D&D 5E Assumptions about character creation

[EzekielRaiden]

I suspect he is suggesting that the game is intentionally designed such that, even if these assumptions are not met, you will still have a reasonable chance of victory over the course of a typical adventuring day. That would be consistent with some other things the designers have said about the way the game’s math is designed. In my opinion, that doesn’t mean the game isn’t balanced around that 65% accuracy benchmark. It just means the game is designed in such a way that 65% accuracy is not necessary for the PCs to be successful.

I am curious how this is achieved, to be honest. Player characters, in general, make many many more rolls than NPCs. When the probability of success on individual actions drops down to the 1-in-2 range instead of the 2-in-3 range,

Perhaps, but what you've been saying certainly comes across as your having a distaste for failure.

Frequent and arbitrary failure. And old-school play is infamous (rightly or wrongly) for such failure. That was my experience (though anecdotes =/= data). Objectively, almost every spell, creature ability, or effect that used to be "make a save or you just die" no longer works that way, for instance. (I want to say all, but I don't know enough to be that certain.)

In 4e, characters still die. The one (sadly cut short) 4e long-runner campaign I played saw four character deaths (and one extremely narrow brush) before 5th level. We failed two of the first three SCs--one badly. We retreated at least twice because we couldn't handle an "at-level" encounter. All in my favorite player-side campaign (I still mourn its massively premature loss four years later, tbh).

All of this to say: I do not oppose failure. My IRL life has just had way too many setbacks and "50/50 chances" to enjoy that anymore. I don't want the world on a silver platter, nor consequence-free bad decisions. You err in judgment, you take your lumps--and maybe a death follows. (Two of the above deaths were that, one mine. I earned it. The consequences, counting my resurrection, were HUGE and LONG-TERM, and it was GREAT.)

"Pure luck" 50/50 gaming leaves me feeling powerless, at the mercy of things I can neither control nor avoid--as with my real life. Gaming gives me the opportunity to get some (admittedly, fictional) success stories. I like it when those stories aren't a smooth road. But if I'm likely to go through ten characters before I get one success story, I'm going to feel like a failure. That hurts. I can't "let go" of the deaths like you can. I'm not going to feel like the one character was awesome and special. I'm going to feel like the one character was a stupid fluke and the rest of it is how all my gaming experiences will ever be: short, disappointing, pointless, and decided by forces entirely outside my control.

I see it as a guideline rather than a hard rule.

I mean, you do you, but a lot of the things you say present things as though this is the way things are done, and then when you're shown that that's not actually what even the old-school books say, you have at least twice said, more or less, "Okay but that's not how I choose to play it." That makes it really hard to discuss with you, because I can't really discuss YOUR game, having never played in it--and when you speak in very general terms or even specifically about how things were done in ye olden dayse, it makes your position sound like it's a lot broader than JUST "Lanefan's specific re-interpretation and revision of early editions." Especially when your suggestions take the shape of stuff like "well X is a bad design choice, and if we used mechanic Y from early editions instead, it would get better and others would be surprised at how well it plays." Because you kinda did say that to me.

I'm talking in a thread about D&D, about a subject (character creation) relevant to all editions.

That's...a little disingenuous in a thread specifically tagged "5e," where people have been specifically using the phrase "the game" to mean "fifth edition"--such as the OP. If you intend to speak in the generic when everyone else is, explicitly and implicitly, talking about the current state of the art, the onus is on you to specify that.

Perhaps surprisingly, no it doesn't. The evolution occurs via different methods and (almost always) takes longer, but it still happens. Many characters die or retire or for some other reason don't last; but some do last, and those are both the result and cause of evolution.

First: No, it doesn't, because of what I said above. I don't get to see the concept I'm playing evolve. I get to see it die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die

And then maybe, maybe, if I'm lucky, I get to see one concept survive. Thus I feel like crap, because I've been ground down by failure until success feels like a ridiculous, completely un-earned, completely uncontrollable fluke that will be randomly ripped away from me later anyway.

Second: I, like a significant number of players these days, neither have nor wish to have the time to wait for that. Maybe you do. I don't. If I have to wait six tries (or whatever) before I get to see a concept that actually flies...I'm just gonna go play any of the zillions of well-made single-player CRPGs out there. Or replay one of the ones I love and already own (I really need to go replay the original Deus Ex, for instance.) A system that (statistically, of course) requires playing many times before you get to see a concept flower is a system that doesn't actually get played long enough for that flowering to happen.

