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

[Yaarel]

What does Tasha's do mechanically that the DM could not apply with the following.

"Put +2 and +1 into any 2 different attributes of your choice."

"Do whatever you want", is the opposite of officially supporting a gaming style.

Tashas supports players who want to avoid unintentional racism and who want to play meaningful character concepts without fighting against the mechanics.

And it matters. I can now play Norse concepts of elf and dwarf − officially. I appreciate the goodwill gesture toward other reallife cultures.

 

[abirdcall]

Sure, they should, but Tasha's didn't and that's bad. For example the reason why mountain dwarves got the unusual two +2s was that their strength bonus wouldn't really benefit classes that would benefit from their armour proficiency. But if you can just be caster, get that super useful armour proficiency and then move that +2 to your casting stat this makes the mountain dwarves simply super good for caster classes. You can eat your cake an have it too, while previously you couldn't. Now it is not a huge balance issue, but if the objective was to correct the issue of some races being better match for some classes, then it didn't work. It just changed which races are good for which classes and made races that simply get more stuff better.

Completely irrespective of my feelings of whether racial ASIs should be thing, I dislike the Tasha's solution because it is just a horrible ugly kludge. If you want get to rid of racial ASIs then you just need to redesign the character creation and races to work with that assumption.

Yep.

When I look at the races in Volo's one thing that jumps out to me is that their abilities often have counter synergy with their ASIs.

The intent and effect of this, I believe, is to make them both rarer at the table and unique in presentation and playstyle. Which in turn keeps them as being weird and bizarre races as they should be.

 

[Scribe]

"Do whatever you want", is the opposite of officially supporting a gaming style.

Tashas supports players who want to avoid unintentional racism and who want to play meaningful character concepts without fighting against the mechanics

Respectfully, this doesn't answer the question.

Mechanically, they are the same.

I certainly can see you perspective on wanting it codified, after all I've argued for inclusion of both options for as long as the UA making Tasha's the only way going forward has existed.

 

[Maxperson]

And it matters. I can now play Norse concepts of elf and dwarf − officially. I appreciate the goodwill gesture toward other reallife cultures.

How does +2, +1 and the ability to swap proficiencies make your Norse Dwarf magically powerful, extremely knowledgeable, and turn to stone if the sun hits him?

How do those things make your Norse Elf able to make others ill or cure them and be more beautiful than the sun?

As an aside, an optional rule is essentially a house rule, which you had access to before Tasha's. If one of my players had a Norse Dwarf concept and wanted to work with me to achieve it, I would work with him to create something better than floating ASI's and a tool proficiency.

 

[the Jester]

The goal is to let each player pick their own ability scores. That is why there are array and point-buy. But the race options entangle the situation.

I'm unclear if you're saying that your goal is to let each player pick or the game's goal is. If the latter, I disagree- that's why the original and still default stat generation method is dice.

Now, don't get me wrong; having players pick their stats is a fine option for some playstyles, and I have nothing against it (in some peoples' games), but I much prefer an element of randomness (which is to say, you don't get to choose everything you want and have to deal with what you roll, with the caveat that I have players discard arrays I find boring- too good, too bad, or too middle of the road).

 

[abirdcall]

I'm unclear if you're saying that your goal is to let each player pick or the game's goal is. If the latter, I disagree- that's why the original and still default stat generation method is dice.

Now, don't get me wrong; having players pick their stats is a fine option for some playstyles, and I have nothing against it (in some peoples' games), but I much prefer an element of randomness (which is to say, you don't get to choose everything you want and have to deal with what you roll, with the caveat that I have players discard arrays I find boring- too good, too bad, or too middle of the road).

Just a quibble, the default stat generation in 5e is to roll or take the standard array.

Point buy is a variant but the standard array is not.

 

[the Jester]

Just a quibble, the default stat generation in 5e is to roll or take the standard array.

Point buy is a variant but the standard array is not.

Fair enough!

 

[Yaarel]

Respectfully, this doesn't answer the question.

Mechanically, they are the same.

