I'm not sure what's not to get. A toolkit is versatile, sure, but it's also work by default. Worse than that, it's about as flavorful as instant ramen with half a spice packet. The DMs (and possibly players depending on how much authorial control the DM is asserting over the setting they're running) have to add all the spice themselves, and when you're preparing dozens of dishes or more, that adds up.
Scribe is complaining that the Level Up yeti is listed as potentially not always murderous; instead, Level Up wrote:
- yetis are known to become violent during blizzards
- when the weather is nicer, it's up in the air as to how violent a yeti will be. They're changeable.
- according to one legend, a family of yetis was helpful to an adventurer and gave him mushrooms to eat.
In other words, when Scribe wants to have his PCs, who are adventuring on a snowy mountain, encounter a hostile monster, he wouldn't know if he could pick a yeti because the book doesn't say "yetis are always murderous," apparently he doesn't want to make that decision himself, and rolling on or picking from the "behaviors" table in the yeti's entry is a step too far.
I don't know about how you run games, but when I want a monster to attack the PCs, I just grab a monster that I feel is appropriate to the area and story, is of roughly the right CR, and that I think is cool. I don't need the books to tell me if the monster is "always" violent.
It's very logical unless you just don't want there to be differences between races at all. Even a slower than average adult cheetah will be faster than a hippo after all.
A tabaxi has the Feline Agility trait, and speed 30 ft. A giff has Hippo Build, and speed 30 ft. The Feline Agility trait allows a tabaxi to move at a very high speed for short periods of time. A tabaxi with a Dex of 5 has Feline Agility and a speed of 30 feet. A tabaxi with a Dex of 20 has Feline Agility and a speed of 30 feet. A giff with Strength 5 and a giff with Strength 20 still have Hippo Build and a speed of 30 feet.
Attributes, whether high or low, do not affect movement speed. Attributes affect attacks, skills, and saving throws, and a tiny handful of other abilities.
Feline Agility and Hippo Build are great, flavorful traits, and all races should have more traits like them. I think half the problem is that people assume that WotC will remove cultural traits and not add any new biological traits. And maybe WotC won't, for 5.5, because of backwards compatibility, but I can see them doing it for 6e.
And taking away ability score bonuses and other features won't make them less boring.
But keeping fixed ASIs doesn't make races more interesting either.
If anything, I'd want to go the other direction and add more defining features given the considerably greater number of playable races that WotC has introduced. But the point of racial ASI isn't to make - in this particular example - all halflings dexterous. It's to make halflings, on average, more dexterous than other races that don't have the same ASI. It's perfectly possible to have a clumsy halfling, a halfling that never skips leg day or a halfling mastermind. But the +2 Dex means that there are fewer clumsy halflings than dwarves, and fewer halfling Schwarzeneggers than orcs.
But there will
always be far fewer clumsy halflings than agile dwarfs, and far fewer strong halflings than strong dwarfs. Because the
only halflings that automatically get to move around their ASIs are PCs.
Every single other halfling in the world has their stats assigned by the DM. And the PCs may very well go along with the halfling norm and put at least a +1 in Dex, because of decades of tradition.
If a player wants their character to be one of the exceptions, they'll need to spend the points(or choose the appropriate array, or hope for a good roll, or whatever) to get there. Or their gaming group can decide they don't like the assigned ASI and just allow it to be put wherever. That's still a choice a group can make regardless of what's written. But taking away the defined ASI in text is limiting the options for those who prefer defined races.
How? You can always put the floating ASI in the traditional spot. With a floating ASI, you
have the option of the traditional racial stats. But with a fixed ASI,
nobody has the option of a nonstandard individual.
And, well, I have the sneaking suspicion that most people who prefer that their halflings have +2 Dex are still going to move that +1 to a stat they find more useful.
The reason is as simple as can be: because it supports the base premise of wanting greater definition to distinguish each race from each other.
Halflings have +2 Dex. So do aarakocra, elves, goblins, kenku, kobolds, and swiftside shifters. That +2 Dex does nothing to differentiate those races from each other.
Personally speaking, my big complaint is that D&D wants to bake its cake once and eat it several times over. If it were up to me, I'd ditch the idea of having an "official" campaign setting represented in the big three books at all. Make the PHB and MM pure classic fantasy, stereotypes on full display. Orcs are evil raiders, elves are stuck up tree huggers, all that crap. The PHB should give new players a clear and simple "this is what you're getting with this race." The MM should allow an inexperienced DM to thumb to an page, get an instant idea of what a particular monster is and how it would fit into an encounter or campaign. Simple, hyper defined, and hitting exactly the notes you'd expect of a classic fantasy setting.
Ugh. No thanks. This would immediately turn me off D&D.