So, again: your method doesn't actually permit me to have fun. I get crushed under the weight of so many completely unavoidable, uncontrollable failures, which ruins the joy of any success I might stumble into (because they aren't earned--nothing gained by pure chance is earned). And I'm not all that likely to stick around to get that joy in the first place. You can, quite easily, add lethality and utter randomness of success to a game compatible with my interests. As far as I'm aware, it's not possible to remove the randomness from the kind of game you're asking for without doing the very thing you had accused me of, unmitigated success. (Perhaps that's where the idea came from?)

That said, I see the evolution of the party as a whole as being far more important in the long run than the development of any one character.

The party should totally also evolve, though I don't think "losing members" is all that interesting a form of change. Death is the least interesting stake as far as I'm concerned, because it completely cuts my investment. I have to invent something else and re-invest, and I can only do that so many times before I just don't have any more emotional capital to invest.

Ah, but they can both accommodate both interests - they just need to be massaged in odifferent directions in order to do so.

See above: I'm not actually sure this is the case. How do you remove the "your life is purely controlled by luck" from a game built on it? That seems to do as you've described, dismissing failure as a meaningful consideration.

Where I suppose one could almost say I'm to some extent in it for just those things: the mercenary attitude, the cavalier disregard, all the things I can't do or be in reality. It never gets old.

Whereas for me those things are utterly soul-crushing. They make me legitimately despair, that morality is dead. That's how bad it is for me. You can quite easily add those things to a game that doesn't have them. It is, in my experience, much harder to remove them from a game where they are the expectation--at least, without making it a really boring or one-note experience. Cynicism is easy to add to an overall optimistic experience. Optimism added to a fundamentally cynical experience just looks dumb.

Not sure where this comes from.

You specifically said that characters with excessively high stats--such as the ones that are generated today, e.g. through point buy--make it impossible for you to take them seriously. The exact phrase was, "For me it's simply when all characters are special, be it via their stats or the rules they use or whatever: bang goes belief." With racial stat modifiers and all the rest (in 5e), you can't do better than a 17 in almost all cases, and typically 16 since (as you said before) odd stats aren't as worthwhile an investment as even ones when you have a choice. That's a +3 in your best stat. By comparison, you are specifically saying you don't mind players specifically re-rolling to ensure they get at least a +2 in their highest stat. Why does the difference of a single point of modifier take you from "you can totally expect that" to "bang goes belief"?

You have, and always have had, a great degree of control over what risks you decide to take. <snip> Once you commit to taking any of those risks, however, all you can do is try to mitigate the odds in your favour: in the end, if you're rolling dice it's still a crapshoot.

And that's my problem. You are cutting off "you have control" at "do you take risk A, or risk B?" And after that point you'd better well pray to somebody, because that's about as likely to help you as anything else you do. I'm talking about things where control over risk continues after you've chosen what risk to take. Where you have the resources to recover from a mistake or two--unless you make a really serious error of judgment, in which case, the consequences are on you. Exactly the way 4e plays.

My point is that I see a typical adventuring PC as being an integral part of its game world, indistinguishable from an adventuring NPC and both having started as part of the general common population. I don't subscribe to the notion that PCs and NPCs are or should be 'built differently'; that an adventurer rolls 4d6k3 rather than 3d6 is a game-based concession to allow a bit more survivability.

Why? I'm genuinely curious. What benefit is to be had by such symmetry? No one will see it except the DM in the vast majority of cases.

I'm talking about level 0 non-adventurers.

There are no such things. "Level 0" doesn't mean anything in 4e, and stuff entirely orthogonal to adventuring is left purely to DM discretion, because if you need one of those things, the designers trusted you as DM to know what you need better than they could ever know.

People lacking the intellectual flexibility to handle subtraction as well as addition, or low rolls being good sometimes and high rolls others, need not apply to play at my table.

I'm sure the discalculic and/or ADD players are just thrilled by your gatekeeping. Hell, I'm totally thrilled by your gatekeeping! It's so good to know that having passed differential equations with flying colors doesn't qualify me for your game because I do, in fact, get confused by "you subtract your +N weapon bonus from your THAC0" or "breaking out of Bigby's crushing hand, a 20 is awesome, but breaking out of mundane ropes, a 20 is terrible."

