D&D 5E (2014) Ability Score Increases (I've changed my mind.)

[Scribe]

Question, for science.

Is there a site that is generally accepted as providing rankings for builds or classes?

I don't look up guides, so I'm looking for a pointer to one accepted as mostly correct.

 

[turnip_farmer]

This thread is very long.

What are everyone's thoughts on this kind of thing:

For clarity, I'm not asking about this specific unessecarily compiclated ruleset. But I really like the idea of designing races such that every one has advantages and disadvantages. That, to me, is far more important than whether or not those (dis)advantages are coded in an ability increase/decrease or somewhere else.

 

[Lyxen]

Question, for science.

Is there a site that is generally accepted as providing rankings for builds or classes?

I don't look up guides, so I'm looking for a pointer to one accepted as mostly correct.

There are tons of theses, and you will find many different advice here and there, but this one has the advantage of being a bit more complete in its assessments. It's pre-Tasha, on the other hand, and does not take archetypes into account. Finally, take into account that the rankings are completely different depending on the level.

 

[Helldritch]

What a read... Took me a long time to catch up. But here I am.
For me and many tables in my area, floating ASI just break the versimilitude of the game. We currently have a mountain dwarf diviner. She took the mountain dwarf race knowing full well that she would not have a 16 in Intelligence. She is now level 6 and she is still at 15 as she took the spell sniper feat. Yes her save DC is less than the human wizard beside her but she is a quite valuable asset. She boosts her companions with spells such as magic weapon, enlarge, haste and quite a few others. She is playing against type but she wanted the dwarven toughness and the ability to wear medium armor. She put a 14 in Dexterity, and a 13 in con (upped to 15) and a 12 in strength (upped to 14). She even went in hand to hand combat with green flame blade. As a diviner, she can use her divining dice to give her an advantage when needed. Yes she plays against type, she does not have a 16 and yet, she pulls a weight with dignity and efficiency. But the best aspect of all this is that she complies to all expectations we have about dwarves! Her "lost" 16 in Intel is a small price to pay to get all she wanted to bring at the table!

With floating racial ASI, she would just be an other diviner with a funny bearded face ( yes, this dwarven female proudly bears a magnificent beard!). My player brought her dwarven diviner idea and all the other players were cheering her up. They would not trade her for an other wizard. Just like we have a dual wielding ranger based on strength and not dexterity. No sneaky stuff for him as he wears plate mail. And he is the medic of the group as he took medic as his feat. We are far from the Drizzt's clone we usually see at many tables. A Vhuman Yes, but not a standard one and one that works out quite well.

With floating ASI and generic lineage, you will not see these kind of characters as it would be considered gimping a character with a deliberate suboptimal built. Having the choice and being forced to work around a problem is not the same. Optimizing has always been an integral part of gaming (power gaming is its own thing and not something I wish to discuss). If given the choice, a player will always optimize, unless reasons like character concepts and even then, a DM's approval would be required. With floating ASI, no need to work around. You just do not have to do it. It simply becomes which racial powers suit your character's class concept the most. There are already guides about which raced to with floating ASI are best suited for such and such classes.

Historically, rolling stats was the only way, and you only rolled 3d6, not 4d6L. It often led to the what I called "the demi-human crisis". The I want to be an elf, but I do not have a charisma of 8... so I can't be one. Or meeting the minimum constitution for a half-orc or dwarf. You wanted a demi-human but would be stuck with human as your only choice. Over the years, more and more restrictions were removed ( level restrictions, stat maximum and minimum, stat penalties and so on) and demi-humand kept most of their advantages while humans gained nothing to compensate. With floating ASI, demi-humans now gain versatility, which was the last thing humans had going for them. As it is now, just make all humans Vhumans, give them floating +2/+1 and one feat and it is all good.

