D&D 5E Halflings are the 7th most popular 5e race

[Lanefan]

Except they had the same thing going on in 4e and didn't change it.

It was bad there too.

And it's not like they didn't know about it. So by choosing to put it in the game, I'm left to assume the 5e design team wanted healing to work this way, meaning that, to them, this is a feature, not a bug.

Nobody's perfect, not even the designers of 5e...

And if they don't change it for Exciting New Flavor D&D in 2024, that just makes it even more evident.

They won't change it, because players (who make up the majority of the survey respondents) will always tend to vote for whatever option makes the game easier on them, which this does; not realizing that doing so isn't in their own long-term better interests.

And why is that? Because a game that is too easy gets boring more quickly.

 

[Lanefan]

Sounds like an awful lot of work to me for...very little benefit. Like, I genuinely don't understand what benefit you get out of doing this.

In 1e D&D as written, some species (like classes) had minimum stat requirements.

To get away from this - and as it's work we only ever had to do once - we just shifted the bell curves instead, so whatever you rolled could and would be adjusted to be in the same relative place on the bell curves of the species you ended up playing.

Okay, but like...I'm dead certain we've had a discussion in the past where you have (in not so many words) said something to the effect of balance being a bad reason to do game design of any kind. That you would do so here, and indeed do so exclusively for balance reasons, is...more than a little baffling.

Rough balance is worth trying to achieve, along the lines of close enough is good enough. Fine-tuned balance isn't; and 3e and 4e both showed us that a finely (i.e. overly) balanced system is much less forgiving if-when things go out of balance - look no further for how poorly those editions handled parties where the character levels weren't all the same - even a 1-level variance could really throw things out of whack.

I also don't care much about moment-to-moment or round-to-round balance. If one character has the capability to blow this scene or even this whole adventure away and another character can blow the next one away, I'm fine with that. If one character is blowing every scene away, though,there's a problem.

My question is just: Why should species be what makes an individual special? It isn't what makes humans special. Why should other sapient creatures have every relevant characteristic of theirs summed up by their physiology, when that's trivially obviously a foolish concept when applied to human beings?

Because all the other species in the game aren't Human.

That's the point: the game was originally designed along the lines that Humans are supposed to be the species that can do a bit of everything, while the others are better than us at some things and worse than us at others. I've never seen any good reason to change that foundation, even after in effect kitbashing and rewriting almost the entirety of 1e over the years.

It doesn't seem to me that you're doing so at all--you're simply saying, "Oh, this would be unbalanced. Better that I just say that can't happen." That's...not actually heading the problem off at the pass.

Er...yes it is: saying something can't happen heads off any problems - balance or otherwise - it might cause before they even have a chance to manifest. And through 40-odd years of trial and error I've gained a little bit of wisdom when it comes to seeing problems on the horizon and stopping them before they get much closer.

Still not perfect, though - my current game still has some deep-rooted (though fortunately fairly minor) design mistakes that I can't in good faith fix until I run out a whole new setting...which likely won't be for some time yet, if ever.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Yes, and banning something up front is that ounce of prevention.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because all the other species in the game aren't Human.

They are not human--but they are sapient beings with self-determination and personal identity. Why is it their sapience, self-determination, and personal identity are always trumped by their physiology?

That's the point: the game was originally designed along the lines that Humans are supposed to be the species that can do a bit of everything, while the others are better than us at some things and worse than us at others. I've never seen any good reason to change that foundation, even after in effect kitbashing and rewriting almost the entirety of 1e over the years.

Completely missing the point. I'm not saying every race should be "can do a bit of everything." I'm saying that every race that is capable of being a player character should have sapience, self-determination, and personal identity. Sapience being human-like awareness and intelligence: the ability to understand oneself as distinct from one's environment, to reason about the world around oneself, etc. Every playable species should have this trait in order to be, y'know, playable. Self-determination should, I hope, be self-evident, but just in case, it means the ability to make one's own choices for how one will live, what actions one will take, etc. (Obviously, some situations like dictatorial regimes or slavery or the like can severely degrade a person's ability to exercise their self-determination, but they have said determination nonetheless.) And, finally, a personal identity is individuation: all the personality quirks, verbal tics, tastes, preferences, dislikes, turns of phrase, etc. which make a person distinct from other people.

Hence why I agreed with the notion above, that a truly eusocial species, one with a "hive mind" or autonomous but not independently-thinking drones or the like, would be one of the few ways to dodge the above--because such entities would lack at least two and possibly all three of the above qualities (they might or might not be sapient, but they certainly wouldn't have self-determination nor personal identity.)

If Dwarves possess sapience, self-determination, and personal identities, why is it their species is what makes them special? Doesn't that erase their individuality worse than the other way around?

Er...yes it is: saying something can't happen heads off any problems - balance or otherwise - it might cause before they even have a chance to manifest. And through 40-odd years of trial and error I've gained a little bit of wisdom when it comes to seeing problems on the horizon and stopping them before they get much closer.

Again: no it's not. Because you had to patch something in at the end, after everything was said and done, because the combination of those things would be broken. You had to ban something. That's--by definition--after the problem ("A wizard with too much health would be broken") has already happened. A Dwarf Wizard would be broken, therefore you are now forced to ban them. Cutting the problem off at the pass would be asking either, "How can we make Dwarves still be really robust--important for them in several other classes--without making Dwarf Wizards overpowered?" Or, though I don't think this would be as effective, "How can we make the Wizard generally balanced around physical frailty when some races bring strong (even, potentially, extreme) natural robustness that could completely eclipse that?"

