recognize that fights are a real thing that happen, and that some people use violence to solve all their problems, and that that is a thing in the real world.

Fantasy references reality. You can't draw a hard line and say that nothing that happens on one side of that line can ever affect or reflect on the other side. That isn't how it works.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It's literally, "This race is more dexterous when it's not actually a race that is more dexterous." That's what dex feats with no dex bonus produce. That's nonsense. The reason I don't like it is that it's nonsense. If it made sense, I wouldn't care.

So why is the lucky feat okay? Or do only halflings get to take the lucky feat because they are a lucky race?

The entire point of racial feats is to show the race is more dexterous without requiring the entire race to have a +2 Dex. That isn't nonsensical, it is shifting the design focus. Less focus on numbers, more on abilities.

 

[Malmuria]

So why is the lucky feat okay? Or do only halflings get to take the lucky feat because they are a lucky race?

And the feat is so much better than the halfling ability! That is, the thing that is supposed to make a race feel unique is overshadowed by a variant human with a feat at 1st level.

 

[Argyle King]

So why is the lucky feat okay? Or do only halflings get to take the lucky feat because they are a lucky race?

The entire point of racial feats is to show the race is more dexterous without requiring the entire race to have a +2 Dex. That isn't nonsensical, it is shifting the design focus. Less focus on numbers, more on abilities.

Do you think that would require D&D to have a higher level of granularity?

I think that the +2s and such were seen to work because they were broad strokes, to illustrate things for a game which tends to deal in broad strokes.

In other games, you might have traits like "high manual dexterity," "flexibility," and "perfect balance" which deal with different aspects of being dexterous.

 

[Maxperson]

No, my point to Max was that you can't talk about "Good and Evil" without talking about the ideas of good and evil in the real world. He now seems to be saying that as long as he isn't citing murder scenes from the NYPD then murder in the fantasy world has no possible connection in any way shape or form with murder in the real world. Ignoring that the ideas of murder apply to both, hence a connection.

The real world helps provide our understanding of in game issues like evil and murder, but in game murders don't have connection with any instance of real world evil or murder. You don't get to cite similarities and say, well that's bad because X happened in the real world and the language is similar. There's simply no connection to X.

 

[Maxperson]

So why is the lucky feat okay? Or do only halflings get to take the lucky feat because they are a lucky race?

What stat is lucky?

 

[Malmuria]

Do you think that would require D&D to have a higher level of granularity?

I think that the +2s and such were seen to work because they were broad strokes, to illustrate things for a game which tends to deal in broad strokes.

In other games, you might have traits like "high manual dexterity," "flexibility," and "perfect balance" which deal with different aspects of being dexterous.

I think there are already ways to do this without adding granularity. For example, skill expertise is a thing that exists, so a dexterous race could get proficiency and expertise in acrobatics. That would be a +4 to your acrobatics roll at 1st level, equivalent to a +8 ASI, but only for acrobatics checks (which would feel quite meaningful because of the way bounded accuracy works).

Related: at 1st level being proficient in a skill is twice as meaningful as a racial asi.