And again, this thread deals with an edition-agnostic topic; meaning good ideas from any edition are fair game to toss in here.

Except that it's not an edition-agnostic topic. It's specifically the expectations of 5e. As explicitly flagged in the title, with the little yellow box with the text "5E" in it. You can talk about other things as well (thread drift is a real and totally valid thing), but again, the onus is on you to say you're doing that. Especially if you're going to retreat to the motte of "well I mean how I choose to play <Edition X> at my table" any time someone challenges your bailey of sweeping assertions regarding how tabletop gaming should be played. Acting as though your unqualified assertions about gameplay in the generic, when the conversation is and has been explicitly about 5e and has accordingly used generic terms under that umbrella, does you no favors.

 

[Lanefan]

I am curious how this is achieved, to be honest. Player characters, in general, make many many more rolls than NPCs. When the probability of success on individual actions drops down to the 1-in-2 range instead of the 2-in-3 range,

Frequent and arbitrary failure. And old-school play is infamous (rightly or wrongly) for such failure. That was my experience (though anecdotes =/= data). Objectively, almost every spell, creature ability, or effect that used to be "make a save or you just die" no longer works that way, for instance. (I want to say all, but I don't know enough to be that certain.)

As far as I know, there were no true save-or-dies in 5e as initially released (whether any have been added since, I don't know); and many 'save-or-suck' elements e.g. paralyzation were greatly toned down either in effect or duration or both.

Which means the trick of, as far as possible, not putting yourself in those save-or-die situations in the first place has somewhat fallen by the wayside in favour of simply trusting the game not to kill you.

In 4e, characters still die. The one (sadly cut short) 4e long-runner campaign I played saw four character deaths (and one extremely narrow brush) before 5th level. We failed two of the first three SCs--one badly. We retreated at least twice because we couldn't handle an "at-level" encounter. All in my favorite player-side campaign (I still mourn its massively premature loss four years later, tbh).

All of this to say: I do not oppose failure. My IRL life has just had way too many setbacks and "50/50 chances" to enjoy that anymore. I don't want the world on a silver platter, nor consequence-free bad decisions. You err in judgment, you take your lumps--and maybe a death follows. (Two of the above deaths were that, one mine. I earned it. The consequences, counting my resurrection, were HUGE and LONG-TERM, and it was GREAT.)

That 4e game sounds like good times!

You mention you retreated from a couple of encounters because you couldn't handle them - does anyone do that any more?

"Pure luck" 50/50 gaming leaves me feeling powerless, at the mercy of things I can neither control nor avoid--as with my real life. Gaming gives me the opportunity to get some (admittedly, fictional) success stories. I like it when those stories aren't a smooth road. But if I'm likely to go through ten characters before I get one success story, I'm going to feel like a failure. That hurts. I can't "let go" of the deaths like you can.

I guess I just don't take it all that seriously. Sure I'm disappointed sometimes, when a character that shows loads of potential snuffs it quick, but them's the breaks: pull out the dice and roll up another one.* Conversely, there's been times I've had characters who simply didn't work out like I had in mind but also didn't die.

* - and, with thus far only one exception, I don't come back with the same concept that just died. The one exception was a character who died while being introduced to the party (it was a strange session); with that one I came right back with the same idea again as it hadn't really been played the first time.

I'm not going to feel like the one character was awesome and special. I'm going to feel like the one character was a stupid fluke and the rest of it is how all my gaming experiences will ever be: short, disappointing, pointless, and decided by forces entirely outside my control.

Short, yes. Disappointing, sometimes. Pointless, rarely if ever; provided the character lasted long enough to do at least one memorable or entertaining thing. Decided by forces entirely outside my control, sometimes; but in hindsight all too often I can see the error(s) I made that led to the character's demise. And note this doesn't stop me from making those same errors again!

Especially when your suggestions take the shape of stuff like "well X is a bad design choice, and if we used mechanic Y from early editions instead, it would get better and others would be surprised at how well it plays." Because you kinda did say that to me.

When an older edition flat-out did something better than the current one does I'm going to call it out.

