D&D 5E A First Look at Tasha’s Lineage System In AL Player’s Guide - Customizing Your Origin In D&D

The new player’s guide for the D&D Adventurers League has been released. Appendix 1 includes the new info from Tasha’s Cauldron on customizing your origin. It‘s a one-page appendix.

The D&D Adventurers League now uses this variant system from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything since it allows for a greater degree of customization. For ease of reference, the relevant information is included as an appendix to this document and doesn’t count against the PH + 1 rule.

You can do any of the following (obviously the full document has more detail):

1. Move your race ability score increases wherever your want to. “...take any ability score increase you gain in your race or subrace and apply it to an ability score of your choice.”​

2. Replace each language from your race with any language from a set list.​

3. Swap each proficiency for another of the same type.​

4. Alter behaviour/personality race-based descriptions.​

Its not clear if that’s the whole Lineage system or just part of it. You can download the player’s guide here.

 

[Oofta]

The problem with saying that elves are people too is that they are not human. Because of magic they can have babies with humans, that does not make them a subspecies of human.

There are any number of differences beyond just pointy ears like darkvision and longevity; it's not just a cultural construct to say that they are not human. So I don't have an issue with ability score adjustments being different, many aspects of the PC will be different.

But this gets back to the correlation people see between fantasy races and real world ethnicities, and that horse is long dead.

 

[billd91]

I get the impression that people here are discussing two things as if they were the same, which they are not, in my opinion.

It's one thing to defend a greater customization of the character races, as PF2 already does and "Advanced 5e" also intends to do, allowing players to create their preferred combinations of race and class, but maintaining the balance between the various options.

Another completely different thing is to look at this lazy solution that WotC presented, which messes up the balance that supposedly existed in the races as conceived in the PHB, and saying that it is OK, no problem.

"OK, no problem" would be an appropriate answer if we were talking about a homemade solution that one of us thought for their own campaign. As I said before, though, a designer was paid to come up with this. It seems that this bad houserule will soon be appearing in a $50 hardcover. It's the solution presented to Adventurer's League, where DMs will have to deal with characters built using these rules, regardless of whether they agree with them.

Besides that, the "it's optional, use it if you want" argument is great in theory, but anyone who (like me) has spent the last 25 years in the DM chair knows that when a player arrives with a new book and says they would like to use one of the options presented there, saying "no" feels more like an act of diplomacy than authority. And you feel bad about having to do that. Many DMs who I know avoid nonofficial stuff exactly because they believe you can trust the owners of D&D to do a better than average job with their rules.

I don't think this is all that bad from a game balance standpoint - rather, I think it's indicative of a bigger issue that's been present in D&D since at least 2008 and in the player community longer. Sanitizing away "penalties" - meaning actual mathematical penalties like penalties applied to stats and using weapons without being proficient, as well as perceived penalties like lack of a mathematical bonus.

The end result, from my perspective, is a washing out of meaningful trade offs. If you wanted to play a mountain dwarf wizard because you liked elements of the concept (like an armored wizard or a stronger wizard), you made the trade off for not getting a mathematical bonus for intelligence. Or if your goal was to still end up with a 20 intelligence, you traded off getting to it sooner via ASIs vs later. With this option, one more set of interesting choices is gone. While there's a lot in Tasha's that interests me, I don't plan on using this option in the (non-AL) games I run.

 

[ChaosOS]

I don't think this is all that bad from a game balance standpoint - rather, I think it's indicative of a bigger issue that's been present in D&D since at least 2008 and in the player community longer. Sanitizing away "penalties" - meaning actual mathematical penalties like penalties applied to stats and using weapons without being proficient, as well as perceived penalties like lack of a mathematical bonus.

The end result, from my perspective, is a washing out of meaningful trade offs. If you wanted to play a mountain dwarf wizard because you liked elements of the concept (like an armored wizard or a stronger wizard), you made the trade off for not getting a mathematical bonus for intelligence. Or if your goal was to still end up with a 20 intelligence, you traded off getting to it sooner via ASIs vs later. With this option, one more set of interesting choices is gone. While there's a lot in Tasha's that interests me, I don't plan on using this option in the (non-AL) games I run.

See, this is where I think that 5e sanitized away a much more interesting set of decisions by removing racial powers and other actually-interesting decisions. If every race is only a combination of ability scores and proficiencies, I find that far less interesting than having to choose meaningful racial abilities like fey ancestry, powerful build, or even small size. I'd rather have my themes and ideas be based around those kinds of features (My race has powerful build so I'm inclined to go a high-strength build to leverage it) than boring math increases.

Furthermore, while obviously a lot of attention has been paid to ability scores, I hope we can all agree the proficiency swaps are good. Even if we accept that elves are naturally more dextrous, why is an elf urchin who grew up on the streets of {major city} genetically proficient with a longsword? I still kinda have this issue with mountain dwarves and hobgoblins, I wish you could trade down the armor proficiency to any weapon or tool prof.

 

[TwoSix]

Well, at least you're honest about how deep and wide your prejudice goes. And here I thought we'd killed that particular issue decades ago.

Are we talking about the Str penalty here? Obviously that isn't needed in a fantasy game. But sexual dimorphism is just basic science.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Well, at least you're honest about how deep and wide your prejudice goes. And here I thought we'd killed that particular issue decades ago.

Nope. That is called science. Sorry. Ever seen sports? It is not discrimination, that women are slower sprinters on average. It is also no discrimination, that women have different hormones and no testicles.
It is also dangerous to medically treat women and man as if they were interchangeable.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Nope. That is called science. Sorry. Ever seen sports? It is not discrimination, that women are slower sprinters on average. It is also no discrimination, that women have different hormones and no testicles.
It is also dangerous to medically treat women and man as if they were interchangeable.

Please stop.

 

[ChaosOS]

So, here's the deal - while population averages may be a thing, D&D is about fantastic individuals. Those individuals are not bound by "population averages". Part of this is as a wish fulfillment exercise, why not allow someone to say "They're a woman stronger than any man!" - it's not like there's a lack of this in fact (female body builders could probably crush anyone on this board with their bare hands) or in fiction (usually Russian-coded "bear of a woman" tropes).

Regardless, let's keep this thread focused on the lineage system

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Please stop.

No I don´t. I explicitely said, that I don´t want that in my fantasy game. But I am getting angry if you deny basic biological facts.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No I don´t. I explicitely said, that I don´t want that in my fantasy game.

As this a board for discussing fantasy games there is no need to bring it up then.

 

[Cadence]

Let me gently suggest you sit down and reconsider your assumptions. There is a very key line being crossed when you go from "This singular person has a predisposition to X because of genetics" and "This race of people are all like X because of genetics". The first can sometimes be true, the latter is pure prejudice with a very ugly history.

If we look at the distribution of "strength" related attributes in all possible human beings under 4' compared to the distribution in all human beings 5' tall or over, is it uncontroversial to say the (i) distributions overlap, (ii) the mean and median of strengths of the > 5' distribution would be larger than the mean and median of the < 4' distribution, and that randomly picking an observation from each distribution would give a chance above 50% but below 100% that the person in the taller group would have the larger strength?

Is it uncontroversial to say there is a race in D&D portrayed as generally human but uniformly under 4' and another race portrayed as generally human but 5' tall or taller?