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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Discriminating Against Sameness: A Case for Readjusting Racial Bonuses and Ability Score Increases
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7146387" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>At a high level, I'm very sympathetic to the OP's perspective. I'm not sure the case has been made, as Dausuul points out, but let's just skip that and say that yes, I personally agree that the races feel pretty samey. Since I have a fondness for Darksun, with its wildly-differentiated races, I am open to homebrew which adjusts the defaults.</p><p></p><p>Eyeballing the OP's suggested racial differences, I have some concerns about stat inflation, but I like the general direction. I'd probably go for something along the following lines:</p><p></p><p>Variant humans remain the same (floating +1/+1 and a feat); standard humans are boring and I don't want to think about them; for races with modifiers, I'm pretty happy with the current net modifiers, but adding penalties so you can have larger mods. But in addition! racial modifiers (except for variant humans) also affect minima and maxima: if elves have +3 to Dex and +2 to Int but -2 to Con, they can get Dex 23 and Int 22 but only Con 18. If half-giants have +4 to Strength and +2 to Con, they can get up to Str 24 and Con 22, etc.</p><p></p><p>I think some people would be afraid that this creates traps whereby wizards "have to" be elven in order to get the "optimal" Int; but I'm not too worried about that in practice, since maximizing stats is already competing with feats, and you'd still have to pay for the extra stats, which just puts more pressure on feats. (Besides, anyone of any race can already exceed the caps via Epic Boons/ASIs past 20th level.) I <em>would</em> expect a certain amount of elvish elitism and condescension toward "brutish" humans, but that's par for the course for elves. All we're doing is justifying the existence of tropes we wanted anyway. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>Anyway, the main attraction for me is that it gives more room for races like Dragonborns and half-giants to differentiate themselves from the human baseline. After all, +2 Str just doesn't seem like a big enough deal for something that is twice or three times the size of a human. I like the general idea; but I'd have to think hard about the implementation (including the stat bonuses for individual races) before finalizing anything for my campaign. I rather suspect that I wouldn't go above +3 as a modifier for any stat except Strength.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 7146387, member: 6787650"] At a high level, I'm very sympathetic to the OP's perspective. I'm not sure the case has been made, as Dausuul points out, but let's just skip that and say that yes, I personally agree that the races feel pretty samey. Since I have a fondness for Darksun, with its wildly-differentiated races, I am open to homebrew which adjusts the defaults. Eyeballing the OP's suggested racial differences, I have some concerns about stat inflation, but I like the general direction. I'd probably go for something along the following lines: Variant humans remain the same (floating +1/+1 and a feat); standard humans are boring and I don't want to think about them; for races with modifiers, I'm pretty happy with the current net modifiers, but adding penalties so you can have larger mods. But in addition! racial modifiers (except for variant humans) also affect minima and maxima: if elves have +3 to Dex and +2 to Int but -2 to Con, they can get Dex 23 and Int 22 but only Con 18. If half-giants have +4 to Strength and +2 to Con, they can get up to Str 24 and Con 22, etc. I think some people would be afraid that this creates traps whereby wizards "have to" be elven in order to get the "optimal" Int; but I'm not too worried about that in practice, since maximizing stats is already competing with feats, and you'd still have to pay for the extra stats, which just puts more pressure on feats. (Besides, anyone of any race can already exceed the caps via Epic Boons/ASIs past 20th level.) I [I]would[/I] expect a certain amount of elvish elitism and condescension toward "brutish" humans, but that's par for the course for elves. All we're doing is justifying the existence of tropes we wanted anyway. :) Anyway, the main attraction for me is that it gives more room for races like Dragonborns and half-giants to differentiate themselves from the human baseline. After all, +2 Str just doesn't seem like a big enough deal for something that is twice or three times the size of a human. I like the general idea; but I'd have to think hard about the implementation (including the stat bonuses for individual races) before finalizing anything for my campaign. I rather suspect that I wouldn't go above +3 as a modifier for any stat except Strength. [/QUOTE]
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Discriminating Against Sameness: A Case for Readjusting Racial Bonuses and Ability Score Increases
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