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

[the Jester]

In 4e and 5e, for example, races can improve any ability, including Constitution, by leveling. Making the abilities themselves 100% nurture and 0% nature.

Making the improvements from level nurture, and saying nothing about the pre-existing stats.

 

[mrpopstar]

I'm a fan of racial ability score adjustments, but I believe race should be a driving force behind your character's abilities. I firmly believe an elf should feel completely different from a dwarf, but I'd be happy to ditch ability score adjustments to make this happen. Ultimately, +2 here or there doesn't differentiate characters, not really. Chances are, nobody notices that +1 in play except in rare circumstances, and even then the +1 typically makes the biggest difference over a long period of play.

I'd like to see dramatic, game-changing abilities tied to race. Elves all get spells, dwarven flesh is hard as stone, halflings are invisible when they're not moving, things of that nature.

I'm with this, though I do think that traits such as Speed, Darkvision, Keen Senses, Fey Ancestry, Trance, etc., are differentiating.

 

[the Jester]

But I guess a question would be, if a player at your table wants to play a str-based gnome battle master fighter, does that break your immersion somehow? Maybe they won't get an extra bonus to their strength at character creation, but per the rules they'll still be able to do all the fighter-y things, including pushing an enemy back.

Not at all. Small bad ass fighters are awesome.

If that gnome starts with a racial +2 Str bonus, though, I'm kinda scratching my head. Honestly, if WotC released a subrace of gnomes that came with +2 Str, I'd be hard pressed to include it in my game based on that alone. That said, I'm very selective about what races I include in my game as options (and the palette changes from area to area), so my default to new races or subraces is most often "No" anyway.

There's nothing wrong with having a fighter, barbarian, or paladin without a +2 racial bonus to Str. Really. And not having the same Str as a goliath or half-orc is part of the fun of playing against type. It's not really playing against type if there's no "against" there.

 

[TwoSix]

Not at all. Small bad ass fighters are awesome.

If that gnome starts with a racial +2 Str bonus, though, I'm kinda scratching my head. Honestly, if WotC released a subrace of gnomes that came with +2 Str, I'd be hard pressed to include it in my game based on that alone. That said, I'm very selective about what races I include in my game as options (and the palette changes from area to area), so my default to new races or subraces is most often "No" anyway.

There's nothing wrong with having a fighter, barbarian, or paladin without a +2 racial bonus to Str. Really. And not having the same Str as a goliath or half-orc is part of the fun of playing against type. It's not really playing against type if there's no "against" there.

You know, one way to bake in abilities into race AND not make any race-class combination disfavored if classes don't have a preferred stat. Have class features that leverage Int for fighters or Str for wizards.

 

[Micah Sweet]

this would be a lot easier if you read the first two sentences, though I admit I was rushing a bit in typing them.

I agree no individual is saying that it is impossible, however a model of biological determinism IS saying it is impossible. That is part of the reason to reject that sort of model. You say it is impossible for you to fight through a double team block by the NFL linemen. Would you say that it was impossible for you because your biology was determined at birth and your strength had a hard limit you could never surpass? That no amount of training, diet, excersice or desire to be a football player in your youth would have ever let you achieve a level of strength that could make that possible?

Saying "I'm weaker than a lineman now" isn't biological determinism. That is a statement of your current physicality. Saying "I was born unable to ever be stronger than a lineman" is biological determinism. Your biology determined your limitations.



Why not? What makes an axe swung by a gnome into your throat any less deadly? What makes a gnome less able to take a blow? Height alone tells you nothing except height.



I know baffles people. It baffled me. But there is a noticeable difference between starting with a +2 and starting with a +3 in your primary. Realistically we think it shouldn't be there, but I've seen it again and again and again and again.


And this isn't about min-maxing or powergaming. It isn't. I know people want to make this what this is about, so they can dismiss us for our impure hearts, but that isn't how this works. Heck, we have two people in this thread who said the exact same thing a few months back, who are now saying "you know... it really does open up options to let me play what I want to play."



But that only lasts until you start assigning hard numbers to try and force things to conform to those averages. If "Elves are usually graceful" means that they get a +2 Dex, why doesn't a graceful dwarf get +2 Dex?

See, part of this issue is a change in what these numbers mean. I can fully accept that back in the original days, the modifiers were meant to shift the bell curve model to model a real-world distribution of stats... but we aren't trying to model population numbers any more. People aren't thinking in those terms. The importance of shifting the bell curve for the population no longer matters, and instead we are focusing on individuals. And if we are looking at individuals, then the modifiers being floating makes the most sense.

One could argue that, if we're looking at individuals, the modifiers being non- existant makes the most sense. At least for character creation.

 

[billd91]

You know, one way to bake in abilities into race AND not make any race-class combination disfavored if classes don't have a preferred stat. Have class features that leverage Int for fighters or Str for wizards.