So far, almost all casters we see at tables in which floating ASI are welcomed are either mountain dwarves, hogoblins and tortoise (that one I did not see it coming). Although on paper floating ASI are promoting diversity, in the long runs it appears to do the opposite. And the losers? Martial characters that do not multiclass... Floating ASI are what I call, a false good idea.

Edit: Quite a few typoes. Damn phone keyboard and autocorrector set in multiple languages...

 

[ReshiIRE]

Question, for science.

Is there a site that is generally accepted as providing rankings for builds or classes?

I don't look up guides, so I'm looking for a pointer to one accepted as mostly correct.

I'm not sure something like this exists. The best you'll find is getting together a bunch of guides and averaging out the results. I don't have a lot of experience but from reading a bunch of forums for D&D, I certainly haven't come across a tier list for 5e for classes, subclasses, etc. (in comparison, I was pretty shocked to learn that 3.5e seemed to have a fairly consistently determined tier list).

I wouldn't say there are any sources that are going to be accepted as mostly correct. My understanding form the few guides I have read that a lot of emphasis is placed on succeeding skill checks and doing well in combat damage wise, but not always looking strongly at utility (especially outside of combat that isn't succeeding a skill check), or concerning whether certain 'weak' things can be quite strong in some campaigns (Actor, from what I read of it, has a lot of use in more social intrigue campaigns or anything where deception and performance is important. It has no 'combat' use necessarily but it's certainly got its place. But from what I know, it's a very lowly ranked feat. I would also say that Mounted Combat is probably not given a high ranking, but I could imagine a campaign focused on open fields and outdoor combat where a Mount will be of the utmost importance.)

So, I would say your mileage will vary, a lot.

 

[Lyxen]

For clarity, I'm not asking about this specific unessecarily compiclated ruleset. But I really like the idea of designing races such that every one has advantages and disadvantages. That, to me, is far more important than whether or not those (dis)advantages are coded in an ability increase/decrease or somewhere else.

I agree, but then with people having a tendency to be oversensitive in the present days, having negatives to any race can be considered problematic...

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, the exact same 6 numbers, placed in six different slots. That is 720 possible combinations. So, please explain how over 700 combos is “cookie cutter”? It certainly isn’t unrealistic. And if your only acceptance of “equivalence” is going to be people IRL being assigned arbitrary values for their constitution, then there is nothing equivalent to even compare too, so we are going to have settle for “good enough”. Especially since your argument is comparing it to reality, and there is no equivalence to compare too.

The combos aren't relevant to my issue. My issue is that they have the same 6 numbers.

No, sorry, you made the claim right here.

My bad. I misspoke. It should have been pretty clear that an infant isn't born with the numbers in the array. It's pretty disingenuous to go down that road when you knew I was talking about PCs and the array.

And even if you had said that it was unrealsitic for the to have the same stats at level 2, which you didn't, then that is still completely unsupported. Heck, there are only 16 possible numbers they could have from rolling 3d6. Having the same six isn’t that far of a stretch for people who follow similar regimes.

16 for each stat is much different than the same 6 over and over and over.

Most fastballs thrown by most Major League Pitchers average between 90 and 100 mph. The average NBA player is 6ft 6 inches. The average IQ of a surgeon is 105. The Marines have a physical fitness minimum they have to achieve to qualify for their ranks.

And yet they don't all come out the same.

Are they identical? No. But they aren't being abstracted into game terms, and can have 0.005 differences between them. But the very idea of having a minimum standard for atheltic training in a profession or education in a career speaks to this meaning that they work within a narrower range of these abstract numbers. And therefore matching these numbers is easy to imagine.

You do know that fighters aren't all trained at some school, right? There are no minimum standards. If you don't believe me, go read the PHB and see what the minimum strength or dexterity to be a fighter is. Is it 15? Is it 17? Or is it 3?

Oh, right. It's 3. Your prime stat to qualify to be a fighter ranges from 3-20. That's some minimum standard.

Also, if they have an 18 strength before they begin training, and after level 1 they have an… 18 strength. How does that work?

Pretty sure it's +4.