First: No, it doesn't, because of what I said above. I don't get to see the concept I'm playing evolve. I get to see it die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die. And then I get to see the next one die

And then maybe, maybe, if I'm lucky, I get to see one concept survive. Thus I feel like crap, because I've been ground down by failure until success feels like a ridiculous, completely un-earned, completely uncontrollable fluke that will be randomly ripped away from me later anyway.

That's a bit more extreme a death rate than even I'm used to. But yes, there's going to be some one-hit wonders.

My usual analogy is comparing the characters in an ongoing party to the players on a sports team. Some players on a team have long careers and become stars; others have shorter careers and are more or less forgotten before long unless they do something special; and most don't stick around for very long at all before they get cut or sent back to the minors.

Looking at the all-time stats for the Vancouver Canucks, who I've followed faithfully since they came into the NHL, shows that 621* players have played at least one regular season game for the team. Of those, 132* played 10 games or less - they'd be the equivalent of one-hit wonder characters in a D&D party. Another 166* played between 11 and 50 games - so not even a full season, but enough that there's a small chance they did something memorable.

138* played 150 games or more, i.e. at least two full seasons worth.

* - numbers taken from this page: List of Vancouver Canucks players - Wikipedia

Second: I, like a significant number of players these days, neither have nor wish to have the time to wait for that. Maybe you do. I don't. If I have to wait six tries (or whatever) before I get to see a concept that actually flies...I'm just gonna go play any of the zillions of well-made single-player CRPGs out there. Or replay one of the ones I love and already own (I really need to go replay the original Deus Ex, for instance.) A system that (statistically, of course) requires playing many times before you get to see a concept flower is a system that doesn't actually get played long enough for that flowering to happen.

So, again: your method doesn't actually permit me to have fun. I get crushed under the weight of so many completely unavoidable, uncontrollable failures, which ruins the joy of any success I might stumble into (because they aren't earned--nothing gained by pure chance is earned). And I'm not all that likely to stick around to get that joy in the first place. You can, quite easily, add lethality and utter randomness of success to a game compatible with my interests. As far as I'm aware, it's not possible to remove the randomness from the kind of game you're asking for without doing the very thing you had accused me of, unmitigated success. (Perhaps that's where the idea came from?)

You can't remove the randomness but, if desired, you can mitigate the results such that the randomness leads only to a temporary or permanent setback rather than a death. (or, in a more extreme example, you can plot-protect characters such that they can't die no matter what they do; but this can go south in a hurry once the players realize their characters are effectively immortal)

The party should totally also evolve, though I don't think "losing members" is all that interesting a form of change.

Losing members isn't the change; it merely leads to the change that happens when new members come in.

Whereas for me those things are utterly soul-crushing. They make me legitimately despair, that morality is dead. That's how bad it is for me. You can quite easily add those things to a game that doesn't have them. It is, in my experience, much harder to remove them from a game where they are the expectation--at least, without making it a really boring or one-note experience. Cynicism is easy to add to an overall optimistic experience. Optimism added to a fundamentally cynical experience just looks dumb.

Heh - I'm a cynical person by nature, so I guess it all fits.

You specifically said that characters with excessively high stats--such as the ones that are generated today, e.g. through point buy--make it impossible for you to take them seriously. The exact phrase was, "For me it's simply when all characters are special, be it via their stats or the rules they use or whatever: bang goes belief." With racial stat modifiers and all the rest (in 5e), you can't do better than a 17 in almost all cases, and typically 16 since (as you said before) odd stats aren't as worthwhile an investment as even ones when you have a choice. That's a +3 in your best stat. By comparison, you are specifically saying you don't mind players specifically re-rolling to ensure they get at least a +2 in their highest stat. Why does the difference of a single point of modifier take you from "you can totally expect that" to "bang goes belief"?

See below re believability.

Why? I'm genuinely curious. What benefit is to be had by such symmetry? No one will see it except the DM in the vast majority of cases.

Believability and internal (mechanical) consistency.

If we-as-a-party meet an NPC adventuring party on the road, believability suggests we should in theory be able to swap half the people between parties without missing a beat - they're just like us. They - like we - fit in as an integral part of a larger world or setting.

Put another way, people in the game world don't go around with stickers on their heads saying 'PC' or 'NPC'. They're just people.