Best remedy for single-attribute dependency issues is to add more multi-attribute dependency.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You know, one way to bake in abilities into race AND not make any race-class combination disfavored if classes don't have a preferred stat. Have class features that leverage Int for fighters or Str for wizards.

Yes. It just is that doing this well is hard. Doing it in a lazy way is easy: just choose which stat to use for a thing. But personally I find that highly unsatisfying as it trivialises the stats; different stats should still mean different things. How fighters currently work is actually a good example how to do this well; you can build an effective dex or strength fighter, but they will play differently and have different feel. This is how it should be. I also feel all classes should be MAD. Whilst it makes sense for certain classes to require certain stats, it is not good that one stats is just so superior for the class that it and only it is the correct choice. And this is not only an issue due racial ASIs, it is a bigger issue than that. Clear prime stats for classes leads to sameyness. Every wizard will have the same int, every rogue the same the dex etc.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Right. And this is what I understand it to mean.

I'm not sure what this means. Is it about pre-evolution understanding of biology via classical Platonian essentialism or something like that? Because that was a thing. I don't think that is in modern parlance meant by 'biological essentialism.'

I don't understand what you mean.

Yes. Because the concept really doesn't make sense to be used that way. Which was kinda my original point: that is weird to try use the term when talking about literal differnt species.

Grouping this all together, because you've sort of missed the boat I was building.

If biological essentialism means that your biology sets limits on your culture, then asking it about things like "I have wings" or "I breath fire" make no sense. Those things cannot limit culture.

We don't ask this question about other species because, well, it is only recently that we've even started thinking some different species might have something similiar to culture. Culture is nearly entirely a human thing on Earth. So, we can't ask "what is the culture of ants" because as far as we can tell, they don't have one. And why don't they have one?

It boils down, if I was to use DnD's highly simplistic model, to the mental stats. Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. The thing is, you can't make racial ASIs without including these, it is impossible. Even if you set out to say that strength and constitution don't impact culture at all, you can't escape from the fact that saying someone is less intelligent than someone else based on their race/species isn't something we want to encourage.

Which then inevitably leads to the wrong questions. It leads to "but isn't a sea cucumber less intelligent than a raccoon, why isn't saying that a problem?" And this is the wrong question because the similiarities between the human scale, and the scale we have placed elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, giants, ect ect ect is too big. Every "race" in DnD has reached the human level of intelligence and culture. None of them are at the level of sea cucumbers or of raccoons. So the question doesn't apply. Anything we normally say about a different species is usually at such a drastically different level, that it breaks the scale of DnD. Is it wrong to say that eagles have better eyesight than humans? No, but the difference is so vast that it would be impossible to model in the game of DnD.

Right. So because the game mechanics do not represent the difference realistically, the difference shouldn't be represented at all? Why do elephants then have a higher strength score than badgers? Should everyone just have the same strength score? Why we even have ability scores if they don't represent anything?

Why do elephants have a higher strength than badgers? Well, let us say that a badger can move double its weight, and a cursory glance shows that a high end badger weighs 40 lbs. So, they can move 80 lbs.

That makes the elephant 175 time stronger. Do you think we can model that scale in DnD? Do you think that is useful in anyway?


See, this is the illusion breaking. DnD ability scores have never been meant to accurately portray biology. Attempting to do so ends up ludicrous. We would need a system that goes from 1 to 1,000 not one that goes from 1 to 30. So, what we need to be asking is if it is worthwhile to try and accurately represent biology. Or, if instead... we try and model what is needed for combat in the game of DnD.

Because 99% of the time, stats are only used for combat. I don't need to roll charisma for a dog, unless someone is using magic to charm it. And even that is kind of silly sometimes.

So, do we want to highlight biological reality of different species, to accurately show that elephants are stronger than badgers, or do we want simply model what is useful for the game to model... which then raises the question, why is it useful to use the model to enforce a population model that we don't even care about? We need individual stats for our characters to be mechanically effective, we don't need to model the entire population of dwarves or elves like what was the goal of racial ASIs in the beginning.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I fully understand that no one (well almost no one, I'm sure someone does) wants to get rid of fantasy species altogether.

But I think we should be able to honestly discuss what it means to have fantasy species and what we actually want to achieve by having them.

Maybe we can. But that conversation is big enough and complicated enough that first of all, I don't even feel qualified to form informed opinions about it. And it certainly isn't something that should be an aside argument on the mechanical side of the game.

 

[mrpopstar]

What if the mental stat ability bonuses aren't the byproduct of something innate, but are instead the byproduct of something nurtured? For example, elves get a +2 Dex due to something physical about their makeup, and high elves get +1 Int not because they're inherently smarter than the next guy, but because they value intelligence and place a particular importance on it culturing it?