Their training was useless in building muscle and making them more effective?

At some point you stop getting stronger through exercise. If you didn't, every fighter would just train to 20 at 1st level and then go adventuring.

Says who? Stories change. Archetypes are only collections of stories. It used to be the idea of a female warrior was impossible, they only existed so that it could be shown that they would lose to the true, manly hero.

Cool story. In D&D the primary dwarven archetypes for all dwarves(mountain and hill) are clerics and fighter. That hasn't changed.

If the community decides that Dwarf Bards are awesome, no amount of “but it’s against type” is going to prevent that type from changing.

It's not going to change. All the people who ran out to make good drow ranger loners after Drizzt didn't make that the new drow archetype.

They can mix it up physically, but about half of all clerics get a boost to cantrip casting. Also, Toll of the Dead works in melee range and is very good, keying off wisdom. Additionally, about half of clerics only get Medium armor, meaning they need at least a positive Dex to get their AC up.

Array is 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. Even is it goes Wisdom, Constitution, Strength then Dexterity they will have a 12, which is a +1. They don’t particularly need charisma or Intelligence, and those might end up being the 10 or the 8.

So, yes, more than likely the cleric has a positive dex. If that happens, then your dwarven cleric is just as graceful as the Average Elf.

Nah. You assume people are going to play gamist, rather than make a character to roleplay. It's not hard to get medium armor proficiency(cough mountain dwarf cough) with a feat or something, and many will just plain want a charisma bonus, because talking/preaching is a cleric thing to do. And while yes there will be some exceptional dwarves that are as graceful as the average elf, exceptional elves will still be more graceful.

They aren’t completely different, because we are talking about rules for generating PCs. If the standard rules already end up with PCs more extraordinary and dexterous than the average elf, then why does it matter that the rules reflect the average elf?

Because the average elven PC will be more dexterous than the average dwarven PC, because race.

If you say that this doesn’t matter, because PCs are extraordinary, then it doesn’t matter if the PC rules are floating, because they are extraordinary anyways.

Nope. Extraordinary + elf = more dexterous on average than extraordinary + dwarf.

Which also ties into how weird it is to have people insist that PCs are perfectly average people.

Who has argued that?

 

[Maxperson]

This thread is very long.

What are everyone's thoughts on this kind of thing:

View attachment 142886

For clarity, I'm not asking about this specific unessecarily compiclated ruleset. But I really like the idea of designing races such that every one has advantages and disadvantages. That, to me, is far more important than whether or not those (dis)advantages are coded in an ability increase/decrease or somewhere else.

You seem to have left out "being a gnome" as one of the cons.

 

[Umbran]

I agree, but then with people having a tendency to be oversensitive in the present days

Mod Note:
So, one of the most common ways to be insulting is to say, in effect, "We disagree, and that's because of a character flaw on your part." Don't be that person.

 

[Chaosmancer]

And at our tables we chose to leave them just like we do with other options, and not ask for advice because we are not building technical characters that need a technical crutch to seem attractive to play.

Good for you. Now, can you stop accusing people who might seek advice in a very complicated game to being toxic to the game because you don't like the advice? Can you stop accusing people who like an option of being horrid bullies because you think they are going to use that option in a way you disapprove of?

I'm not asking you to let it in at your table, but you have done nothing but throw accusations at us, without any reasoning. Roll it back.

They have everything to do, it's a power option, demonstrated as such.

No, it isn't. No more than any other legal option in the game. And your issue is with toxic players, which has nothing to do with the rules, and everything to do with toxic people.

I don't think I ever did something of the kind. I'm saying that when you don't want a powergame, it's reasonable to leave power options on the side, nothing more.

You absolutely did that.

