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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mordhau" data-source="post: 8520911" data-attributes="member: 7032137">As I said earlier, the point is not really whether Powerful Build is good or bad, it's that it's supposed to work as part of an overall package.A Strength 20 Goliath has a huge carrying capacity.  600lbs or 272 kgs.  (Although we shouldn't use that to determine what they can lift - the world deadlift record is 501 kg (1,104.5  lbs).  However a Strength 8 Goliath has a carrying capacity of 240lbs the same as a Strength 16  character.  (Once you get your Goliath to Str 12 he's categorically the Strongest in the party - assuming noone else with powerful build, but probably not by all that much, and this really strikes me as a distinction that needs to be reasonably significant to be meaningful.  It's not all that helpful if there's only a narrow range of things that you can lift that the Halfling can't, even if you can beat all the other characters in a deadlift competition - although that's far from guarenteed, it depends on whether the DM calls for a die roll.)Now powerful build might be still be useful, but in this instance it's not really doing much to highlight the Goliath's size and strength in the game.This is what I pointing out earlier.  The design of the Goliath as a package assumes the character is going into a Strength based Melee class (and the fluff of the Goliath has always been, "this is the race for Barbarians").  If you're a high Strength Barbarian then Powerful build is cumulatively more useful.   It fades away the lower your Strength. This is why I don't buy that the designers didn't realise that the ASIs would influence what classes people would pick, I think it was clearly a matter of design.  (They had all of 4e to observe the same effect of the design and the resulting patterns of behaviour, including the requests for new races to fill gaps, so I think they knew.) The removal of the ASI bonses leaves some of the races feeling half-cooked - the bonuses are not meant to work alone,  they're meant to work as part of a package.  I think merely removing one part of that leaves some of the design half-baked.I don't know what the best solution is here.  I wish there was some way to give certain races minimum ability scores that didn't also screw them for classes that don't need that ability, but I can't think of a particularly good way to do that without some race based dice rolling method,  (I don't know maybe something like assign a 15 to Str, roll 46Dk3 four times and 3d6 once.  Assign as desired to ability scores other than Strength.  If you have a higher score than 15 you may choose to place that in Strength and use the 15 for a different score).</blockquote>

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