D&D 5E Do you miss attribute minimums/maximums?

[Celebrim]

It is only on Tolkienesque fictions that dwarves lost their magic.

"The dwarves of old wrought mighty spells."

It's only in D&Desq fictions that dwarves lost their magic.

 

[Celebrim]

We seem to have moved on from numeric restrictions toward ideas like class restrictions and generally can the DM ban stuff.

This is very abbreviated list of everything banned in my current campaign: dragonborn, tieflings, goliaths, halflings, gnomes, half-orcs, orcs, warlocks, rangers, druids, monks, paladins, barbarians, all prestige classes, and most spells that wouldn't be recognized by a 1e era player.

Appalled?

It's not as bad as it sounds, because for everything I've banned, I've put something in. So, you can't play a halfling or gnome, but you could play a sidhe or a forest dwarf or a wild elf if you wanted to play a 'little person', and a bearded sidhe trickster with illusion magic might feel very gnome-like. You can't play a ranger, but you can play a hunter and if you really wanted to make a ranger you could play a hunter/shaman with an animal companion. You can't play a paladin but you can play a champion, and if you really wanted to play something with the flavor of a paladin you could play a champion with the righteousness and guardian portfolios serving a lawful good deity that promotes a chivalric code. You can't play a druid but you can play a shaman, and you could customize your shaman with totems like plant, animal, healing and fire and take the spell wild shape and a adopt a guise similar to a northern European animist priest.

I've very little complaint about DM's banning different elements. I consider basically every element of the game optional, and I expect DM's to want to make the setting their own. I'd probably be highly skeptical of the ability of any DM who didn't ban something.

 

[Helldritch]

"The dwarves of old wrought mighty spells."

It's only in D&Desq fictions that dwarves lost their magic.

Yep, dwarves of old. But in the Silmarilion, The Hobbit, Lord of the Ring and the Various "Age" books, dwarves don't. Their magic is part of the past and of legends. They abandoned magic because of the "corrupting" effect it had on them. So yep, I am partialy right on that account.

 

[Arilyn]

If the GM takes time to create her world and comes up with history and traits for the playable races, then banning and restrictions work. If, however, she is using Forgotten Realms, or a world very much like it, and is using the races, pretty much as is, from the player book, then it is limiting player creativity to no good purpose other than, personal bias.

Celebrim's world, as stated in an earlier post, sounds fun and interesting, and I am assuming he does not get players complaining about restrictions to their creativity.

BTW, I have always loved the idea of the Dwarf wizard. And they work well in 5e, because of their armour and weapon proficiencies. If you are willing to have fewer spells prepped, and focus more on non saving throw spells, you have a solid build. Look at me getting all min/maxy!

 

[MechaPilot]

I like that dwarves can be wizards now. Around the same time I got into d&d I was reading Norse myths. Dwarves and magic go hand in hand there where they would craft magical items for the gods. I always felt that they should be some kind of mage.

I like that they can be wizards too. I like that restricting them is in the hands of the DM, and is a setting decision by the DM, instead of just a default assumption.

You ban halflings? You don't mention gnomes, so I assume you allow those? That's going to have a negative effect on your alignment audit, you know.

In my Tenesia setting, gnomes are an offshoot of the dwarf race (specifically, Tenesia's dwarfs are either stone or flame dwarfs, because they're tied to the elements similar to how Tenesia's elves are tied to nature, and gnomes naturally occur among stone dwarfs). Tenesia's gnomes are tinkerers, but they don't typically make giant, insane, devices that risk blowing up their homes. An item of gear in that setting is the "gnomish lock:" it's basically a combination lock. Gnomes also make clocks, pocket watches, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, in general the harder it is to multiclass the better. You could even ban it outright and I wouldn't shed any tears.

3e's version of multiclassing was, in my own experience having tried it, rather awful; particularly if one or both classes was a caster.

For me, multiclassing is a fix for a problem inherent in class-based rpgs: that you might have a character idea that doesn't fit neatly into a single class. That said, I agree with you about 3e's version of multiclassing. It was a massive disappointment to me after being used to AD&D 2e's version of multiclassing.

