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

[Celebrim]

Looks like it'll work just fine in a world where I can be a fire-breathing dragonman....

What about the existence of fire-breathing dragonmen causes swords to leap from sheaths more easily and readily? Wouldn't the existence of firebreathing dragonmen cause it to work worse?

 

[Caliban]

What about the existence of fire-breathing dragonmen causes swords to leap from sheaths more easily and readily? Wouldn't the existence of firebreathing dragonmen cause it to work worse?

Do the standard 5e rules make a distinction between drawing a dagger out of a sheathe and drawing a greatsword out of a sheathe?

Do they even address if a greatsword is carried in a sheathe or not?

I don't have my books with me, but I don't think it's a distinction the rules care about.

 

[Coroc]

Do the standard 5e rules make a distinction between drawing a dagger out of a sheathe and drawing a greatsword out of a sheathe?

Do they even address if a greatsword is carried in a sheathe or not?

I don't have my books with me, but I don't think it's a distinction the rules care about.

Nah as you probably now have realised I am a bit into the things how they really were, and lots of this stuff fascinate me. And HEMA is Historic European Martial Arts, so these guys in the vids know what they talk about because they use those weapons or sparring equivalents to fight with other people in tournamants. Also some of them collect real antiquities or very well made replicas (Not the scrap to decorate walls with). And they learn the way those weapons were used from historical treatises.

It is totally clear to me that you cannot reflect actual combat with 5E and it is a high grade of abstraction in what takes how long etc. and action economy etc. But as you can trace back the discussion started with the topic encumbrance. And this I treat in my games as haptic encumbrance, not so much as in can you carry this bag of coins in addition to all other stuff, but where on your body do you put this. And I do not need abstraction or mechanics for this other than RL realism.
If you tell me you want to do something at my table and not use magic or other gimmicks then it has got to be something which you or me could probably do as well in RL. Be it jump over a chasm or carry around 5 spare weapons. Yes you can strap 5 spare weapons to your body and you and me could carry five weapons around - somehow. But would you do it in a real live situation? No you would not. You can carry one big weapon and climb a ladder or jump a chasm but you will not carry 5 of these and perform equally well. And I do not need game mechanics for this. And I do not need game mechanics to tell me even with fictional Str of 20 you will not jump a 100 ft chasm.
And if you just strap your sword like shown in the 1st vid then yea that's ok, you just wear it hanging from your shoulder. But if you want to carry it on your back you will bump into things and if even if you use your special sheath from your picture, you will have to untie the swordknot at least to have your weapon available for the bonus action draw a weapon.

 

[Caliban]

A) House rule it however you wish. I was only sharing an opinion on one specific thing you said that I disagreed with (specifically the bit I quoted), not everything you were saying.

B) White space is your friend. Paragraphs of text jammed together are hard to read.

 

[Coroc]

I people complained I was off topic...

Back more toward target, and actually addressing the topic of the question, I don't miss attribute minimums or maximums by gender or race, but I did miss them by class enough to actually bring them back for my 3.X homebrew.

For example, the homebrew hunter class had a minimum strength and dexterity of 7, while the fighter had a minimum strength of 9. And, in a nod to the old dual classing restrictions, each additional class you multi-classed into raised the ability score minimum to enter into a class of all classes by 2. So for example, a multi-classed fighter-hunter would need at least an 11 STR and at least a 9 DEX. That isn't a very hard requirement, but it did mean that you couldn't dump stat out of a class's prerequisites (as for example, trying to play a pixie fighter with basically no strength) and also there was a practical limit of 3 or 4 classes that you could multi-class into. Further, if you did try to front load, you'd soon be forced into multiple attribute dependency by the system, and MAD is a great balancing element in my opinion because what usually breaks balance is excessive depth of ability and not excessive breadth of ability. "jack of all trades, master of none" is usually balanced or even subpar, where as, "I have a big hammer, and every problem is a nail." is usually broken.

Those, combined with banning PrC's, stopped some of the front loading nonsense seen in standard 3.X that seemed to combine the worst elements of point buy (no balance, no breadth) and class systems (no flexibility, arbitrary restrictions) into one. And if I was converting to 5e, I'd probably bring similar ideas forward.

But I see no point in racial minimums - every race can have inept members. An elf could have arthritis and bed bound, or be born learning disabled. Indeed, I'd expect more handicapped elves than goblins (who'd just kill and eat anything that couldn't pull it's own weight). As a practical matter, the adventuring class, or 'heroic' class if you will, of all races would be presumably not be drawn from the least able members of the society. As for racial maximums, their is no reason to enforce them beyond the practical limits imposed by racial modifiers. Average pixies are more agile than average dwarves, and this comparison is likely to remain true of the most agile members of both races as well.

As for gender, now that things have calmed down a bit, I'll risk a few comments. If there is a game I would want to play where the capabilities of men and women are not equal, then it isn't D&D or anything like it. In D&D, I don't play a female character hoping to get a uniquely feminine perspective on life, or imagining that by my role-play I'll learn anything about real women. I've played relatively few female PC's and really none since junior high, when a I played in Gamma World what would now be a very stereotypical attractive kickbutt no-nonsense action girl Pure Strain Human with a sawed off shotgun and love of wanton violence (I was ahead of my time, even Tank Girl wasn't published until 1988). But again, even then this was pure escapism of the 'imaginary girlfriend' sort, and had nothing to do with real women nor was it intended to be commentary on real women.