I certainly can see you perspective on wanting it codified, after all I've argued for inclusion of both options for as long as the UA making Tasha's the only way going forward has existed.

I described the above, where the elf race is mainly a choice of any elf feat and any cantrip.

As far as I understand, there can be among the elf feats, one that supports the 5e high elf concept.

Without worrying about finetuning it for balance, the High Elf feat would look something like.

ELF (HIGH CULTURE)
Creature Type. Fey humanoid.
Size. Medium.
Speed 30.
Prestigious Abilities. Dexterity and Intelligence.
Prestigious Trait. Darkvision.
Prestigious Feat. Fey Knight Magic.

Fey Knight Magic
• Trance. Immunity to sleep. Long rest for only four hours, meditating while alert.
• Perception Skill.
• Charm Resistance.
• Wizard Cantrip.
• Elfsword Cantrip. Longsword attacks are proficient, using spellcasting ability for it.
• Elfshot Cantrip. Bow shoots psychic damage, paralyzed instead of dead.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Not so. I've set up a situation where the truth matters for those groups that want to engage it. If your group wants to find and engage good hobgoblins, go out there and meet them.

I'm just not forcing complex real world angst on the players who are there to escape that sort of stuff.

Do you have evil humans? How is that not forcing complex real world angst on the players but having a good hobgoblin is?

And how would your players know to go looking for Good Hobgoblins if they never encounter them, never hear about them, and never see any evidence of their existence?

No. They exist and are encounterable if that's the kind of game you want to play.

I know that. But if you say "Well, hobgoblins can be any alignment, but you will only see or hear about evil hobgoblins in my games" then you have to recognize that means you have effectively made all hobgoblins evil for your game.

And you have to be careful with that sort of thing. I was playing a game with friends where we were fighting gnolls, who were literal demon spawn, who were allied with literal neo-nazis (post apocalyptic earth) planning on killing all life on the planet... and we had to stop and figure out how we were approaching race and "evil" because the GM wanted us to get some information so he had a Gnoll surrender.

And one of the other players pointed out that since we were fighting nazis, having an entire race of people who were incapable of good and only capable of evil... reinforced the nazi's idealogy and made it really weird. DM didn't intend that to happen, they didn't want a complex game of real world angst, but they had stepped face first into it, and we had to halt the game and figure out what we were going to do about it.

Real life has no place in this discussion. Nothing I'm saying is making any attempt to mirror reality. That's like the point and everything! We don't want to have reality in the game.

But you can't do that. I'm sorry, you just can't. You cannot have a game about Good and Evil without getting into discussions of Good and Evil in the real world. You can minimize it as much as you want, you can try and ignore it, but in the end of the day, something is going to slip through and slam you with reality.

Me? I'd rather be prepared for that. I'd rather have gone ahead and considered that, as best as I can, instead of getting caught off guard.

If you remove the ability to play against type for those races with type, sure.

An argument can also be made that classes you commonly see due to racial bonuses are also a form of type, so in that context I suppose Genasi and such have a type.

So, Genasi get +2 Con, which character class is that?

See, here is my issue. You can be upset that you can't play against type for a dwarf... but what was playing against type for a dwarf? Being a wizard? I've seen a lot of dwarven wizards. They work, they make sense, they are kind of cool. It hasn't been "against type" for a while. And if it is okay for these other races not to have a type to play against... why isn't it okay for dwarves to broaden out so they no longer have a type to play against?

Why is it bad that a dwarven wizard might become a little more common and help counterpoint the elven wizard. Not by being a worse wizard, but by how we can talk about their approaches being different.

None of the races without types matter. They're completely irrelevant to the discussion about races with types having those types go away.

I say they do matter. If Genasi and Humans and Aasimar can be popular and successful races without having a type to play against, then why can't elves and dwarves? Why do elves and dwarves need to be more constrained so that they have classes they are good at and classes they are bad at, when we don't need that for the other races?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I find that to be a pretty strong argument against including all the various race options willy-nilly, actually.

Why? Because it is just as easy to make a Genasi Rogue as it is a Genasi Barbarian? How is that a bad thing?