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

[Lanefan]

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

You must run with different players than I, as there's always someone here (and not always the same someone) who will try playing against type now and then just for the challenge of it.

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.

Sure, and this explains both a) why characters almost invariably start with their highest stat in the prime requisite for their class and b) why we as designers allow players to rearrange their stats such that this is (with rare exceptions) the case.

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.

You keep equating "challenging" with "punishing". Why?

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.

Meanwhile, if those are the Human limits in a fantasy world then while there might be an occasional Dwarf who through disease or whatever also can't lift 15 pounds, the strongest of them could clean-and-jerk 800 pounds rather than 500. Meanwhile, the Elf who could clean-and-jerk even 400 pounds would be among the rarest of specimens.

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.

I should probably mention here that Mages in my game can't wear armour of any kind, assuming they want to be able to cast any spells. But, I've otherwise heard worse ideas. (EDIT to add: there's an exception to this, that being rare and stupendously expensive armour enchanted with a property I call "Arcane Aid" that lets you cast while wearing it; but if you can afford this stuff you're long past the point of balance meaning anything anyway)

• 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.

Which falls apart the moment a Dwarf goes to Praetos and get her mage-schooling from Humans.

• 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.)

OK, I suppose that could work.

• 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.

Rather not go this route; if anything I'd like to chop down the number of sub-species a bit if I can (and I already don't have all that many).

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.)

It does ooze with dramatic potential and so on, but one thing I very much favour is things mechanically working the same for everyone in the setting, mostly for reasons of player-side simplicity. In this case, that means if wizardry becomes rune-based for Dwarves then it would have to become rune-based for everyone else as well.

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,

That's just it - I'm not OK with one thing being powerful, and it's invariably easier to fix that one thing than to fix everything other than that one thing.

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!)

Having not allowed them before, I opened the Mage classes up to another very high-Con species - Hobbits - for my current game; and the long-term numbers tell me their average survival rate (sessions per death) and longevity (overall career length by either sessions or adventures) far exceeds that of Mages of all other species, to the point where my little internal red warning flags went up quite some time ago.

Worth noting that the survival rate of non-Hobbit Mages is more or less on par with that of most other class-species combos.

I look at these numbers (and others) to give me an idea of what needs tweaking next time out. For example, Cavaliers (of any species) have the opposite problem - they tend to drop like flies - and I need to do something to help them out, though I've no idea what. Nature Clerics (Druids) are still overpowered despite previous attempts to knock them back a bit. And so forth.

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.

Given as I'd really rather not redesign all the classes from the ground up, I'm not sure 5 holds much water. And 6 very quickly runs into internal consistency issues unless extreme care is taken.

 

[James Gasik]

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.

Yes, it's a tough fight for our group (Wizard 4, Ranger 4, Cleric 4, Monk 4), and if we could have avoided it, we would have (stupid burrowing monsters). But it's not actually unusual in printed modules; a good example of this is the final battle of the Adventure League mod DDEX1-4: Dues for the Dead. In an adventure for characters of level 1-4, you get a Red Wizard (CR 2), a Knight (CR 3), a Cultist (CR 1/8), 2 Kobolds (CR 1/8), and a Zombie (CR 1/4). Just the Knight by themselves is beyond Deadly (500 xp) for a level 4 character; the whole encounter is worth 2,550 xp, a little above a Deadly Encounter for a level 4 group with five players! And sure, it can be adjusted, this is just the default encounter, it scales all the way up to 4,500 xp by adding another 3 zombies and 3 kobolds if the DM decides the party is "very strong", lol.

Oh and that Bulette definitely did not die on round 3; sure, it only has 94 hit points, but given that are attack bonuses are +6, that 17 AC was a pain in the butt, not to mention it was able to open with it's deadly leap, so we had several severely wounded characters in the first turn to deal with.

Thankfully it had a lousy Wisdom saving throw, so we got lucky when the Wizard hit it with Nathair's Mischief and we were treated to a round of a giggling Bulette while we got everyone up and finished it off at the top of round 5 (after it knocked the Ranger down a second time and he had to be revived).

Anyways, it just goes to show what my 5e experience has been like; obviously others have had different experiences.

As to the thread's topic (yes, back to that at last), it feels like there's two driving forces at work when it comes to the subject of what species should be in the PHB.

People who want familiar things vs. people who want exotic things. Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, etc., are familiar to a lot of people. It might be easier on a DM when world-building to start with the known, and put those races front and center.

On the other hand, players wanting to try new and different options is a constant in gaming, and it's not unreasonable to find someone turning up their nose at seven kinds of Elf and want to play a Githzerai or something.

