D&D 5E Are proficiency swaps too strong for some races?

[ScuroNotte]

You can swap out armor or a weapon for a weapon or tool. In the example, an elf can swap a long sword for a tool as per page 8. So if a player playing an Elf martial character who already gains martial weapons through the class, can swap the 4 weapons (longsword, shortsword, shortbow, longbow) for 4 tools. Or a martial Mountain Dwarf character can exchange 4 weapons and 2 armor proficiencies for 6 tools.
Or am I over reacting.

 

[tetrasodium]

Mountain Dwarves were kind restrained by their package mostly being good at classes that already grant the weapons and armor.

They were, which is just lazy designing to me. It's like half of their features suck to both martial classes and non-martial classes.

Like

That is excellent design! It is as it should be. They get a lot of stuff, some of which is useful whichever class you choose. All races should be designed like that.

No it's much worse than that. The value of light & medium armor proficient is two feats & we know that because if you take

Spoiler: this

add & combine

Spoiler: these

you get +2 con +2 strength for a faster moving less buffed up version of

Spoiler: mountain dwarf

You get this kind of design not because of some grsnd bargain good & bad for all, it comes from designing within the constraints of "medium armor would be great for a caster or rogue but these are poor stats for those, for a tr/con class likely has medium armor or can't use it so lets make them +2/+2 to be good for them because that will never change" after realizing that that getting rid of things like variable crit multipliers, variable crit ranges, & meaningful damage types made all the racial weapon proficiencies meaningless. It's poor design that assumes the badly balanced house of cards will never have one poor assumption changed... The second that assumption changes you get a disaster & 5e is rife with that kind of thing. If there needs to be a str/con dwarf with poison resist & a dwarf with armor proficiencies there can be individually balanced subraces with boons & penalties that make them have a roughly equivalent value as the other races rather than one mary sue dwarf that's not too bad if some bad assumptions hold true until 6e.

The races don't need t o be exactly 100% equivalent & it's ok to have some subjectivity on the value of this or that feature, but combining multiple great features in one race under the phoned in justification of them being a poor match when the goal for every other race was more like one good feature or two could have been good features is very much the opposite of "excellent design"

 

[Crimson Longinus]

They were, which is just lazy designing to me. It's like half of their features suck to both martial classes and non-martial classes.

Like


No it's much worse than that. The value of light & medium armor proficient is two feats & we know that because if you take

Spoiler: this

View attachment 128883

add & combine

Spoiler: these

View attachment 128884

you get +2 con +2 strength for a faster moving less buffed up version of

Spoiler: mountain dwarf

View attachment 128885
View attachment 128886
View attachment 128887

You get this kind of design not because of some grsnd bargain good & bad for all, it comes from designing within the constraints of "medium armor would be great for a caster or rogue but these are poor stats for those, for a tr/con class likely has medium armor or can't use it so lets make them +2/+2 to be good for them because that will never change" after realizing that that getting rid of things like variable crit multipliers, variable crit ranges, & meaningful damage types made all the racial weapon proficiencies meaningless. It's poor design that assumes the badly balanced house of cards will never have one poor assumption changed... The second that assumption changes you get a disaster & 5e is rife with that kind of thing. If there needs to be a str/con dwarf with poison resist & a dwarf with armor proficiencies there can be individually balanced subraces with boons & penalties that make them have a roughly equivalent value as the other races rather than one mary sue dwarf that's not too bad if some bad assumptions hold true until 6e.

It'

I mean it made perfect sense until they designed to make the stats float. That some of the race features are useless for some classes is not a problem, as long as each race has something at least somewhat useful for each class. Ideally I would design the races so that if their ASIs would favour certain classes then their features would favour other classes.

 

[aco175]

Is the solution to crappy races (and classes) to give them more free stuff, or to take stuff away from better races (classes)?

I see the tool proficiency as a bit weak and not used much except a couple of them like thieves' tools. I could see where dragonborn are not that weak. +2 to strength is one of the better attributes for certain builds. Breath weapon is ok and damage reduction is at least as good as most other race's powers. If we add smithing tools to the race, would that make it as good as an elf or do we also need to take martial weapons away from elves.

There also seems to be some arguing about certain builds like I mentioned above. I still think that certain races are designed to be better at certain classes, like elf mages and dragonborn fighters. Some of the new rules letting you take the +2 strength of a dragonborn and add that to Int and now he is a mage. Do I now get to complain that he is still a crappy mage because I do not get more things that other races get?

 

[tetrasodium]

I mean it made perfect sense until they designed to make the stats float. That some of the race features are useless for some classes is not a problem, as long as each race has something at least somewhat useful for each class. Ideally I would design the races so that if their ASIs would favour certain classes then their features would favour other classes.

"made sense"?... maybe... that's miles from an example of "excellent design" though, those are two very different things.

@aco175 That would have been a good design goal before they started adding new races in ee, volos, & so forth that generally targeted the weaker end of the spectrum. Now that there are so many races on the weaker end having TCoE shine a spotlight on the problem with blinding clarity makes it difficult to just add some things to the weaker races. It's pretty unlikely that wotc is going to do such a thing as an errata or me culpa races of d&d book so "give them stuff" means every table having to acknowledge the problem & one by one come up with solutions after convincing the gm to allow it or while hoping the player doesn't find a way to make your boon wayyyyy more powerful than you expected.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think really the fix is just to not let anyone swap away weapon proficiencies because of overlap with class proficiencies, or to allow only a single weapon-for weapon/tool swap.

IMI the fix is the opposite.

Let people swap proficiencies that are doubled up for whatever weapons or tools they want.

It’s not like they’re getting skills.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Oh, yeah, Dragonborn are seriously underpowered. No doubt about it.

Resistance to a common damage type is pretty good, breath weapon is good, and their stats are good.

at most they need a better refresh on their breath weapon, or it needs to be a bonus action to use.

I’d give them medium armor and some weapons for flavor, but that’s for flavor.

At worst they’re a bit underpowered compared to the top tier races, in a game where it literally doesn’t matter where your race is on the power scale.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The only race who is truly screwed over here is the Hobgoblin, an already sub-par choice whose special power was being able to choose whatever martial weapon proficiencies you want. Suddenly that feels a lot less special.

 

[aco175]

At worst they’re a bit underpowered compared to the top tier races, in a game where it literally doesn’t matter where your race is on the power scale.

What would be considered the top-tier races? Elf/Half-Elf?

 

[Charlaquin]

Resistance to a common damage type is pretty good, breath weapon is good, and their stats are good.

at most they need a better refresh on their breath weapon, or it needs to be a bonus action to use.

I’d give them medium armor and some weapons for flavor, but that’s for flavor.

At worst they’re a bit underpowered compared to the top tier races, in a game where it literally doesn’t matter where your race is on the power scale.

Yeah, I’m with you on all of that.

 

[Charlaquin]

What would be considered the top-tier races? Elf/Half-Elf?

Variant human, half elf, yuan-ti, probably Satyr, maybe elf and dwarf?