As an example of the latter, consider the 13A Necromancer. One of its class features actually punishes you for having a positive Con modifier (and, if you invest feats into it later on, you can actually get bonuses for having a negative Con mod.) Something like that is a brilliant design move, because it doesn't force players to never play Dwarf Necromancers (for any reason, balance or otherwise), and instead gives them a reason why they shouldn't choose to do that. (or, well, it would in your game's model of stats. 13A stats work differently.)

Yes, and banning something up front is that ounce of prevention.

Er...no it's not. It's a pound of cure. Prevention would be the situation where you don't need to ban anything in the first place. Dropping the banhammer IS the prevention!

 

[Neonchameleon]

Except they had the same thing going on in 4e and didn't change it. And it's not like they didn't know about it. So by choosing to put it in the game, I'm left to assume the 5e design team wanted healing to work this way, meaning that, to them, this is a feature, not a bug.

And if they don't change it for Exciting New Flavor D&D in 2024, that just makes it even more evident.

It's a bugfix that is considered better than the bug. The bigger bug is that being on 0hp or dead means you have to sit out of the game, which is boring. It should be tense but all you personally actually get to do is roll a death save (or mark off one hp). And being dying or dead is boring because you don't actually do anything while dead. 5e is pretty consistent; it prioritises the player experience and gives the DM very little. And the "get up from 0hp easily" is mostly annoying for the DM.

I think I use a better solution; when someone is on 0hp they get to hand their action (but not their move) to another PC of their choice to represent fighting harder because this is serious. But this sort of meta-mechanic is anathema to a group of D&D players.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Rough balance is worth trying to achieve, along the lines of close enough is good enough. Fine-tuned balance isn't; and 3e and 4e both showed us that a finely (i.e. overly) balanced system is much less forgiving if-when things go out of balance - look no further for how poorly those editions handled parties where the character levels weren't all the same - even a 1-level variance could really throw things out of whack.

Not seriously so. It just wasn't done after 3.0.

And the problem here wasn't balance. It was power scaling, especially in 3.X. The difference is that 3.X characters doubled in power about every two levels and 3.X was supposedly a 20 level game. oD&D (and for that matter 4e) characters doubled in power about every four levels and oD&D had 10 levels before the soft-cap while 4e supposedly had 30. You can be balanced and have extreme power scaling or imbalanced and have trivial power scaling.

 

[Horwath]

Huh. I wonder why a species that is more or less locked out from like three classes due to garbage size rules might not be played as often...

Completely agree with garbage rules.

Penalties for size should be much bigger. 3E style.

 

[greg kaye]

I don't know of any evidence to specify any accent to any of the LotRs peoples.
Tolkein, however, did indicate that he had "no doubt that... all users of the [C.S.] C[ommon] Speech would reveal themselves by their accent" in his Letter [numbered] 193:

I have no doubt that, if this ‘history’ were real, all users of the C. Speech would reveal themselves by their accent, differing in place, people, and rank, but that cannot be represented when C. S. is turned into English – and is not (I think) necessary. I paid great attention to such linguistic differentiation as was possible: in diction, idiom, and so on; and I doubt if much more can be imported, except in so far as the individual actor represents his feeling for the character in tone and style.

As Minas Tirith is at the source of C. Speech it is to C.S. as London is to modern English, and the standard of comparison! None of its inhabitants should have an ‘accent’ in terms of vowels &c. The Rohirrim no doubt (as our ancient English ancestors in a similar state of culture and society) spoke, at least their own tongue, with a slower tempo and more sonorous articulation, than modern ‘urbans’. But I think it is safe to represent them when using C. S., as they practically always do (for obvious reasons) as speaking the best M[inas] T[irith]. Possibly a little too good, as it would be a learned language, somewhat slower and more careful than a native’s. But that is a nicety safely neglected, and not always true: Théoden was born in Gondor and C.S. was the domestic language of the Golden Hall in his father’s day (Return of the King p. 350).

 

[jmartkdr2]

That's a slightly different matter. You're talking about classes being unavailable to certain races. There's a difference between "No dwarf can be a wizard" and "Only elves can be bladesingers"

There's arguments for the latter, though - although mostly it works if Bladesinger is just one kind of wizard/fighter hybrid, just the specifically elfy one. Humans have magi, gnomes and halflings have duskblades, dragonborn have elemental knights, and any race can be a hexblade. Or something like that.

So long as you don't wall off a whole category it can work (although there's definitely a lot of potential bloat if you go this route)

 

[jmartkdr2]

I've always kinda wondered about this "whack-a-mole" thing. How long are your combats that this is actually an issue? For all the years I've played or DM'd 5e, combat's pretty generally over by round 4 or 5 at the most. Figure that no one (usually) goes down in the first two rounds, that means that someone might go below zero HP in round 3. Pick them up in round 4. Combat's done.

It's not so much "whack a mole" as just ... well... whack.

Like a lot of criticisms, I find that when the rubber meets the road, these theorycrafted issues just don't happen. Or, don't happen often enough that it needs to be fixed.

The way healing works is because of a different design goal: they do not want manndatiry healers. If no one wants to playa healer, that shouldn't be an issue.

In order for that to be true, healing just can't be very powerful. If healing is powerful you need to either balance the game around the party having it, or let healers be broken. (Which isn't even the fun kind of broken because they drag things out).

But they don't want to axe healing entirely, so they make it situational - after someone's already down. Thus the "whack-a-mole" thing.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Except they had the same thing going on in 4e and didn't change it.

Not really?

4e Healing healed a quarter of your total plus some. It did more than a single enemy hit would and thus was worth actually doing outside of people being downed. It was also usually a minor action so you weren't blowing your entire turn to do it.

5e really, really wanted to force out of combat healing without giving a care to how people actually play the game. So you have people desperately trying to make healing 'count' because it blows your action and actively sucks in combat.