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

[Micah Sweet]

Goblins.

Sometimes goblins are presented as incredibly strong beings, even though they are smaller than humans.
Sometimes goblins are tireless.
Sometimes goblins are cunning and clever tricksters.
Sometimes they are sneaky and stealthy.
Sometimes they are keen of ear.
Sometimes they are incredibly charming.

I could probably find a goblin myth tying them to any ASI I wanted. And if you take the "goblinoid" races from older editions, I can probably find a lot of different ASIs they have had over the years.

Fair enough. I'll give you goblins.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That's the same kind of question as "have you stopped beating your wife?" I already answered this multiple times in other posts.

No, it really isn't.

Counting subraces across all official DnD products, there are 23 options that have a +2 dex. Counting all the subraces, there are 15 options, total, in the PHB.

There are more +2 Dexterity options in the game, than there were OPTIONS in the PHB. There are also 15 different options for +2 Con. 11 for strength

So, if this +2 is important enough to be a major factor in defining a race... and we have more +2's than we had initial options... how is opening it up more causing any issues?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, it really isn't.

Counting subraces across all official DnD products, there are 23 options that have a +2 dex. Counting all the subraces, there are 15 options, total, in the PHB.

There are more +2 Dexterity options in the game, than there were OPTIONS in the PHB. There are also 15 different options for +2 Con. 11 for strength

So, if this +2 is important enough to be a major factor in defining a race... and we have more +2's than we had initial options... how is opening it up more causing any issues?

Because so many races already get darkvision we should just give everyone darkvision. Several races also have powerful build, perhaps that should be given to everyone too?

 

[Aldarc]

Because so many races already get darkvision we should just give everyone darkvision. Several races also have powerful build, perhaps that should be given to everyone too?

This doesn't really seem to apply to the argument that @Chaosmancer is making, but whatever.

 

[dave2008]

If a race gets +2 to dex because the race is dexterous, then that applies no matter what. It doesn't go away and allow for a +2 to strength.

An adventuring elf will most likely have a minimum dex of 10, not 8(assuming no rolling). The strength elf would not have the bonus that they should have had and will have a lower dex than an elf would had it started with the same base number.

My position isn't that an adventurer with +0 to dex can't achieve a dex within the elven(+2 dex) range. My position is that since the entire elven race gets the +2 to dex, an elven adventurer will have that +2 regardless.

You don't seem to be understanding and I apologize I don't feel like explaining anymore. Busy day and such. Have a great weekend!

 

[Yaarel]

Please show me a non-elf race where different narratives necessitate floating ASIs.

To represent the D&D elf traditions of earlier, as well as the current descriptions in 5e, the floating ability score improvements are necessary.

For other races, the floating improvements seem useful, to focus on one of the specific tropes, while alleviating any conflictive mechanics.

The hobgoblin comes to mind because of its complex tradition, and because of its unfortunate stereotyping.

In D&D 1e, the hobgoblin is nonmagical, average intelligence, with a military vibe, relating to leadership, morale, tactics, battle formations, military engineering, competitiveness, gory brutality, and Evil. Its illustration in the MM (Monster Manual) wears Japanese-esque samurai-like armor, possibly suggesting a grotesque caricature of a Japanese WW2 enemy.

By 3e, the MM illustration wears Roman-esque armor, with a vibe of imperial brutality, but the earlier "samurai" meme will continue to resurface elsewhere. The hobgoblin becomes a player race featuring Dexterity and Constitution. They tend to be fighters and, now, rogues, but now spell casters exist, either clerics or low-level "adepts" that prefer damage spells.

By the 4e MM, the hobgoblin groups together with bugbear, under the goblin entry, as kinds of "goblin". (In 5e, the three will come to be called "goblinoid" to disambiguate from the goblin proper.) The hobgoblins "live for war and bloodshed", are "aggressive and organized", conquerors and slavers, and "reserve a special loathing against all fey". The hobgoblin statblocks are all nonmagical military personnel, "grunt", "warrior", "archer", "soldier", and "commander", except for a magical "warcaster" who seems like a kind of religious military chaplain yet is more like a Wizard, and for a "Hand of Bane" who seems a kind of paladin.

