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

[Lanefan]

As Halflings are the size of 2-year toddlers, anything above Str 4 is always going to be unrealistically strong for them.

Well, maybe not Str 4 - they might be the size of small children but they've had time to develop mature muscle structure etc. - but yeah, anything beyond about Str 12 might stretch credence.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

C: Leads to bland and shallow player options.

Only if you use the worst way of implementing it.

That's the argument I keep making, and which keeps getting magically ignored.

 

[Scribe]

Only if you use the worst way of implementing it.

That's the argument I keep making, and which keeps getting magically ignored.

Which they did?

I mean I'm not sure what you are arguing for to be honest. I'm not against balance, but 'balance' is utterly meaningless. People will say the math behind 5e is fair. I say its easy mode. People will say 'without the +2 to my primary I'm useless' I'll point out the math and laugh.

So, I'm afraid I'm not sure what you are saying.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

First, it's not true because ability scores aren't the only difference. Dragonborn have elemental halitosis. Elves have trance. Etc. These features can, and arguably should, carry more weight than bland +2 to whatever.

That’s how my game is built. You have an assigned attribute bonus in 2 attributes, but it’s very clear in the text of each ancestry that you can choose different ones.

Then you have stuff no one else can do. Alfar talk to spirits as if they themselves were spirits, with different other traits depending on whether they are Myrkalfar or Vidalfar, Döragr can speak to the earth and stones, turn their bodies to stone, and eat anything organic for sustenance.

Each ancestry also has two signature skills, and can trade them if desired, with a note that they should still reflect where the character comes from in some way.

But the part that isn’t malleable is also the part that actually makes them stand apart from eachother meaningfully. The traits.

 

[James Gasik]

That would explain it. Do no dms ever attack downed pcs? And the fact that you come back prone means you’re losing mobility as well.

I suppose the fact that I allow potions as a bonus action might be a contributor here as well.

I’ll admit that I just haven’t really seen this.

Given how anemic healing is compared to incoming monster damage, as annoying as the trend is, it's pretty easy to see why it can happen.

Cure Wounds is a hard spell to use, since you have to be in melee range of the target to cast it. So unless everyone stays relatively close together, it might not even be possible to tag someone with it. But let's look at a fairly typical scenario.

In a game I'm playing at the moment, we have a level 4 Ranger with a 15 Constitution. Let's say he has 39 hit points. He's fighting a CR 5 Bulette which can hit for 4d12+4 piercing damage. An average hit brings him to 9 hit points.

The level 4 (non-Life) Cleric can rush up to heal him with an upcast Cure Wounds for 2d8+4. The average result of this is 13, bringing our Ranger to 22. The Bulette attacks and if it hits, he goes to 0.

Or he could attempt to Withdraw or Dodge instead of attacking, and the Bulette can attack the Cleric, who has, say, 34 hit points and is now at 4. Or he could use his standard action to drink a potion and get 7 hit points, putting him at 29...an average Bullette hit puts him to 0.

The other way of doing things is you wait for the Ranger to hit 0, which takes 2 turns for the Bulette to do since attacking him when he's down is 2 failed death saves; heal him before his turn comes up and he'll be fine.

Your spell is still only giving him 13 hit points instead of putting him at 22, but given the Bulette's damage, it's academic. At this point you might as well have your Cleric stay away from the Bulette and keep throwing level 1 Healing Words at the Ranger for 1d4+4 to bring him up to make his attacks on the thing while spamming Toll the Dead or something.

The Ranger could die outright to a lucky critical (max damage here is 100 points!), but there's nothing you can do about that; anyone in your party would instantly die to that, after all.

And the only real cost to being knocked down and healed to 0 is prone, which only takes half your movement to recover from, and then you can do anything you were going to do on your turn anyways.

And if you survive the fight, well, the Cleric may not have had to use up all their level 2 slots, and the Ranger has 4 Hit Dice to work with (though that means he's going to have to be extra cautious tomorrow).

And it's because out of combat healing is so plentiful that in combat healing is so terrible, apparently (I had a fun thread about this last year wondering why healing can't be better).

I hate that this is the paradigm, and that all the solutions people dream up for it is to further punish players for going to 0 hit points, like "gain a level of fatigue", etc.., when the real problem is, monsters deal a ton of damage and for most levels of play, nobody has the resources to do much about it.