So on the player side, the more fantastical and varied the races are, the better. On the DM side, unless they planned for it in world-building, now they have to figure out what to do with this weird alien guy from the Astral Sea, lol.

If all people want is mechanics, you could fit a dozen races easily in the PHB, but there are people who want lore as well. Who are these guys? What does one play like? What is their culture like? What niche do they occupy in the world? How do other people see them?

It seems a bit foreboding to put that on a new DM, so some of this is necessary. And the less familiar the race, the more of this lore needs to exist for a race- there's a pretty huge divide between "explain Dwarves" and "explain Shadar-Kai".

So what you need to remember is, what races would be great for you to see in a PHB might not be great for everyone. You need a balance of "tried and true" and "interesting and creative" to make the game work.

 

[Hussar]

But the reason those races are “tried and true” is because they’ve been in the game so long. They weren’t “tried and true” in 1983. They were pretty new and different.

And again I look at how very popular Tieflings and Dragonborn became. Even though they are the furthest thing from tried and true, they both instantly became very popular.

Or warforged for that matter.

Not being tried and true doesn’t seem to be much of an impediment.

 

[Hussar]

Yes, it's a tough fight for our group (Wizard 4, Ranger 4, Cleric 4, Monk 4), and if we could have avoided it, we would have (stupid burrowing monsters). But it's not actually unusual in printed modules; a good example of this is the final battle of the Adventure League mod DDEX1-4: Dues for the Dead. In an adventure for characters of level 1-4, you get a Red Wizard (CR 2), a Knight (CR 3), a Cultist (CR 1/8), 2 Kobolds (CR 1/8), and a Zombie (CR 1/4). Just the Knight by themselves is beyond Deadly (500 xp) for a level 4 character; the whole encounter is worth 2,550 xp, a little above a Deadly Encounter for a level 4 group with five players! And sure, it can be adjusted, this is just the default encounter, it scales all the way up to 4,500 xp by adding another 3 zombies and 3 kobolds if the DM decides the party is "very strong", lol.

Oh and that Bulette definitely did not die on round 3; sure, it only has 94 hit points, but given that are attack bonuses are +6, that 17 AC was a pain in the butt, not to mention it was able to open with it's deadly leap, so we had several severely wounded characters in the first turn to deal with.

Thankfully it had a lousy Wisdom saving throw, so we got lucky when the Wizard hit it with Nathair's Mischief and we were treated to a round of a giggling Bulette while we got everyone up and finished it off at the top of round 5 (after it knocked the Ranger down a second time and he had to be revived).

And just to go back to this. You've got 4 PC's. 4 rounds (and a bit) means you're doing about 22 points of damage per round. That's really, really low for a group of 4 4th level characters. But, then, you have a group here that's also pretty weak as well. No rogue hurts, as well as no paladin. Yeah, I can see how this group would struggle a bit more. But, even with a 17 AC, you should be hitting 50%. And, obviously some very bad luck if you had "several" wounded PC's after the leap attack.

The thing is, this is the sort of thing that has to be tracked over several levels because confirmation bias is so strong. We all remember the fights where the ranger fell down, but, forget the ones where he didn't. My suggestion would be to track this for a group over several encounters. Just how often is a PC going down more than once in a single encounter? IME, it's pretty rare. It does happen, but, not all that often.

Again, IME, it becomes really enlightening when this sort of thing gets tracked over time. What we think is true often isn't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You must run with different players than I, as there's always someone here (and not always the same someone) who will try playing against type now and then just for the challenge of it.

I'm just speaking of the way most people actually tend to play. Because that's the real issue here. It may be the case that your players don't follow the trend, but the trend is there and it's quite real.

Sure, and this explains both a) why characters almost invariably start with their highest stat in the prime requisite for their class and b) why we as designers allow players to rearrange their stats such that this is (with rare exceptions) the case.

You keep equating "challenging" with "punishing". Why?

Because the line is perilously thin. Especially because you're using penalties rather than incentives. Because gamers today don't have as much time or energy to play as they did before. The character funnel, for example, removes a significant amount of the "challenge" from old-school-style play because that challenge is actively un-fun when you have nowhere near as much time as you did before. When spending six months having characters die left and right can mean you never get anywhere.

Hardwired challenge, especially when it's really significant challenge, is effectively a wall for a large portion of players. Making that hardwired challenge be present literally before play begins means inserting those walls that early. Walls like that drive people away from the game.

Meanwhile, if those are the Human limits in a fantasy world then while there might be an occasional Dwarf who through disease or whatever also can't lift 15 pounds, the strongest of them could clean-and-jerk 800 pounds rather than 500. Meanwhile, the Elf who could clean-and-jerk even 400 pounds would be among the rarest of specimens.

