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

[ReshiIRE]

My suggestion was more about discouraging having odd scores and encouraging a more distributed score in a 'build' for a character, not removing their possibility. I do have a large gripe that odd scores do nothing except for say carry weight for Strength; it is a little irritating that depending on wheather feats are available and how you've built your character, you start having to really mess around to get even scores again.

I... also am not a huge fan of odd numbers anyway...

 

[Lyxen]

But D&D doesn't work that way, and given what we have I personally don't think it's worth any energy trying to get people to not max out their primary attribute.

Oh, I agree with this, but what we can do is not give them the opportunity to both max their attributes and get the optimal combination of race and class that means that their powers are going to be in synergy most of the time.

Think of it this way: if one player at a table didn't put their highest score in their primary attribute (but didn't totally dump it, either) and you were observing but couldn't see the dice and didn't know ACs and saving throws, do you think you could tell which player it was?

I agree, however you would notice the character who always pulls of the same combo(s) successfully, because of the combination above. Efficiency in combat (or social, if it comes to this) is really noticeable on optimised characters.

Again, I'm not against optimisation/powergaming, I'm just trying to limit its influence on casual by controlling the power gap.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

./returns to thread and discovers odd-numbered scores are on the chopping block.

Let's face it, they exist purely because of tradition. Or the whole ability score does, the modifier is all that is needed. And I actually like this tradition but I'm fully aware that if we were designing a game from scratch, no one in their right might would come up with such an convoluted system.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My suggestion was more about discouraging having odd scores and encouraging a more distributed score in a 'build' for a character, not removing their possibility. I do have a large gripe that odd scores do nothing except for say carry weight for Strength; it is a little irritating that depending on wheather feats are available and how you've built your character, you start having to really mess around to get even scores again.

My solution was the opposite. I removed +2 levelling ASI bumps, they're now always +1/+1, so if you consistently bump one score it keeps altering between even and odd so there is no particular incentive to start with either. Also avoids hyperfocused characters that have only one good score.

 

[ReshiIRE]

My solution was the opposite. I removed +2 levelling ASI bumps, they're now always +1/+1, so if you consistently bump one score it keeps altering between even and odd so there is no particular incentive to start with either. Also avoids hyperfocused characters that have only one good score.

I would not be opposed to that and it would make half-feats make a lot more sense.

 

[Lyxen]

You obviously wouldn't say you are a powergamer, and yet you read those guides. So it is possible to go as far as reading the guides, and yet still not be a powergamer. Therefore, the mere existence of the guides proves nothing about people's intentions.

I agree, I read them (not all of them, but the best ones) because it's interesting to see what people think about classes, and sometimes they have interesting ideas. However, my point about the intention comes from the DDB forums, where when people ask for advice about their character builds, all the answers are along the lines of the guides, choosing the race and class for maximum power and then floating the ASI where it benefits the class.

While I agree that it does not say a lot about what the majority will do, with that kind of "help" going on, and all the people reading this advice, what do you think will happen ? Especially when, on top of this, there is that huge powergaming community that sniffs and derides all characters that have not been created optimally, the player obviously being a moron ?

Moreover, honestly, I'm not too concerned about what is happening with the community in general, everyone can play the game that they want. It's just that I am really annoyed by the powergaming people above, for one, and I like to remind them that floating ASIs are an option (for some reason that infuriates them). As for our tables, on the other hand, I KNOW what the powergamers at our tables would do, because we have discussed it and, being reasonable people who understand the benefits of limiting the power gap (as well as long term fans of the racial ASIs that they, like me, grew up with), they agreed not to implement the Floating ASIs.

So I'm just telling you simple facts:

• Floating ASIs are an option, just like playing on a grid, and we don't use either at our tables.
• The powergamers that I know personally would definitively use Floating ASIs to create more powerful characters.
• All the advice that powergamers on the boards provide are about using Floating ASIs to create more powerful characters.

After that, I honestly am not more pig-headed than people insisting that Floating ASIs are gifts from the light above and that I'm stupid for not accepting their great benefits, and this, by the way, without ever telling me exactly what these benefits are, and certainly not putting in practice benefits other than POWAAAH !

You want an example of a Tasha's character who isn't powergaming? Sure, I actually have one. I have a Levistus Tiefling Artificer. Due to my rolls (the DM had us roll two arrays and take the higher of the two or the standard array) they have an 17 intelligence. The DM did have us take a feat at first level, I took Tiefling Constituiton to add in cold resistance (makes sense being tied to the icy hell of Stygia) and Poison Resistance. As an artificer, that allows me to work in hot, cold and poisonous environments far more safely, and I thought was fairly appropriate for an industrial character.

That's nice, I hope that you do realize that I don't even know if you are a powergamer or not ?