Anyways, I apologize for the derail of the thread.

 

[Clint_L]

Can it?

The XP track and XP for GP. In oD&D you are going to catch up to basically a level behind the rest of the party in the time it takes them to level up once. And that's without the XP for GP rules also enabling power levelling.

This - in the first game I ever played (AD&D, late 1979?), they brought me along on a dragon kill specifically to jump me up levels almost instantly.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That would explain it. Do no dms ever attack downed pcs? And the fact that you come back prone means you’re losing mobility as well.

I suppose the fact that I allow potions as a bonus action might be a contributor here as well.

I’ll admit that I just haven’t really seen this.

Yeah I wonder what would happen at folks tables who do see it if they allowed the target of healing word to spend HD, and made cure wounds work at range or heal a lot more health.

 

[Lanefan]

Given how anemic healing is compared to incoming monster damage, as annoying as the trend is, it's pretty easy to see why it can happen.

Cure Wounds is a hard spell to use, since you have to be in melee range of the target to cast it. So unless everyone stays relatively close together, it might not even be possible to tag someone with it. But let's look at a fairly typical scenario.

In a game I'm playing at the moment, we have a level 4 Ranger with a 15 Constitution. Let's say he has 39 hit points. He's fighting a CR 5 Bulette which can hit for 4d12+4 piercing damage. An average hit brings him to 9 hit points.

The level 4 (non-Life) Cleric can rush up to heal him with an upcast Cure Wounds for 2d8+4. The average result of this is 13, bringing our Ranger to 22. The Bulette attacks and if it hits, he goes to 0.

Or he could attempt to Withdraw or Dodge instead of attacking, and the Bulette can attack the Cleric, who has, say, 34 hit points and is now at 4. Or he could use his standard action to drink a potion and get 7 hit points, putting him at 29...an average Bullette hit puts him to 0.

The other way of doing things is you wait for the Ranger to hit 0, which takes 2 turns for the Bulette to do since attacking him when he's down is 2 failed death saves; heal him before his turn comes up and he'll be fine.

Not knowing the lead-up to this combat I can only ask: was there no time to put some ranged damage into the Bulette and-or take evasive measures yourselves, before it got to you?

'Cause yeah, face-to-face melee with this seems to be above your lot's pay grade as it stands.

Your spell is still only giving him 13 hit points instead of putting him at 22, but given the Bulette's damage, it's academic. At this point you might as well have your Cleric stay away from the Bulette and keep throwing level 1 Healing Words at the Ranger for 1d4+4 to bring him up to make his attacks on the thing while spamming Toll the Dead or something.

The Ranger could die outright to a lucky critical (max damage here is 100 points!), but there's nothing you can do about that; anyone in your party would instantly die to that, after all.

And the only real cost to being knocked down and healed to 0 is prone, which only takes half your movement to recover from, and then you can do anything you were going to do on your turn anyways.

And that to me is a problem (and always has been TBH, except when 0 meant outright death). Being knocked down to 0 implies you're near death, and to pop back up fully functional from that within six seconds is beyond the pale.

And if you survive the fight, well, the Cleric may not have had to use up all their level 2 slots, and the Ranger has 4 Hit Dice to work with (though that means he's going to have to be extra cautious tomorrow).

And it's because out of combat healing is so plentiful that in combat healing is so terrible, apparently (I had a fun thread about this last year wondering why healing can't be better).

I hate that this is the paradigm, and that all the solutions people dream up for it is to further punish players for going to 0 hit points, like "gain a level of fatigue", etc.., when the real problem is, monsters deal a ton of damage and for most levels of play, nobody has the resources to do much about it.

Yes they do. It's called not getting into those battles in the first place if you can avoid them; and if you must fight, do everything you can to soften the foe(s) up and-or buff yourselves before melee begins. Because yes, going to 0 should have more lasting consequences than it currently does.

And to vaguely bring this back around to topic, this means a species that is good at hiding itself (as in, Halflings) has a better chance of surviving encounters like this.

 

[Hussar]

Given how anemic healing is compared to incoming monster damage, as annoying as the trend is, it's pretty easy to see why it can happen.