In 3e and 4e, the statblocks normally list the ability scores as primary Strength then secondary Dexterity/Constitution (usually equal), except depending on the concept Intelligence or Charisma gets a jump, and these abilities continue in the 5e MM too.

Despite the normal "brute" build, with primary Strength, the player character ASIs conflict. Player character stats abandon the ubiquitous Strength improvement. 3e improves Constitution and Dexterity. 4e improves Constitution and Charisma for military leadership. 5e Eberron Rising improves Constitution and Intelligence for military tactics.

In sum, for the D&D hobgoblin tradition, every ability score improvement can be +2, except perhaps for Wisdom. (Notably, even the religious leaders seem either Charisma or Intelligence.) So a floating ability score improvement to represent Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, and Charisma, is necessary to represent the hobgoblin tradition.



After 3e tended to Romanize the hobgoblin, 5e unfortunately returns to its roots as the evil Japanese-esque meme, via the MM illustration of armor, and the Eberron Rising "Saving Face" trait.

Currently, 5e is in the process of making alignment an individual choice for humanoids, including the hobgoblin. Likewise, hobgoblin culture is becoming more realistic and more complex, comprising diverse individuals who may or may not conform to the "average". Volos explores what hobgoblin Monks can look like, appropriately, given the Dexterity tradition. Intelligence and Charisma suggest powerful spell casters can rise in prominence. I personally feel, a reallife culture must never be a model for a monster concept that is a grotesque version of a human, as the hobgoblin is. Hopefully, the diversification of alignment and abilities, helps make any unintentional recycling of unfortunate traditional memes less egregious.



I love the current 5e renaissance of the hobgoblin returning to its mythologically accurate roots as a fey being. A UA lists the goblinoids as having fey ancestry, and I expect we will see more in the upcoming Witchlight book, and perhaps Strixhaven too.

In reallife, the goblin and hobgoblin are British folkbelief. Where a hob (domestic gnome) is a helpful fairy, the goblin is a harmful fairy. In this context, helpful versus harmful has to do with how much they participate in human society. So the "hobbit" is a very humanlike house being. But a goblin tends to be dangerous to human communities. The term "hobgoblin" is an oxymoron, being both helpful and harmful simultaneously, and is a nickname for a practical joker, with a painful sense of humor. In the sense of the hobgoblin as a fey being of fate, the victims who suffer from the pranks often richly deserve it. Karma is at work. Shakespeare details Puck as a "hobgoblin" who is the royal jester of a fairy court, in Midsummer Nights Dream, and if I recall correctly adds other information about the reallife concept of a hobgoblin elsewhere in passing. Humor and being funny is the key concept of a hobgoblin.

For the D&D tradition, the goblinoids are now fey ancestry, like the elves. Also like the elves, there are still fey goblinoids who never left the Feywild. Fey is a new tradition opening up, but makes sense in the context of both the D&D tradition and the mythological accuracy. Earlier editions mostly lacked the concept of a Feywild (despite occasional references to the Faerie or Fairyland), so there are few early traditions about it. In 4e, the goblinoids are material ("natural"), but often populate the Feywild. In 5e, there are fey hobgoblins and material hobgoblins. Where the material ones have fey ancestry, it can help explain why at least some of them hate all fey. Perhaps they entered the material world to punish humans, but the other fey decided the hobgoblins went too far, and perhaps the fey went too far?

At least one material hobgoblin culture tends to obsess on military conquest, whence "evil". But the fey hobgoblin culture might tend to obsess on humor, whence "good", albeit in a painfully punishing funny way. The UA fey-ancestry hobgoblin traits "fey gift" and "fortune of many", involve the flavor of karma-like "reciprocity" that is appropriate to fey as they personify fate.