You realize that some of us just play the characters we want, and don't read the guides for our character ideas at all.

I do, and I have met a number of non-powergamers as well along my long years playing.

 

[Lyxen]

Let's face it, they exist purely because of tradition. Or the whole ability score does, the modifier is all that is needed. And I actually like this tradition but I'm fully aware that if we were designing a game from scratch, no one in their right might would come up with such an convoluted system.

Tradition is important too, and honestly one of the great benefits of 5e is that I can run my old AD&D stuff almost straight out of the box thanks to things like stats and levels. But yes, it's still too convoluted, however look at what happened to 4e when they slaughtered too many sacred cows, or the fact that a number of extremely imaginative and well made TTRPGs never really took off...

 

[clearstream]

My suggestion was more about discouraging having odd scores and encouraging a more distributed score in a 'build' for a character, not removing their possibility. I do have a large gripe that odd scores do nothing except for say carry weight for Strength; it is a little irritating that depending on whether feats are available and how you've built your character, you start having to really mess around to get even scores again.

I... also am not a huge fan of odd numbers anyway...

How do you feel about irrational numbers? I certainly view those with suspicion.

Still, it's not solely carrying capacity. One extra strength will let you wear heavier armor without a speed penalty, and jump a foot further.

Let's face it, they exist purely because of tradition. Or the whole ability score does, the modifier is all that is needed. And I actually like this tradition but I'm fully aware that if we were designing a game from scratch, no one in their right might would come up with such an convoluted system.

Hmm, one of the fundamental meta-mechanics of D&D is progression in increments toward a threshold. So I suppose one might argue that odd scores are consistent with that. They create some design space that can be exploited, e.g. for half-feats. I'm more musing than arguing for or against.

My solution was the opposite. I removed +2 levelling ASI bumps, they're now always +1/+1, so if you consistently bump one score it keeps altering between even and odd so there is no particular incentive to start with either. Also avoids hyperfocused characters that have only one good score.

That's quite a nice solution. I'm experimenting with the 8th level ASI being instead a 'Practice' feature, that gives you 1pt instead of 2pts to distribute. It has some interesting consequences.

 

[Lyxen]

How do you feel about irrational numbers? I certainly view those with suspicion.

This, my friend, is the way to paranoia as there are so many more of those ran rational ones...

Still, it's not solely carrying capacity. One extra strength will let you wear heavier armor without a speed penalty, and jump a foot further.

These are really edge cases, are they not ?

 

[Chaosmancer]

You'd be wrong. The DM has the right to add, remove or change every single rule in the game. Period. The game, not you, gives the DM that right and tells the player to check with the DM to see if any rules have been changed.

I don't care that you believe that. When it comes to player characters generating their stats using the default version of the rules, I'm not budging on this. You enforcing your preference on others for now other reason than you like it better, is not acceptable to me. I don't care if you think the rules of the book give you the right to do so, if the Standard Array was meant to be optional, they would have made it optional like they made point buy.

I'm not deciding anything about the character. I'm setting the rules for character creation which is within my right as the DM. Period.

You are deciding that because you think a character with the standard array is boring, a player isn't allowed to use the available option if they do not want to randomize. This is no different than saying that since you find a paladin with a longsword boring, all paladins must use hammers. You don't get to make that call to enforce your vision on a Player Character, they are not a Dungeon Master Character.

No. What it says is "highest stat", not "highest placed stat before racial bonuses are applied." You don't get to change the meaning.

I'm not changing any meaning.

It doesn't work that way. The designers, not the players, determine the baseline. If the players most commonly put 10's in the main stat, that wouldn't be baseline, either.

And I've shown how the designers decisions lead to the 16 being the most commonly seen prime stat. They did it in three different methods. If that does not show their intent and the point was to have a different result, then they must have expected the majority of people to not play archetypical combos.

As long as we're naming games that don't have anything to do with a conversation about D&D dwarves...

Settlers of Catan.
Terraforming Mars.
Marvel Superheroes.

As I said, you can't limit the discussion of archetypical dwarves to only DnD dwarves. Even if you did that, then you'd have to ask which DnD dwarves, so it is a pointless excersise to try and claim that because 50% of dwarves don't get a bonus that 100% of dwarves can't reach the baseline. The intent was blindingly obvious. Mountain Dwarves were meant to be martial characters, hill dwarves were meant to be clerical characters.

Yes I can. This is about D&D archetypes. Archetypes change depending on the game and that game's lore.

And the setting. Which means that the archetypical elf needs to cover a lot more than being graceful and the archetypical dwarf needs to be a lot more than just tough. So, floating ASIs allows the core game to actually reflect the reality of play better.

You want graceful elves? Say that your NPCs are graceful. Done. You have graceful elves. Heck, you might not even have an elf player in which case there are zero elves outside of your control to be non-graceful.