I'm sure the discalculic and/or ADD players are just thrilled by your gatekeeping. Hell, I'm totally thrilled by your gatekeeping! It's so good to know that having passed differential equations with flying colors doesn't qualify me for your game because I do, in fact, get confused by "you subtract your +N weapon bonus from your THAC0" or "breaking out of Bigby's crushing hand, a 20 is awesome, but breaking out of mundane ropes, a 20 is terrible."

My game, my table, my gates.

There's an active-right-now thread in 'general' regarding player recruitment in which I explain my standards a bit more fully.

Except that it's not an edition-agnostic topic. It's specifically the expectations of 5e. As explicitly flagged in the title, with the little yellow box with the text "5E" in it.

I always assume people put the '5e' tag on edition-agnostic threads just so the thread will get noticed and-or read by those who filter out everything else.

 

[Coroc]

I have seen a number of people claim that the game ‘assumes’ a certain score in a certain stat.

the default assumption is that scores are rolled.

just curious. I assume people put a good score in main/attack stat, but where has that been explicitly stated?

additionally, I have seen assertions about the math of the game likewise assuming certain scores in certain places.

any specifics would be great. Common sense says bonuses are good but where is that written? Just curious as the game seems to be less lethal than some past editions...

A good table can support any attribute distribution, evven if counter class as in not optimated.

It really depends on the type of campaign: A investigative campaign wit hloads of RP and social skills would rather have everyone put soem points in Cha, Wis or Int for the social skills, whereas a campaign with many hard fights should have players with a min 14 Con and some combat output aka good prime attributes. (Asuming point buy here since i do loathe rolling for 5e, since you can easy achieve any score combo you want in 5e - at the cost of other good things of course, as it should be)

A good DM communicates this issue a bit before character creation. But nothing should ever be expected as a rule cast into stone

 

[Charlaquin]

I am curious how this is achieved, to be honest. Player characters, in general, make many many more rolls than NPCs. When the probability of success on individual actions drops down to the 1-in-2 range instead of the 2-in-3 range,

Well by accuracy not being the only variable. Monster attack bonuses. HP and damage numbers, and the encounter building guidelines make it so that even if the players are only hitting 50% of the time, they’re statistically favored to win normal-difficulty encounters (note, favored is not the same as assured), even if they do nothing but spam at-will attacks and spells. If they expend limited resources and/or have better accuracy, their chances of victory improve. From there, the DM is expected to adjust to achieve their desired level of challenge.

 

[Hriston]

What the gnome rolled and what the orc rolled have no relation to how good a choice the race was for the class. The orc may happen to be a better wizard than the gnome, but that happenstance is unrelated to their race. If that player had decided to play a gnome instead, they would be an even better wizard.

The way I'm looking at this is that the only way Orc is always a worse choice for a wizard than Gnome is if it always results in a worse wizard, which I assume is being defined as having a lower Intelligence, and it doesn't.

Imagine two players that both decide to play wizards. One chooses to play a gnome (+2 INT) and the other chooses to play an orc (-2 INT). You would say the orc-player is choosing to play a worse wizard and the gnome-player is choosing to play a better wizard. They're both going to roll their scores, however, so at this point, their Intelligence scores are in a quantum state. You can't say, based on race alone, which player will end up with the better wizard. I'll concede that the gnome has a hefty advantage, but that's all it is, probability. It's not unlikely at all that the gnome rolls a 14 and the orc rolls an 18, both wizards ending up with the same Intelligence, 16, in which case the choice of race didn't matter at all. You can't really say in this case that the orc-player chose to play a worse wizard than the gnome-player because they aren't worse. They're just as good a wizard as the gnome.

You can look at it as insurance if you want; in fact that’s a pretty accurate analogy. But the fact of the matter is, choosing a race that boosts your primary ability will result in a higher score in that ability than choosing a race that doesn’t. Period.

But that just isn't true. The gnome-player did not, by choosing Gnome, guarantee themselves a higher Intelligence than the orc-player.

Sure, it “outweighs” the bonus from race in the sense that the result of the die roll can have a greater impact on the resulting score than the +2. But since the cap is 2 above the maximum possible roll, the total score will always be higher with a +2 than without it.

Not between two characters with two different sets of scores, though. The character with a +2 could have a score that is lower or equal to a character without that bonus.