Moreover, honestly, I'm not too concerned about what is happening with the community in general, everyone can play the game that they want. It's just that I am really annoyed by the powergaming people above, for one, and I like to remind them that floating ASIs are an option (for some reason that infuriates them). As for our tables, on the other hand, I KNOW what the powergamers at our tables would do, because we have discussed it and, being reasonable people who understand the benefits of limiting the power gap (as well as long term fans of the racial ASIs that they, like me, grew up with), they agreed not to implement the Floating ASIs.

Firstly, you said that you "like" reminding them it is an option. You do it because you enjoy it, by your own admission. Since you follow that up with how it infuriates them, you are clearly expecting to needle them, and like doing so. Maybe I'm reading too deeply into that, but combining it with your venom towards any form of optimization I fear it is a likely conclusion.

Secondly, you said that your table discussed it and "being reasonable people who understand the benefits of limiting the power gap" they agreed not to use the rule. This immediately sets up anyone who disagrees with you as either a) unreasonable or b) lacking understanding. It is a neat little rhetorical trick, but it is again, inappropriate. Reasonable people can disagree. People who understand the game can see different sides, and your insistence that everything and anything is powergaming and toxic, makes it hard to have any discussion with you about those reasonable differences, because you refuse to see anything that disagrees with you as unreasonable. That we are liars who will always seek to overshadow our peers and make our games worse, unlike you whom is enlightened.

Again, roll back the rhetoric. Stop assuming negatives about people. It is doing nothing but making a discussion harder to have.

This is really funny because it demonstrates that it only opens options that were not considered before because they were not powerful enough for your taste. Because the Floating ASIs did not create any new option in terms of race/class. They only make options that were here all along more palatable because now you have more power with them!

So? Am I somehow wrong because I wasn't compelled to start myself off in a character whom I didn't think would be satisfying to play? I did it once, a Gnome Cleric, started with a 14 Wisdom. Character struggled every inch of the game to accomplish what I knew I could do in combat.

I loved the story, but the story was hampered by the mechanics. And I was never confident enough to try it again. Instead I just played the options I knew weren't hampered and told those stories instead. Now I have the option to go back and tell stories I want to tell, without worrying about it.

Do you feel like I'm wrong to do so? Do you feel like I'm bad for the game because I'm happy to have options that match my preference? Why should it matter if I want to play a Goliath Barbarian or a Elf Barbarian, and have the same stats. I could have by rolling, you realize that, right? I could have rolled stats and been able to do it, but my desire to play one of those characters and the times I rolled good stats never aligned. And now, I can do it anyways. Why am I wrong and bad for doing so?

Please stop it with the strawmaning. We don't need these options, we don't need crutches to have race/class combination seem attractive. You do, hence it's powergaming. I don't ascribe something evil to this, so why are you doing it to yourself ?

You do. You've made multiple claims that powergamers look down on others, that they belittle others, that they only follow the guides and don't think for themselves, and on and on and on. You have never had a single positive thing to say about them, other than "and of course I don't judge them for it".Which rings a bit hollow.

And didn't you yourself say that your group sees the benefits of "reducing the power gap"? Multiple people have gone to these guides you decry and pointed out that with Tasha's... the power gap has been reduced. The middle has grown, a lot of ideas are in a far better place, and able to compete with the top spots. I'm not talking about crutches, I'm talking about leveling the field... which is what you are for right? But you refuse to accept it because you can't see it as anything other than powergaming.

And here you go, just to justify a +1 Technical power, you do exactly what I say, you invent a TECHNICAL build and you try to justify it with a story that anyone can invent in 3 seconds. The only person that you are fooling here is yourself, you know, because I chose to play a halfling warlock, an extremely satisfying character, by the way, but without these bonuses years ago.

So nothin hampers you except the POWER that you need from th Floating ASIs. In short, only one word for it, powergaming.

So what, I should play anything with no concern for the mechanics? Make a bard who has a -1 to all charisma checks, invest in atheltics and animal handling, and play them like a face relying on Persuasion and deception? Do you do that? Do you put your lowest possible score in your prime attribute? Or are you obsessed with POWER and make sure that you have your highest score there?