Interestingly, because these hobgoblins are fey, their Intelligence and Charisma comes to forefront as hobgoblins who are powerful spellcasters.



In sum, the Tashas rules that float the ability score improvements allow the hobgoblin to better represent the complex D&D tradition, helps mitigate unintentional reallife racist memes, and facilitates the exploration of the Feywild setting.

 

[DEFCON 1]

To me it is as simple as "mechanics can almost never really replicate the narrative function they mean to represent".

So long as your supposedly highly dexterous race that gets a +2 to DEX can end up with a DEX of 10 via point buy and be the least dexterous character in the entire party... it shows me just how unnecessary requiring the racial write-up to have a +2 DEX really is. Not all elves are graceful, because you just made one who isn't. And thus requiring elves to get a +2 to DEX does not actually accomplish mechanically when is meant to be represented narratively.

Any racial bonus to a stat ONLY has an appreciable result in two cases via Point Buy-- the race cannot be the weakest in that ability if everyone tries to be bad at it... and the race will be (one of) the best in that ability when starting the game. (But of course through the uses of ASIs they can be caught up to later on.)

Everything else is mush. Your supposed bonuses to being dexterous get cancelled out by standard ability score generation. The bonus might as well not even exist in those cases. And before anyone says "well, average elves should be more..." we're not talking about average elves, we're talking about PCs (the ones that actually use that +2 DEX). And elven PCs can be as far from average as can be (as my illustration above points out.) So requiring a racial write-up to include a bonus to create an "average" member of a race in a process that does not in any way, shape, or form CREATE an "average" member of that race (because PCs aren't "average") fails in the job it is trying to do. So removing it does not cause any issues.

(By the same token, I also don't really care if it's kept in, because the entire point of D&D is to let DMs make the game their own, so they can add racial bonuses back in if they have been removed, or take racial bonuses out if they are still in the game. It doesn't matter either way-- especially because RAW shouldn't even be a thing in 5E.)

 

[Scott Christian]

Serious question:
Why not just let players pick ability scores for their characters?

For example, if player #1 wants to have a 20 dex and 20 strength and 18 charisma, why not just let them? If player #2 wants to have a 20 intelligence but an 8 strength, 6 dex, and 10 con, why not just let them?

I get you might need to not let this happen for the 12 or 14 year old players out there that will always put 20 in everything, but why not let mature players just pick their attribute scores?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Serious question:
Why not just let players pick ability scores for their characters?

For example, if player #1 wants to have a 20 dex and 20 strength and 18 charisma, why not just let them? If player #2 wants to have a 20 intelligence but an 8 strength, 6 dex, and 10 con, why not just let them?

I get you might need to not let this happen for the 12 or 14 year old players out there that will always put 20 in everything, but why not let mature players just pick their attribute scores?

There's no reason you couldn't. The only thing you lose is a couple extra "build" items during the leveling experience. All those 20s give you are just a couple additional modifier points when making checks, and any DM can account for that by just upping the difficulty of the things those checks are rolling against. So it doesn't really matter at all.

 

[mrpopstar]

Everything else is mush. Your supposed bonuses to being dexterous get cancelled out by standard ability score generation. The bonus might as well not even exist in those cases. And before anyone says "well, average elves should be more..." we're not talking about average elves, we're talking about PCs (the ones that actually use that +2 DEX). And elven PCs can be as far from average as can be (as my illustration above points out.) So requiring a racial write-up to include a bonus to create an "average" member of a race in a process that does not in any way, shape, or form CREATE an "average" member of that race (because PCs aren't "average") fails in the job it is trying to do. So removing it does not cause any issues.

To be fair, it's not only the player characters that use the +2 ability modifier to Dexterity as it's also reflected in monster stat blocks. The Monster Manual depicts drow as having a 14-15 Dex.