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

[Scribe]

We already have meaningful ways to differentiate between the various PC options. They're called "traits." Powerful Build, Aggressive, Luck, Long-Limbed, Mask of the Wild, Draconic Ancestry, Dwarven Resiliance, innate spells, innate proficiencies, innate damage resistances.

And I, want more.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You say it is disengenious... and yet literally every single time we see people talking about gnomes getting a +2 strength, someone brings up an example like this. Badgers vs elephants. Mice vs ox. wolf vs blue whale. Every. Single. Time.

And, taking it seriously shows that... well, no one is taking these arguments seriously. No one really wants to show biological accuracy in the strength between a badger and an elephant, it is just a smokescreen to make the argument "shouldn't strong things be strong" seem better, and to make the other person have to take a position of arguing against something ludicrous.

So, I want to side-step that. The game isn't trying to show biological differences in strength accurately. It just isn't. It isn't even set up to show that half-orcs are stronger than humans. Because there is no way to show that. Again, the best we can do is some sort of statistical average... but this isn't a game about population distributions. this is a game about individuals. You can't just look at a piece of paper that says "half-orc" and determine if the person who gave you that paper is stronger than the person whose paper says "human". Just like you can't do it if the papers say "male" and "female". You can talk about statistics, probability, you can do all sorts of obsfucation to make it seem like making that decision is reasonable, but at the end of the day they are an individual, and considering I'm much more concerned with +1 to hit and damage (which in the real world is a combination of skill, strength, speed, mass, endurance, and the angle of the cutting edge of the weapon) than whether or not they can lift 30 more pounds than the other person... I don't see what biology has to do with it.

Maybe a gnome +2 strength means that they know how to leverage their mass better, it doesn't really matter, because the game is just using that number to show how effective they are at the job.

The ASIs weren't about individuals until 5e. They were about races, and how they generally appear. The individual idea is a very new construct that WotC is trying to convince us was always their intent, because modern culture. Even if it was never an accurate way to portray a population, that's what it was. Without that, we shouldn't have ASIs at level 1 at all.

 

[Faolyn]

And I, want more.

Then you also have all the cultural information written in the racial description.

You want more than that? Write your own supplement, sell it on DM's Guild.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That the thing is not represented accurately, doesn't mean it isn't represented at all. Or that it shouldn't be represented at all. The game rules absolutely should in some way try to represent the fictional reality, or otherwise the rules simply lose all relatability and indeed their whole purpose.

In some way? Sure.

To the point that a 180 lb half-orc man raised in the mountains and logging his own wood since he was 8 is slightly stronger than a 180 lb human man who was raised in the mountains logging his own wood since he was 8? No, I don't think that we really need to make the distinction that fine.

Ability scores exist to give us some measure of characters for the point of mechanics. That is it. There is no value in racial ASIs trying to talk about population averages. It simply isn't helpful to the game.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Of course it does. It removes a meaningful way to differentiate between the various PC options at the crunch level.

How important that is, is a personal question. I'd say the literal thousands of words spilled over the topic would mean it is of value to some.

Really? You can't decide between elven weapon training and cantrip vs fire resistance a cantrip and two spells? There is no meaningful distiction there to differentiate them on the level of crunch?

Meanwhile, +2 dexterity is shared by elves, goblins, halflings, aarcrockra, kobolds, kenku, shifters, and probably a handful of others, and that makes those races all distinct in terms of crunch?

 

[Scribe]

Then you also have all the cultural information written in the racial description.

You want more than that? Write your own supplement, sell it on DM's Guild.

I likely will, hopefully Wizards doesn't further decrease what they provide in the meantime.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The ASIs weren't about individuals until 5e. They were about races, and how they generally appear. The individual idea is a very new construct that WotC is trying to convince us was always their intent, because modern culture. Even if it was never an accurate way to portray a population, that's what it was. Without that, we shouldn't have ASIs at level 1 at all.

And maybe early in the game, when you were expected to go through a dozen characters, when it was based on marching armies and the population average might have mattered.... I can see where the idea came from.

But I've rarely seen a player have more than two different characters in a single game, and pretty much never have they both been the same race. We may have never had a grand revolution, but the idea that the game is about individual characters has grown and grown over the decades, until I'd say that is how much of us think about out characters.

And if you think the solution is to remove ASIs from level 1 entirely? Go ahead. But, the game balance was made with the idea that those +2/+1 stats were going to be there, so you have to account for them somewhere.

Floating ASIs make it easier to do so while letting some people do point buy and others rolling for stats, so it seems like the best solution.

 

[Scribe]

Really? You can't decide between elven weapon training and cantrip vs fire resistance a cantrip and two spells? There is no meaningful distiction there to differentiate them on the level of crunch?

Meanwhile, +2 dexterity is shared by elves, goblins, halflings, aarcrockra, kobolds, kenku, shifters, and probably a handful of others, and that makes those races all distinct in terms of crunch?

Again, I want more. I don't want things removed. It's quite simple.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Again, I want more. I don't want things removed. It's quite simple.

Well, I'm sorry that you want more. I have no more desire to deal with these ASIs. They do nothing positive for my games, and removing them does.

 

[Scribe]

Well, I'm sorry that you want more. I have no more desire to deal with these ASIs. They do nothing positive for my games, and removing them does.

Good thing you have Tasha's then to do with as you see fit.