Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8373683" data-attributes="member: 7006">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.)</blockquote>

Verification