Cure Wounds is a hard spell to use, since you have to be in melee range of the target to cast it. So unless everyone stays relatively close together, it might not even be possible to tag someone with it. But let's look at a fairly typical scenario.

In a game I'm playing at the moment, we have a level 4 Ranger with a 15 Constitution. Let's say he has 39 hit points. He's fighting a CR 5 Bulette which can hit for 4d12+4 piercing damage. An average hit brings him to 9 hit points.

The level 4 (non-Life) Cleric can rush up to heal him with an upcast Cure Wounds for 2d8+4. The average result of this is 13, bringing our Ranger to 22. The Bulette attacks and if it hits, he goes to 0.

Or he could attempt to Withdraw or Dodge instead of attacking, and the Bulette can attack the Cleric, who has, say, 34 hit points and is now at 4. Or he could use his standard action to drink a potion and get 7 hit points, putting him at 29...an average Bullette hit puts him to 0.

The other way of doing things is you wait for the Ranger to hit 0, which takes 2 turns for the Bulette to do since attacking him when he's down is 2 failed death saves; heal him before his turn comes up and he'll be fine.

Your spell is still only giving him 13 hit points instead of putting him at 22, but given the Bulette's damage, it's academic. At this point you might as well have your Cleric stay away from the Bulette and keep throwing level 1 Healing Words at the Ranger for 1d4+4 to bring him up to make his attacks on the thing while spamming Toll the Dead or something.

The Ranger could die outright to a lucky critical (max damage here is 100 points!), but there's nothing you can do about that; anyone in your party would instantly die to that, after all.

And the only real cost to being knocked down and healed to 0 is prone, which only takes half your movement to recover from, and then you can do anything you were going to do on your turn anyways.

And if you survive the fight, well, the Cleric may not have had to use up all their level 2 slots, and the Ranger has 4 Hit Dice to work with (though that means he's going to have to be extra cautious tomorrow).

And it's because out of combat healing is so plentiful that in combat healing is so terrible, apparently (I had a fun thread about this last year wondering why healing can't be better).

I hate that this is the paradigm, and that all the solutions people dream up for it is to further punish players for going to 0 hit points, like "gain a level of fatigue", etc.., when the real problem is, monsters deal a ton of damage and for most levels of play, nobody has the resources to do much about it.

Anyways, I apologize for the derail of the thread.

S'okay, I'm enjoying the derail and I think it's interesting. At least no one is yelling at me anymore.

The thing is, that Bullette died on round 3. There is no fourth attack because it's dead. Sure, it knocked the ranger down on round 2, fair enough. But, since it died on round 3, there's no "whack a mole" going on at all. And this is a pretty dangerous monster for a 4th level party.
I just don't think that a PC going down once in an encounter is enough to count as "whack a mole". That Bullette only has a single +7 attack. A 4th level ranger should have an AC around 18 (give or take), meaning that the bullette is only hitting once every other round. So, hits on first round, misses on second and hits on third and the ranger goes down. By the end of round 3 (or early into round 4) that bullette is dead. A 4 PC party of 4th level can pretty easily pump out 30 hp of damage/round, even without spending resources.

Like I said, I'm really not seeing the problem. Ok, fair enough, Mr Ranger is down in the third round, but, so what? Fight's over anyway.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Exactly. It's my whole point too, only from the reverse direction: playing an against-type class-species combo is going to be unusual, and will present a whole new set of challenges to that character's player.

It's not "unusual." It will be "almost never." That's what you keep not getting.

How? Either you make those physical differences mechanically invisible (so why bother with physical differences) or you make the classes not dependent on abilities (so why bother with classes).

As noted above: By making it so class AND race contribute.

Because let's be real: if you're hitting the books to study for your bar wizard exams, you're going to pick up some smarts. That's...just the nature of the beast. The training process for producing a Wizard provides opportunity to refine your mental abilities. And the same can be said for other classes: Rogues must practice their legerdemain their "but he had such an honest face" front, Fighters must physically train, Clerics swing weapons and study theology, etc.

Being a Dwarf still affects you. Take Dwarf Cleric: maybe being a Dwarf gave you a leg up on the theology work, so you could focus on the weapon training. Maybe it just made you tougher, so you had to choose which side to focus on. But you still had to do the things that naturally result in improved ability beyond just the things you trained for.