So? 99.999% of humans cannot ever achieve those heights. What does it matter that the 99.99th percentile is better, when the 90th percentile of one is going to be hardly much different from the 90th percentile of the other?

I should probably mention here that Mages in my game can't wear armour of any kind, assuming they want to be able to cast any spells. But, I've otherwise heard worse ideas. (EDIT to add: there's an exception to this, that being rare and stupendously expensive armour enchanted with a property I call "Arcane Aid" that lets you cast while wearing it; but if you can afford this stuff you're long past the point of balance meaning anything anyway)

I was only using that as an analogy. The mechanical analogy here, would be that being a dwarf is, itself, a special survival boost if you happen to play a wizard. Thematically, you'd probably go for the actual explanation for why there aren't dwarf mages in Dragon Age, the environment dwarves come from exposes them to something which worsens their ability to access magic. (In actual DA lore, dwarves used to be able to use magic, before recorded history; but literally no one, not even the dwarves, knows about that anymore.)

Which falls apart the moment a Dwarf goes to Praetos and get her mage-schooling from Humans.

Nah. I used the example I used very intentionally. Remember that the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed specifically because of a failure to translate American customary units to metric, and there have been many (many, many, many) other instances of similar problems in aviation, aerospace, military, etc. D-Day was on June 6 not because that day was especially good, but because the Allied commanders wanted to make sure that you couldn't have confusion between the European forces (which listed dates as DD/MM) and American forces (which listed dates as MM/DD.)

Haughty, "our-way-is-best" approaches to science and technology are literally as old as recorded history (and probably much older.) Couple that with the explicit jealousy with which wizards guard their secrets, and fundamental underlying differences in expression (believe me, shifting to dozenal is MUCH more of a difficulty than mere unit conversion.)

It does ooze with dramatic potential and so on, but one thing I very much favour is things mechanically working the same for everyone in the setting, mostly for reasons of player-side simplicity. In this case, that means if wizardry becomes rune-based for Dwarves then it would have to become rune-based for everyone else as well.

Why? Again, guild trade secrets and the like were zealously guarded. There's a reason we don't know all of the techniques used at various points in history, like Damascus steel, Greek fire, etc. If it is possible for us to lose the correct pronunciation of the name of God Himself because some secrets are simply kept too well, it is quite possible for the very few Dwarf Wizards to be foolishly insular and far too proud to share their knowledge with anyone else. The idea that knowledge wants to be free is a deeply modern concept.

That's just it - I'm not OK with one thing being powerful, and it's invariably easier to fix that one thing than to fix everything other than that one thing.

A ban isn't a fix though. It's an admission that there's a problem that can't be fixed.

Given as I'd really rather not redesign all the classes from the ground up, I'm not sure 5 holds much water. And 6 very quickly runs into internal consistency issues unless extreme care is taken.

Well...sure? I didn't say it was easy. Often the better solution to something is harder. E.g. the old saw "fast, good, cheap: pick two." In this case, it's more "simple, easy, good: pick two." The simple, easy solution is a ban--but that's clearly not great. The simple, good solution won't be easy to come by, it's gonna take effort on your part. And easy good solutions, they're gonna be either complex or fly the way an F-117 does: not at all unless continuously corrected.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

I've done exactly this! It... doesn't change much. Players still generally don't want to spend time healing when they could be making progress.

You really can't fix healing in 5e without rethinking the entire concept of hit points.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I've done exactly this! It... doesn't change much. Players still generally don't want to spend time healing when they could be making progress.

You really can't fix healing in 5e without rethinking the entire concept of hit points.

You’ve done beefing healing word way up and it didn’t change anything?

 

[jmartkdr2]

You’ve done beefing healing word way up and it didn’t change anything?

Pretty much. All healing was "you can spend one hit die for each die of healing from the spell." It wasn't enough to change the tactics. It affected strategy a bit (short rests are less important, hit die get spent more) but that was it.

It was short experiment, but mostly because it felt like a lateral shift at most.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Pretty much. All healing was "you can spend one hit die for each die of healing from the spell." It wasn't enough to change the tactics. It affected strategy a bit (short rests are less important, hit die get spent more) but that was it.

It was short experiment, but mostly because it felt like a lateral shift at most.

How odd. I’d figure that making HW good enough you don’t need to spend an action would mean that you can heal and do soemthing offensive in the same turn, leading to more focus on keeping other PCs up.

I wonder if we made HW not count as a spell when cast in combat?

 

[Neonchameleon]

The only hit point that matters is the last one in D&D.