Did you hafling warlock start with a 10 Charisma? A 7? Or was it closer to a 15?

I'm not fooling myself. I know what I want, I know why I want it, and I know that I love the stories of my characters. You can look down on me and mock me for caring about that +1, you can say that I'm playing it wrong and try and force me to change... but that's on you. I'm being honest with you. Nothing more, nothing less.

Why ? Because you like the power of the +1. Powergaming, this has NOTHING to do with story or roleplaying.

And why are you struggling ? The difficulty is not set beforehand by an unforgiving DM who decides to kill characters if they lack a +1, or at least I hope your DM is not like that. Ours certainly are not. Moreover, considering that this +1 has really had a statistical effect over a few games is mathematically fallacious. Pure luck has a much greater influence over the few rolls that you are doing in a given session anyway, and you are much more likely to die from bad luck than from a missing +1...

And yet, it has made a difference. Repeatedly. You'll tell me I'm wrong, that I can't possibly have noticed myself and a dragonborn cleric player who both started with a +2 Wisdom being noticeably underpowered. Everyone tells me I'm wrong. But no one else was sitting at those tables, so I'm going to continue pointing out that those two characters struggled more than any other clerics I have ever seen. Seven years of running 5e, a cleric in nearly every single party, and the only two who felt weaker than normal, even with the guy who always missed Guiding Bolt, were the ones with a +2.

And, a secondary point, on why I struggle. Because it isn't worth it. Going against the grain and being behind the curve for my characters entire career isn't worth playing one story over the other. But, if I truly only cared about those +1's? If I only cared about POWER and not RP? Then why would I be so happy to have this option? This is it, this lets me do what I want to do. I don't have to decide between my first story and the my second story anymore, I can just go with the first.

And you don't think that it's a problem ?

No. Some DMs don't adjust their encounters for the players. That isn't a problem, that is a style choice.

And here you see one of the nasty sides of powergaming (although not the nastiest). Why are you in this competition about playing archetypal characters ? Powergaming, and ONLY powergaming. It has nothing to do with how the game is described by the devs.

So, we are all powergamers because I've got friends who like playing Tiefling Warlocks, Dwarf Fighters and Humans? And it isn't a "competition", we aren't comparing our DPS between fights. But when one person is noticeably weaker than the others, especially when that person is someone like me who is generally the most experienced player at the table, you feel bad. You feel like you let them down, because you were selfish about what you wanted instead of what was better for the group.

Maybe that's just me, but I've seen other people get frustrated that they feel like they aren't pulling an equal share. It isn't about overshadowing them, it is about not being a burden to them. And you can tell that person all day long that no one else cares, but it isn't about the other people caring, it is about them caring. And you can't tell someone to stop caring about something. Well, you can, but it pretty much never works. (Yes, I understand the irony everyone)

And isn't that exactly what I'm telling you is one of the nasty effects of powergaming ? Looking down at people who do not optimise their character ? Saying that only powergamers are "real players"?

So why are you telling me that only "real players" would play a character who isn't optimized? Why are you looking down on me for not wanting my Elf Warlock to have a 15 charisma?

There are so many people in this thread telling me I'm wrong for not just doing things the way they would do them. But, I've never argued against someone having the choice to play with a 15. I've never argued that they are wrong to do so. I've argued against absurd claims about "what we really want" or about how "unrealistic" it is. But I have never once told someone that they shouldn't play the character they want to play. Meanwhile, that is all I'm being told. That I'm wrong, that I always could have played their way, and so it is my fault for not wanting to.

I don't doubt that, but I never said he was great, I said that he had the same thinking as me about what wizards are about.

Once day, you will read my posts and stop strawmaning, and it will help immensely in the discussions. I never said anything like the above, i'm pointing to guides as obvious sources of powergaming, but I'm not guilty of the sophisms that you profess. Obviously, you can be a powergamer without consulting the guides, I'm just pointing out that I've seen so many people on the forums referencing them as their source of inspiration that they certainly have some effect, at least on the community frequenting the forums...