 

[Celebrim]

Yep, dwarves of old. But in the Silmarilion, The Hobbit, Lord of the Ring and the Various "Age" books, dwarves don't. Their magic is part of the past and of legends. They abandoned magic because of the "corrupting" effect it had on them. So yep, I am partialy right on that account.

a) The quote itself is from The Hobbit.
b) In context, the song is not referring to events of the first age, or the second age, but rather to much more recent events after the founding of the Kingdom Under the Mountain by Thorin's grandfather. The dwarves wrought mighty spells while in Erebor.
c) Thorin mentions how the dwarves were found of making magical toys, such that the "toy market of Dale was a wonder of the world". Well, after the dwarves reestablish the kingdom under the mountain, we get to see some of these magical toys at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, purchased by Bilbo to be party favors for young Hobbit's at his 111st birthday party. The dwarves continue to make magical things using their magic even up to the events of The Lord of the Rings.

Now, in Tolkien's legerdemain 'magic' is a very slippery subject. It refers to having authority and understanding, such that you can command things. The magic of the dwarves is the authority and understanding they have over the stone from which they were made, and which has been bestowed on them by their maker Aulë. They cannot be corrupted by exercising their native authority and understanding, provided they do so with good intent. Dwarves are often corrupted by greed - the desire to possess and hold on to things to the exclusion of others, even if they themselves make no use of it. Ironically, Dwarves speak bitterly about the very same trait occurring in dragons that they themselves are prone to. Corruption involves trying to gain authority that isn't inherent in your beings, such as command over other free beings or command over everything, or using your own authority for evil purposes. So most magic in Middle Earth doesn't necessarily look like spellcraft as we think about it. It's certainly not 'occult' in nature. The only 'wizards' in the canon are those ainur of the same order Gandalf belongs to, the Istari. Sorcerers refer to those beings which practice magic by invoking the power of Morgoth or Sauron, and using their arts and devices - such as the Ringwraith's power to break and rend things at a distance, or to amplify destructive effects, or to invoke dismay and despair, or to command others to do their bidding and break the will of others. In effect, the sorcerers are priests of Sauron, able to invoke his power as one of the great of the ainur - and this 'false religion' is at the time of the third age basically the only religious belief in Middle Earth. However, not all invocations are corrupting. Good peoples of Middle Earth who are lorewise - that is, they've been taught about the fundamental nature of reality by the elves who received if from the Valar - frequently invoke the Valar by name, to receive blessings from them in a form of theurgy or supplication. This is not exactly religious belief, because no one really has been instructed in how to worship, and the Valar specifically aren't asking to be worshipped, but it does prefigure religious belief in middle earth, and in D&D terms is a sort of 'divine magic'.

So there are a lot of things that the dwarfs would or could do that the Hobbits would recognize as being 'magic', even though any lorewise person could tell you that magic is a rather meaningless and undescriptive word that basically means, "things the Hobbits don't understand". Nonetheless, since to a modern observer most (but not all of these things) would seem supernatural, in D&D terms they are magic and spells. Of course, Tolkien certainly hints that technology is itself one of these sorts of things that in the story is called 'magic', so that the modern reader can recognize for example gunpowder within the story and in the magic fireworks of Gandalf. So this ability to understand the universe and make new things out of it could be understood to be a part of 'human magic', and compounding gunpowder or a semiconductor would have been thought of as a spell or magical ritual by the hobbits. But we, because we understand these things (well, maybe) would laugh at the question, "Is the computer magical?", just as the elves laughed at Sam's question about the rope - "I don't know what you mean, but it is certainly well made."

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Well, we discussed about that. I think it's, in the end, a false promisse.
Long story short: in many occasions, if the DM has to impose restrictions, s/he is the bad guy, spoiling the player's fun. If s/he takes out restrictions, s/he is the cool guy; the one that "breaks" the rules so you can "have fun".

It is only false for practical purposes, which is yet another reason why those restrictions should have been baseline in the book. When third edition removed the restrictions on classes, they forever denied the DM the ability to run that sort of game without looking like a villain.

The same is true when they went bonkers with the healing rules. By setting the default at such a ridiculous extreme, the practical effect is that no DM can run a game with moderate healing without it looking like they're intentionally trying to kill the party.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

"The dwarves of old wrought mighty spells."

It's only in D&Desq fictions that dwarves lost their magic.

To be fair, D&D is quite possibly the most influential game of all time, so that's not a small amount of fiction.

 

[Celebrim]

To be fair, D&D is quite possibly the most influential game of all time, so that's not a small amount of fiction.

At this point, I feel D&D has been more influential on fantasy than Tolkien.

 

[Satyrn]

2) everyone is annoyed by 3e-style multiclass.

Please don't speak for me.