This is where the insurance analogy breaks down. Unlike insurance, +2 in your primary ability score is always useful. Again, the result of the die roll may have a greater impact than the +2, but the +2 is never without impact.

Yes, I understand how you're coming at this, but by "often isn't enough", I meant not enough to give you a higher Intelligence than another wizard whose player chose a "worse race" than you did.

You don’t have to choose something optimal. But many players like to and I think the fact that the design can force those players to have to choose between playing something optimal or playing the race/class combination they want is a design flaw.

I think the "design flaw" was allowed to exist because the designers of the game weren't interested in catering to and designing around that play-style. Unfortunately (IMO), it seems that play-style has won out and is now a driver of design choices. At least this is true to the stated goal of making 5E a "living rule-set" even if I don't agree with the direction. Like pretty much all non-core material (or any material at all for that matter), I don't have to use it in my game.

Taking what has been said about the game’s underlying assumptions in its totality, along with some thorough analysis of the system math, I think it is clear that there are indeed some assumptions going into the design. If you start with 16 in your primary score, increase to 18 at 4th level and 20 at 8th level, and the DM follows the guidelines in the DMG about awarding treasure hordes or the guidelines in Xanathar’s Guide about parceling our magic items, the expected result is that you will have a 65% chance of hitting monsters with average AC for your level’s CR, at all levels. If Jeremy Crawford is earnestly claiming that the game isn’t “balanced around” those assumptions, I can only assume that he has a different understanding of what “balanced around” means than I do.

But none of those assumptions rely on having racial ability score modifiers, so he isn't claiming anything with regard to those assumptions, at least not with the statement to which I was referring. The most likely result of rolling is that you have a natural, unmodified 16 to put in your primary ability, so no matter what PC race and class you choose (as opposed to non-PC races with negative modifiers, like orcs), you can rely on being at or close to that baseline. Racial ability score modifiers are just flavoring for your scores.

 

[Lanefan]

I think the "design flaw" was allowed to exist because the designers of the game weren't interested in catering to and designing around that play-style. Unfortunately (IMO), it seems that play-style has won out and is now a driver of design choices.

So it would seem.

Personally, I don't have any problem with a system that softly says to first choose either your character's class or its race; and that what you chose here will to some extent inform or influence the choice of the other.

So, if you choose race (Half-Orc) your choice of class is going to be tempered by the fact that Half-Orcs come with built-in bonuses and (ideally) penalties. Or, if you choose class (Wizard) your choice of race will then be tempered by there simply being some creatures more suited to wizardry than others. You can always play against type if you want, but the system will gently argue with you.

If you want full flexibility in class choice, pick Human for your race.

 

[Charlaquin]

The way I'm looking at this is that the only way Orc is always a worse choice for a wizard than Gnome is if it always results in a worse wizard, which I assume is being defined as having a lower Intelligence, and it doesn't.

Again, an orc can end up with a higher Intelligence than a different gnome character. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with being an orc. If the orc character’s player had chosen a gnome instead, they would have an even higher int score. Ergo, gnome would have been a better choice (assuming a higher intelligence is your priority when building a wizard, which I grant is not everyone’s priority.)

Imagine two players that both decide to play wizards. One chooses to play a gnome (+2 INT) and the other chooses to play an orc (-2 INT). You would say the orc-player is choosing to play a worse wizard and the gnome-player is choosing to play a better wizard. They're both going to roll their scores, however, so at this point, their Intelligence scores are in a quantum state. You can't say, based on race alone, which player will end up with the better wizard. I'll concede that the gnome has a hefty advantage, but that's all it is, probability. It's not unlikely at all that the gnome rolls a 14 and the orc rolls an 18, both wizards ending up with the same Intelligence, 16, in which case the choice of race didn't matter at all. You can't really say in this case that the orc-player chose to play a worse wizard than the gnome-player because they aren't worse. They're just as good a wizard as the gnome.

I see the disconnect. I am not saying that the player choosing to play the orc wizard is choosing to play a worse wizard. I am saying that player is making a worse choice of race, given that they are also choosing to play a wizard. They may end up with a better wizard than the player who chose to play a gnome wizard (for a given definition of “better wizard,” which again I concede is far from universal); however, the player who chose to play a gnome still made a better choice of race for their wizard, even if the wizard didn’t end up being better overall.

