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

[TwoSix]

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.

I think it should be feasible to have all classes with at least 3 different stats as possible main stats without the need for multiclassing or feats.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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?

"High elves get +1 Int because they have a good school system" - not a terrible sentence by itself, but perhaps a poor fit for a racial trait - you could have high elves who didn't grow up in such school systems, wood elves or half-elves who did, and of course we don't want to imply that only high elves value education so any race might be able to access that trait...

This is where a floating bonus is good. If it works for your character to have +1 Int because they went to fancy high elf schools, great, but forcing it creates more problems than it solves.

 

[mrpopstar]

"High elves get +1 Int because they have a good school system" - not a terrible sentence by itself, but perhaps a poor fit for a racial trait - you could have high elves who didn't grow up in such school systems, wood elves or half-elves who did, and of course we don't want to imply that only high elves value education so any race might be able to access that trait...

This is where a floating bonus is good. If it works for your character to have +1 Int because they went to fancy high elf schools, great, but forcing it creates more problems than it solves.

Was just a thought.

 

[Yaarel]

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

Leveling improvements show that these ability improvements are strictly because of training and experience.

With regard to the pre-existing abilities, before level 1, the same can also be true.

In my setting, a level 1 character is an adult, roughly 20 years old, roughly equivalent to a college level student, during the "apprentice tier", levels 1 to 4.

As a teenager, this character has already been training before reaching level 1. There is a kind of "level zero" sotospeak, when the proficiency bonus was presumably +1, not +2 at level 1. Likewise, a time when the Wizard in training could only cast one slot-1 spell per long rest, rather than two at level 1.

The point is, an unusually high ability score can have resulted during this "level zero" training so to speak, while a teen.

Similarly a human spends their feat at level 1, to gain a +1 improvement to an ability score. Depending on character concept, this ability improvement might result from previous training.

Similarly again, player characters can use an array with high-ish scores in the Players Handbook for their characters. Depending on which settings, typical members of the same race might use an array whose scores are much lower. If the player characters are significantly higher than is typical, then the improvements of the player characters might be the result of training.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

Yeah, something like that certainly might be interesting. The real issue with removing racial ASIs mid-edition is that the game was really not originally designed to work that way. Without them, the races have very little mechanical weight left, and it also creates weird issues like mountain dwarves suddenly being the best choice for wizards and sorcerers.

Tasha's is playtesting for a "D&D 5e Revised."

 

[Chaosmancer]

That's pretty disingenuous, given that elephants are not a pc race or even humanoid. I don't see how this intersects at all with the idea that (f'rex) half-orcs are stronger than human. D&D is set up to capture that difference, and if you think it's nothing, it shouldn't bother you to not get fully optimized stats.

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.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

Again, if the argument is that if the game doesn't model the thing accurately it shouldn't model the thing at all we can just throw away all the rules. D&D models practically nothing accurately.

 

[Undrave]

All things being equal, what is the difference? Men, on average, probably lift more than women. Lifting weights, is 'lifting more' than someone else.

Remove everything else, what is left. Its lifting. If men on average lift more, then men on average make better weightlifters, and the records (I'm looking at olympics) bear this out.

And what does all this mostly irrelevant tangent of mine boil down to?

Goliaths should be better Barbarians with a +2 to Str, and should on average be stronger than Halfings or Gnomes.

To me this means that a Goliath should have a potential maximum strength of 22 instead of 20, but they'd still need to work at it. A Goliath Wizard could have less strength than a Gnome or Halfling who trained their STR.

 

[Scribe]

To me this means that a Goliath should have a potential maximum strength of 22 instead of 20, but they'd still need to work at it. A Goliath Wizard could have less strength than a Gnome or Halfling who trained their STR.

Absolutely agree, my system allows for this, while also putting a cap on small PCs because I personally think massively strong Halflings, are a nonsense idea.

 

[clearstream]

How about "Asian girls are hot"?

Exoticizing people can be a form of racism, even when it's to attribute (ostensibly) positive traits to them.

That form of objectification is not an unmitigated positive. It is worrying that you believe it is.

It is better we discontinue this line of discussion.