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

[Yaarel]

You say this as if it's new. It was literally always possible. It was then codified as an option 'sanctioned' by Tasha's, but that just wasn't good enough.

Instead, what we had and some enjoy, needs to be officially removed, for others to be satisfied. I must lose, for others to be happy, yet I'm happy just having multiple options.

I'm not asking for you to feel bad for me. I would like people to at least understand why I want things to remain without resorting to passive aggressive sniping (not to say you are BTW) but we don't all get what we want do we.

Im trying to get a sense of where you are coming from. In what sense would Tashas be making you "lose" something?

If you want your elf to have the +2 in Dexterity, you can still choose to put it there.

If I want my elf to have the +2 in Charisma, I can choose to put there.

Neither of us have lost the elf we want.

 

[Malmuria]

Im trying to get a sense of where you are coming from. In what sense would Tashas be making you "lose" something?

If you want your elf to have the +2 in Dexterity, you can still choose to put it there.

If I want my elf to have the +2 in Charisma, I can choose to put there.

Neither of us have lost the elf we want.

Yeah...with all these things the argument of "you were always able to homebrew it" does not make sense because you are still able to homebrew it. At least with alignment some people were making the case that adding alignment back in to monsters was a time consuming process, which, whatever the validity of that, at least was an attempt to show that homebrewing a rule back in is harder than taking it out.

 

[billd91]

Im trying to get a sense of where you are coming from. In what sense would Tashas be making you "lose" something?

If you want your elf to have the +2 in Dexterity, you can still choose to put it there.

If I want my elf to have the +2 in Charisma, I can choose to put there.

Neither of us have lost the elf we want.

That's not entirely true. If whatever comes next just covers the floating bonuses, then we lose an aspect of the elf archetype that has been represented in the system since at least 1e AD&D. From my perspective, since it took all of 1.5 pages of Tasha's to describe how groups can follow the archetypes or not and offer some guidance to trade-off the archetypical characteristics, I don't see why they couldn't keep the archetype and incorporate Tasha's suggestions in whatever exists going forward. That really would be a case where we both do get the elf we want.

 

[Chaosmancer]

They are being removed going forward, you won't see ASI on the new PC options in Strixhaven or what it's called.

sigh

"New options will be written differently" =/= "Old options are taken away"

Seriously, no one threw a fit when Half-Elves were revealed to have two floating ASIs, yet the world is ending and your options are being taken away because Rabbitfolk will have floating ASIs? New stuff being different isn't the same thing as old stuff being removed.

 

[Scribe]

Im trying to get a sense of where you are coming from. In what sense would Tashas be making you "lose" something?

If you want your elf to have the +2 in Dexterity, you can still choose to put it there.

If I want my elf to have the +2 in Charisma, I can choose to put there.

Neither of us have lost the elf we want.

If everything is floating, the archetype as noted by @billd91 is less defined.

That is the opposite of what I want.

 

[Chaosmancer]

What I want is niche protection. That if the player decides to focus on the thing their PC's species is known for, they are guaranteed to be best in the party at it.

No thank you, hard pass. I don't want my fantasy world to be one where you can be correct by saying "we should hire a gnome wizard, gnomes are the best wizards because they are just biologically better at it."

 

[Scribe]

New stuff being different isn't the same thing as old stuff being removed.

When the reprinting of the PHB takes place, the PC options will be all floating ASI.

That is a loss to me.

Me. Mine. I.

You don't care? You see no loss? Fantastic.

The lack of definition or decrease in definition, is a loss to ME.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No thank you, hard pass. I don't want my fantasy world to be one where you can be correct by saying "we should hire a gnome wizard, gnomes are the best wizards because they are just biologically better at it."

Not best wizards, whole class is not the niche. You can qualify who's best at class by one stat alone. Sure the gnome might have one point more int but the human fill have an extra feat. Not that my setting has gnomes to begin with.

 

[Faolyn]

You say this as if it's new. It was literally always possible. It was then codified as an option 'sanctioned' by Tasha's, but that just wasn't good enough.

Except that it was never actually "literally always possible."

Sure, I could always say "in my world, goblins are any alignment but all dragons, even the metallic ones, are evil." But not a single official source would ever include anything like that, because goblins are evil and metallic dragons are good. And if they did introduce creatures from an evil race that had become good, those creatures were always an anomaly. The only excepts are for settings like Eberron, which very specifically chose to ignore racial alignments. And because of that, it would be difficult or even impossible to convince some players that no, "in my world" things are different, because officially goblins are evil and metallic dragons are good.

So I'm kind of with @dave2008 here. I can't feel too bad because we've had it your way for nearly 50 years. Now you can learn to adapt the same way we always had to adapt.

 

[Faolyn]

The lack of definition or decrease in definition, is a loss to ME.

And not having that floating ASI is a loss to other people.