+1 to all stats sounds attractive. It's +6 when the others get +3. Of course, with your system mastery, you know this to be false, but it's a very common "first read impression". Plus, it can be true if one rolls a lot of odd scores. Add, on top of that, the players who don't feel like roleplaying a non-human because credibly playing an alien mind is very hard and taxing, so they need some human, and their DM might ban vuman altogether.
D&D (2024) Playtest: Is the Human Terrible?
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
+1 to all stats sounds attractive. It's +6 when the others get +3. Of course, with your system mastery, you know this to be false, but it's a very common "first read impression". Plus, it can be true if one rolls a lot of odd scores. Add, on top of that, the players who don't feel like roleplaying a non-human because credibly playing an alien mind is very hard and taxing, so they need some human, and their DM might ban vuman altogether.
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
Notably, this proposed Human has a Feat pre-selected.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Yep. Though you do have to choose the bonus skill, and the three skills granted by the Feat if you take the default one.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Before Tasha's, vHuman was S Tier with a few others - they had better features but vHuman was the only way to start with a feat. After Tasha's, when everyone had variable modifiers so the +1/+1 became weaker comparatively, and Custom Lineage could give a feat and Darkvision it moved down to Tier 1. Which is still at the top of the power curve.
Now, when everyone gets a feat so this is a second feat, human is a good, solid race. Basically, it was nerfed both directly and by giving everyone a feat so it wasn't special. But only down to being a good race. It only feels like a bad race because it gave so much before.
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We have a human bard with 2 feats. She jumped at getting tough +2hp per level and the music feat that grants inspiration.
She just took the valor bard subclass and is as good in combat as our fighter
Or hell just throw on toughness and your tougher than a dwarf.
Benjamin Olson
Hero
Generally it gets a better ASI than the old Variant and free inspiration in exchange for being limited to a still fairly strong list of feats. How that's remotely "terrible" by comparison for a typical player I don't know.
However the new Human is terrible compared to the variant human if you absolutely had your heart set on starting with some specific feat. There are definitely powergamer reasons to do this, but they might also just have a specific concept around a specific feat. Personally as someone who has yet to get around to rolling up a post-Tasha's level 1 Sorcerer I would be real disappointed if I couldn't start with the metamagic feat, because I think the first tier of the class probably plays a lot better with that. I suppose that's a powergaming desire on some level, but it's also a matter of finding the design of a class that never really worked for me improved by the feat.
Personally I dislike the new human for the same reason I dislike the Variant human. Compared to the standard human they are paying extra ability score points for a feat versus what they would if they just waited for an ASI. Yes I understand why that results in a more powerful character, it still rankles me to do in principle.
However the new Human is terrible compared to the variant human if you absolutely had your heart set on starting with some specific feat. There are definitely powergamer reasons to do this, but they might also just have a specific concept around a specific feat. Personally as someone who has yet to get around to rolling up a post-Tasha's level 1 Sorcerer I would be real disappointed if I couldn't start with the metamagic feat, because I think the first tier of the class probably plays a lot better with that. I suppose that's a powergaming desire on some level, but it's also a matter of finding the design of a class that never really worked for me improved by the feat.
Personally I dislike the new human for the same reason I dislike the Variant human. Compared to the standard human they are paying extra ability score points for a feat versus what they would if they just waited for an ASI. Yes I understand why that results in a more powerful character, it still rankles me to do in principle.
