5% is all that the systems gives us. Not my fault that getting anything under 8 is basically impossible. O wait, you meant the difference between 14 and 16? Both are high! But apparently the difference is so important that players and DMs claim a character with the former is somehow crippled and unplayable!
It's not "unplayable," but that's because "unplayable" is a BS standard that should never even be
considered.
Like, for real, I am getting sick and tired of people ever mentioning "unplayable" anything. If it were unplayable, it would be SO HORRIFIC, so ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE that no one would give it the time of day. Playability is the ABSOLUTE ROCK BOTTOM, the barest of bare minimums; if something were LEGITIMATELY unplayable, so unbelievably bad that it
literally prevented a person from even attempting to play, it would not only not deserve the title of "game" but would be an immediate topic of psychological research for how it can achieve such a psychologically devastating result. I imagine it would in fact be of interest to people investigating psychological warfare.
Instead? 16 is good. 14 is mediocre. Less than 14 is gonna be noticeable (e.g. going from a 60% to a 50% hit rate doesn't sound like a lot, but it means you miss not quite one-fifth more often than you used to.) Most people want to do well, so most people want to have a good stat in the thing that has the biggest impact on what they can do. That's why there's so much emphasis on being SAD, for example; it's easy to get a 16 in the stat most important to you, and if you can do things to make that stat do more stuff, well then you don't have to worry about any of your other stats, so they can be as high or as low as the game permits, and you only care because you just like having them that way.
Again, this is exactly what I spoke of earlier. People hyperbolize to the extreme; they portray
all optimizers as whiny, petulant jerks who wring their hands over the tiniest details and throw hissy fits about literally everything. It's incredibly frustrating and insulting. I really wish you, and others, would stop doing that, and instead actually have a respectful conversation. This thread is rapidly demonstrating that that isn't gonna happen today.
I do some optimization. Sometimes, that means pursuing high stats. Other times it doesn't. (I actually preferred taking slightly lower main stats as a Paladin in 4e, so I could have higher secondary stats. 4e offered enough mechanical depth that this was
actually a choice, and not "would you like to be demonstrably inferior at what you're best at in order to maybe be decent at something else?") Sometimes it means answering a weird question, like, "Is it possible to have ALL the skills, and I mean ALL of them?" (With the addition of the Prodigy feat, the answer is now 'yes': half-elf Rogue 1/Knowledge Cleric 1/Lore Bard for the remainder, pick up Skilled and Prodigy.) Other times, it's just a question of what the possibilities are, like Zee Bashew's "The Diviner Who Knew Too Little," a character concept (hardly even a "build") based on the film
The Man Who Knew Too Little, where the character's success is built on being a Diviner (Portent) and a halfling, ideally with the Lucky feat. Probability warps around the character, enabling implausible situations and humorous escapes, a delightful concept for roleplay opportunities.
With the current design trends I'd be surprised if race -sorry I meant lineage- wasn't but a pointless background detail in 6e.
Oh, almost certainly. It's extremely disappointing, but an almost inevitable result of the flattening policy behind 5e's design.
Or you can instead play smartly and play to your strengths, finding alternative ways to achieve the same thing. It isn't as if a cha 8 sorcerer is going to solve everything by blasting... or a nimble barbarian is going to be able to rely on rage...
What strengths, exactly, does an 8 Cha Sorcerer have? Certainly not any that a Sorcerer with better Charisma
couldn't have. And if you're so set on a +1 or +2 difference not mattering, then why does having 14 Strength (or whatever) as a Sorcerer matter? You've already pooh-poohed the difference between 14 and 16 (or even 12 and 16). Why is that Strength 12-14 making such an impact then? It seems like you're trying to have it both ways.
A nimble Str 8 Barbarian is actively shooting herself in the foot, since Rage almost exclusively benefits people who use Strength. (You don't get Advantage on Dex attack rolls, and you don't get your Rage damage bonus on attacks made with Dex; the only benefit is the damage resistance.) There's a pretty big difference between "you can't solve everything with Rage," which is true for
literally 100% of Barbarians, and "you've literally made it so you don't get 2/3 of the benefit of your class features."
Why not, instead of just asking people to pursue inferior performance, support stuff that
rewards diversity? Give Sorcerers a reason to think Strength or Wisdom could actually be neat, instead of wasteful. (Like, I dunno, the way the Next Playtest Sorcerer was actually a super cool and thematic concept that rewarded diverse stats and playstyle changes instead of SADness and uniformity....just sayin'....)
I was flat out told that if I don't have a 14 in Constitution then I don't know how to play the game.
And I have likewise been told that caring at all about your stats, to any degree whatsoever,
actively prevents you from roleplaying.
There are extremes on both sides here. It's not helpful to pretend otherwise. Maybe, instead of shooting at extreme strawmen, we could instead try to have a respectful conversation about different preferences and what can be done to ameliorate them?