Obviously, this doesn't work for the game you're talking about that you run, because your system is all about punishing folks who consider playing against type and massively rewarding those who repeat whatever stereotypes (IMO, cliches) the rules were designed to enforce. But for a game in the process of being designed--like, say, "One D&D," stupid name aside--we can do things differently.

Of course the bell curves will overlap. That said, that a Strength-10 Human is average among its people while a Strength-10 Dwarf is a weakling among Dwarves.

Irrelevant. That they overlap at all is what matters. Because the variance is HUGE. The variance in human strength is huge! If Dwarves are comparable in terms of variance--and, as I've said, sapience, self-determination, and personal identity ensure that this will be true--then all bets are off. You can't meaningfully exclude much, if anything, because there are IRL humans who can't lift 15 pounds, and IRL humans who can lift ("clean and jerk") over 500 pounds. The variance is simply too wide, two or even three orders of magnitude.

So are you saying I should power up everything else to the level of what now stands out as overpowered?

No. Well, not really. I think you shot yourself in the foot by making a design with such an egregious flaw, but going back and reworking it is obviously off the table. My preference, as a designer, would be to find ways to compensate that do not require outright banning, because...well, that's a pretty draconian (no pun intended) solution to the problem. Possible alternatives (recognizing that I find some of these really not good, but better than banning):

• XP penalty for playing a dwarf wizard. This is comparable to the idea that heavy armor is an XP penalty for a survival boost in OD&D: when GP=XP, anything that eats into how much treasure you can pull out of the dungeon is an XP penalty.
• Limited spell selection. Perhaps dwarven physiology alters the casting of arcane spells, perhaps it's a cultural thing, e.g. maybe dwarf education clings tightly to a traditional system of units rather than the modern dozenal system or something.
• Reduced durability. Maybe dwarven physiology and magic don't gel well together--so either you must undertake certain painful rites that weaken you physically but allow magic (kind of like lyrium in Dragon Age), or you accept that you'll never really be a Wizard. (Clerics, naturally, get out free because their magic is divinely gifted.)
• Subrace/variant race creation. There's already good precedent for duergar. Perhaps there's a way to look like a dwarf and act like a dwarf, but actually come from a different lineage that adapted differently.

Those are the only ones that come to mind currently, but I might be able to come up with a few more if given time.

The reason for the ALL in those is that I simply can't justify saying, for example, that only Dwarves who become Wizards don't get anything from high Con; and if I nerf those Dwarves then in the name of setting consistency I have to nerf all Dwarves equally. (thinking on it further I think I'd have the same problem with the idea of 13th-Age Necromancers not getting the same benefits from high Con that everyone else gets)

I mean, that's more or less what I would expect for any kind of "not getting what others usually get." Perhaps the dwarven tradition of wizardry is more runic in nature--and requires those runes be literally carved into one's flesh. Wizardly power, acquired at the price of sacrificing your body. Sounds like it oozes with both creative player potential and dramatic choices down the line (what other sacrifices are dwarven wizards willing to make for power? Is a propensity toward extremes part of why few dwarves choose to make the leap? Etc.)

Of the above, IMO 4 isn't even worth considering; neither is 3 as I'm specifically trying to fight against power creep rather than add to it. 2 does nobody any favours. But you seem to be arguing for 3, and yet how can 3 happen without up-powering the whole game?

Certainly, we agree on 4--hence why I have offered other options (some of which, I recognize, are more for "design a new game" rather than "adapt an existing game.") Personally, I do actually think 3 is the best choice in the long run--because if you're okay with one thing being powerful, it seems reasonable that other things should also be that powerful, just differently. (And, honestly, it comes across as a touch overblown, that potentially having a bit higher than usual Con suddenly makes the Dwarf Wizard unstoppable. Strong, to be sure, but utterly outclassing everything else? I'm skeptical--unless the Wizard itself is simply poorly designed!)

My proposal is that we instead do either
5: design the classes from the beginning so "has slightly higher Con than usual" isn't game-breaking in the first place, or
6: adapt around the problem with narrow, tailored solutions, like the ones listed above.