Then the players can see the monster damage dice and assess its threat level. You don't need average damage for that. You may want to use average damage to make the game safer or to speed up play, but you don't need it to enable players to make informed choices.
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D&D 5E Access to Races in a Campaign
- Thread starter JohnLynch
- Start date
Then the players can see the monster damage dice and assess its threat level. You don't need average damage for that. You may want to use average damage to make the game safer or to speed up play, but you don't need it to enable players to make informed choices.
AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
You and I must have different definitions of what an informed choice is.
A player that sees that a monster is going to do somewhere between 13 and 68 damage per successful attack (assuming no critical hits) is not nearly informed enough to decide how many rounds to spend in combat with the creature before breaking off or healing, but a player that knows the monster is going to do 40 damage per successful attack (assuming no critical hits) can say with a significant amount of accuracy exactly when the tide of the battle has turned decidedly against them.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
S
Sunseeker
Guest
Spinoff: people's thoughts on rolled races? Arrange your stats as you see fit, but rolling randomly for race? For class?
Some people don't like to step out of their bubble, be it the bubble of weirdness or a bubble of normality. Sometimes weird isn't available, sometimes normal isn't available. But assuming everything is available, has anyone had their players roll randomly for their race? How'd it work out?
SnakeEyes097
Villager
My group and I are all brand new to D&D, however I am extremely familiar with the Forgotten Realms books because I had over one hundred and twenty of them when I was younger. For our first campaign, I proposed and was accepted that we use the basic/common races, to help us all with easier role play and to stay away from some of the things that might become a problem with some of the more exotic races. It also helped for character creation that first time, because they weren't so paralyzed by choices. Their options were all races that even a casual fantasy fan is familiar with. On our next campaign, I'd say if people want to roll new characters they can be whatever race they want though.
AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
Dungeon Crawl Classics kind of has you do that, and it certainly was well received by my group of players - but it was one of those things where it gives the game a certain style and flavor, but that style and flavor is not one my group wanted to try to mix into other games. Like how a person can really love sushi, and really love pizza, but not at all be interested in trying to blend the two together.
Of course, that character creation was actually fully random rather than allowing assignment of ability scores - it might feel strange to randomize race without randomizing other elements.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
I've both had players sometimes roll for race and have sometimes done it myself as a player; our games always have a chart for such. Reasons have varied:
- no preconceived character idea but something's needed right now so let's see what the dice give out and just play that (worked fine)
- character is preconceived as being chaotic to the core and said concept includes everything about it being randomly generated e.g. race, class, name, stats, etc. (worked excellently)
- player wants to try for a more exotic race than can normally be chosen (see below)
- rules-forced - I've been in (and run) games where between class and race you could choose one but had to roll the other; this was deliberate, intended to get people playing something different than their norms, and it worked just fine
In my current game there's a short list of common races you can choose from (this list varies a bit depending where you are in the game world and what lives there) and a longer list including uncommon and rare variants on a table you can roll from (again varying based on location). And any race can be "tainted"; there's an optional roll for taint that gives a few % chance that some crossbreeding happened somewhere in your ancestry, and I have a bunch of charts and tables for that if-when it arises. This has produced some truly bizarre mashups over the years and has twice led to characters being in some part descended from divinity!
Lan-"entire sessions have been lost to the argument over whether a halfling/human crossbreed is a quarterling or a three-quarterling"-efan
Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
That's part of what Gamma World is all about.
It can be fun, but the faster pace of that game, along with the faster turn-over, allows for many weird choices that otherwise would become annoying quite swiftly. I prefer picking races in 5e, but as a DM I try to encourage players to move outside their comfort zone. This is role playing! You're becoming someone new!
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Yeah, I'd be even less thrilled with random races than with random stats...and I really don't like random stats. It's all about putting together an interesting package, leveraging different story components and such.
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