But you have repeatedly said that powergamers would just blindly follow the guides.

So, here we are.

You can be a powergamer with the guides, you can be a powergamer without the guides. You can be a non-powergamer without the guides, and you can be a non-powergamering with the guides.

So, for the purposes of this discussion, the guides are a moot point. They prove nothing.

Oh yes there is. A lot. It's not worth doing it if you don't think that it will not benefit the players, but the players need to respect the work that you are doing so that they can enjoy the game. And that respect starts with listening to what the DM has prepared, with an open mind, and complying with his requests in terms of world building, ambiance and power level.

If you disagree, you can always leave, but I've DMed for more than 40 years using these methods and no one has ever walked out of my games. Ever.

I'm glad that you've never had a failed game. I've listened to plenty of my friends who said that the DM refused to budge on this, but they gave him a chance... and then three weeks later they are quitting in disgust because the DM can't relax their grip on their characters.

There is nothing wrong with using the Standard Array. There is no reason to deny people from using it, except you don't like it. And, while the players should listen to the DM with an open mind, that street goes both ways, and you should listen to the players with the same, instead of dismissing them out of hand. You want respect? Earn it. The title of DM earns you nothing.

They do. Not for powergaming reasons (although it's often the case in other groups), but for our groups, it's about larger than life heroes, so having heroic stats, both high and low, help in characterising extraordinary PCs (yes, they are sometimes over the top, and fairly caricatural, but that's the way Heroic Fantasy and in particular High Fantasy works, and we like it that way).

The standard array is very very bland, to be honest, and no-one at our tables ever use it.

It allows for a character with up to a 17 and as low as an 8. How is that not larger than life with heroic stats high and low? Do all your characters need to have an 18 and a 5 to be considered at your table? You might find it bland, but again... it isn't your character. Who cares if you think it is bland, MR. DM? You aren't the one who has to run it.

I don't agree. And I know, it's in the trend to complain about bad DMs, but I can honestly say that in 40+ years and thousands of game, I have never ever had a bad DM. Some DMs were more to my taste than others, but nothing ever really bad.

On the other hand, I've had scores of really, really bad players, of all breeds.

Respect your DM and the work he does for your entertainment, and his choices, because he is a clever guy, probably more clever than you, and who has made his choices for a reason. As he is not playing for himself, by default, think that the choices were made for YOUR entertainment during his games. If you make these hypothesis, I can guarantee that you will enjoy the game a lot more.

You are luckier than you know. I've had plenty of bad DMs.

I had a DM who forced my character to play "throw a turd at a turd" with an NPC, so he could laugh at my character being in such a situation.

I had a DM who was running a system I actually liked, with pre-gens I'd played with before, and made such a massive mess of the table I had to tell the other players later that the system was really good. And that DM also during one of the scenes basically said (and I'm paraphrasing from a few years ago) "You go down the side tunnel, and some stuff happens, and you kill the cultists, and then you arrive at..." and just handwaved away an entire section of the adventure.

I had a DM once who gave us literally nothing to do, no conflict to solve, and no goal, and then put us on a railroad track to a village, where we were forced to eat some fruit that had some magical effect, and then had all the village women hitting on our characters, despite none of us being interested.

There was a guy at a Con who proudly red markered and pinned the dead characters from his game to the wall. Triumphant in how many PCs he had killed, because that was his goal.

And on

And On

AND ON.

I've had bad players too. And I've had DMs who made major misteps, but were new and I forgive them for it, but I've only been seriously gaming for about 10 years, and I've had plenty of horror stories, and heard many many more.

My DM is not more clever than me. They are dude running a game. They made choices thinking it might be fun, but that doesn't mean it was fun. And if you aren't willing to listen to criticism or change course, then I have better things to do than to waste my time.

Again, you want respect? Earn it. Being a DM doesn't earn you respect. I know, I'm a DM.