But that just isn't true. The gnome-player did not, by choosing Gnome, guarantee themselves a higher Intelligence than the orc-player.

No, but the orc player did, by choosing an orc, guarantee themselves a lower intelligence than they would have had if they had chosen a gnome.

Not between two characters with two different sets of scores, though. The character with a +2 could have a score that is lower or equal to a character without that bonus.

So?

Yes, I understand how you're coming at this, but by "often isn't enough", I meant not enough to give you a higher Intelligence than another wizard whose player chose a "worse race" than you did.

I’m not really interested in how the orc wizard compares to other wizards. Yes, of course, if you roll for scores it is entirely possible to end up with a higher score in an ability that you did not receive a racial bonus to than another, separate character got in a score that they did receive a racial bonus to. But that doesn’t really mean anything other than “random rolls have random results.” I can’t do anything useful with that information. What I care about is how a character with one race compares to itself with a different race. That is valuable information when building a character that can influence the player’s decision of what race to play.

I think the "design flaw" was allowed to exist because the designers of the game weren't interested in catering to and designing around that play-style. Unfortunately (IMO), it seems that play-style has won out and is now a driver of design choices. At least this is true to the stated goal of making 5E a "living rule-set" even if I don't agree with the direction. Like pretty much all non-core material (or any material at all for that matter), I don't have to use it in my game.

Yeah, for sure. I’m not saying anyone has to use anything. I’m advocating for WotC to adopt rules that are more conducive to my own play style preferences (and apparently with some success, given the new optional rule, even if it isn’t the way I would prefer to see such things implemented.) If you like fixed racial ASIs, by all means, continue using them.

But none of those assumptions rely on having racial ability score modifiers, so he isn't claiming anything with regard to those assumptions, at least not with the statement to which I was referring. The most likely result of rolling is that you have a natural, unmodified 16 to put in your primary ability, so no matter what PC race and class you choose (as opposed to non-PC races with negative modifiers, like orcs), you can rely on being at or close to that baseline. Racial ability score modifiers are just flavoring for your scores.

Ah, ok. That was my misunderstanding then.

 

[S'mon]

Any D&D edition with 'encounter building' rules must necessarily have some concept of how powerful PCs are. The 5e encounter design metrics seems to assume standard array or point buy, so that characters begin with a +3* (or occasionally +2) in their primary attribute, with very minimal magic items (but able to harm the rare creatures hit only by magic weapons), no multiclassing & no feats.

Since most games have a fair number of magic items, feats, and often multiclassing, the Challenge ratings & encounter building systems tend to be fairly accurate at low level, but create very weak challenges at high level.

*By either standard array or PB, a PC can start with a 15 (+2) in primary attribute, which can very often be increased to a 16 or 17 by racial bonus.

 

[S'mon]

Looking at the 8 characters in my D&D Beyond Faerun Adventures campaign, including inactive characters, all created with Point Buy and of level 1-3, I see 7 have a +3 in their primary attribute. The exception is a High Elf Fighter with STR +2 DEX +2 CON +2 INT +2, who usually attacks with his Firebolt cantrip.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I also suspect that the CRs were created based upon a default 4 PCs using the four classes from the Basic Rules using Standard array.

So you have only a single character than can using healing magic (cleric), only a single character usually able to make area of effect attacks (wizard), two melee characters (fighter/cleric) two ranged characters (rogue/wizard), and their stats probably have one +3 and one or two +2s. And if you fight the monsters in the MM using this party make-up and don't go Monty Haul with the magic items... the CRs and encounter design probably holds up pretty well.

Of course, I doubt most groups actually play with this party make-up, and anything a group does that enlarges all these abilities in greater numbers is going to make the CRs less and less useful. Especially because adding extra PCs and all these other classes/subclasses do not create a linear improvement to the party for which you can easily measure the CR and encounter design up against. Instead, more of everything creates exponential power in the party and thus using CRs and encounter building defaults mainly to guesswork.

But then again... as I think DMs who are forced into this guesswork and have to use trial-and-error to find out how to challenge their players is actually a good thing because it results in making stronger and more flexible DMs who can adjust and challenge on the fly... it's a net positive in my book.