Generally speaking, any game that I would want to play where men and women were really different straight out of chargen, would be very much about 'who you are' and not 'what can you do', so that attributes reflecting who you are were more important than ones reflecting what you could do. Actually doing that well might be impossible, and my expectation would be that it would be done wrong more often than not and an endless source of table arguments about whether its assumptions were truly realistic and not merely socio-cultural stereotypes. Regardless, I think there comes a point where you are trying to explore a serious setting or concept where playing a stereotypical kick-butt fantasy female who is stronger than any man is being as goofy as insisting on playing Luke Skywalker, Green Lantern, or Mickey Mouse in 11th century Japan where everyone else is trying as hard as they can to play someone who actually might have lived in 11th century Japan - right character, wrong setting, wrong game.

Do we really want to insist that Pendragon's 'Book of Knights and Ladies' (or Pendragon generally) is a sexist document, and that it's creator is to be denounced, or that anyone that actually wanted to explore a sexist setting like Arthurian Romance was themselves sexist (and hence immoral)? Even if we move the game to another fantasy setting like Tamora Pierce's 'Protector of the Small', so that Knights and Ladies aren't implicitly different categories, part of what makes 'Protector of the Small' more compelling than similar works is while it's protagonist is as large and as strong as believable for a woman (six foot tall, athletic and muscular), the very fact that she's not effortlessly stronger than typical for her sex and has to approach problems differently than a man overflowing with muscles would is what makes Kelandra such a compelling character - especially compared to more obvious wish fulfillment characters like Alanna. Had the author attempted to convince us Kel was just stronger than everyone she met, it would diminish the story. The point was that she could do the job, not that she was better than everyone else, or even had the same capabilities. If men and women were actually equal in all capabilities, one wonders why sexism exists in the setting at all? It's not social pressure or the patriarchy keeping women from being pro linebackers. You can't explain sexism with 'othering' alone, nor can you explore it deeply simply by postulating a fantasy woman who really is stronger than any man.

Would I want to try that in D&D with the average group of beer and pretzel players? Heck, no. But on the other hand, don't tell me either that only fantasy women are worth thinking about or role-playing.

Yes back to topic, sorry for the excursion, I do houserule at my table that to cast a spell you have to got 10+ spell level in your casting stat. That means be a mage with int 10 fine, but you only learn cantrips then.

 

[Coroc]

A) House rule it however you wish. I was only sharing an opinion on one specific thing you said that I disagreed with (specifically the bit I quoted), not everything you were saying.

B) White space is your friend. Paragraphs of text jammed together are hard to read.

Ok one short reply then and that be the last I do not want to hijack the thread,

For me if you are wearing your sword on your back it is about the same as if you got strapped it to your horse or stowed it in your cart, or your dagger is in your backpack.
No game mechanics just prosa.

It simply is not ready to start combat with bonus action draw 1 weapon because it is in "transport mode"

 

[Celebrim]

Do the standard 5e rules make a distinction between drawing a dagger out of a sheathe and drawing a greatsword out of a sheathe?

Before I answer that question, I want to point out something I consider very important. The assertion was made that drawing a sword from one's back would work out fine because the world also contained firebreathing dragonmen. Whether the rules make a distinction between daggers and greatswords for the purposes of readying a weapon is irrelevant to the original claim, and your response is a complete tangent. It could be that the rules make a great distinction, or that they make no distinction but whether they do or not has nothing at all to do with the presence or absence of firebreathing dragonmen, nor - and this is less obvious but equally important - does it have anything to do with how readable a greatsword is if it is currently strapped on ones back.

The rules make no distinction between readying a weapon on the basis of size in most situations, though the wieldiness of 'light weapons' does make a difference in some few situations. But, and here we must read the minds of the designer a little bit, I think we can reasonably speculate that though this is something the player character's care about very much indeed, it's not a level of detail that the players themselves will normally care about. To this end, proper stowage of gear falls into the category of things like maintenance of weapons and gear and relieving oneself in the field and dressing wounds between battles where it is assumed that the PC's, being expert in this sort of thing, will have done the correct thing even if the player themselves doesn't know how to expediently stow a greatsword so that it can be readily wielded but also doesn't greatly hamper movement. However they are doing it normally, the weapon is readiable in the space of time necessary to arm oneself in the heat of battle without giving away openings to the enemy. PC's are just cool like that.

I don't have my books with me, but I don't think it's a distinction the rules care about.

But the critical thing to understand is that this is a role playing game and not a board game, and as such it doesn't matter too much what the rules care about. There are plenty of things that are in the game that aren't in the rules. In fact, in general, there are more things in the game that aren't stated in the rules, than are in the rules. If a PC expressly stows the weapon away in a particular manner, and if an expert would recognize that manner as being unweildly, then the stowage of that weapon is actually unwieldy and the PC in question may require more than a normal amount of time to retrieve the weapon. For example, if - fearing thievery - the PC explicitly takes extra steps to make the weapon difficult for a thief to remove, then it's quite reasonable that those same steps force the PC to take extra time to ready the weapon. And this happens, not because the rules care about such things, but because in the fiction being created by the players, the exact fictional positioning of the sword mattered. And presumably, the way adventures with greatsword stow their weapons is not the way that is called out as unwieldy, but is a more efficient and practical manner.

And we still haven't explained what the presence of firebreathing dragonmen has to do with the wieldiness of weaponry, because the two are completely unrelated except that if you are really living in a world with firebreathing dragonmen, you probably care very deeply about stowing weapons in as practical of manner as possible.

If I had to guess, what the person was trying to say is he doesn't care about the fictional positioning of weapons. But he's rather ineptly linking his lack of concern for these details to firebreathing dragonmen.

What's actually going on here deep down is how you think about a game and how you prepare to play a role-playing game is more important than the rules of the role-playing game in determining how the play at the table will actually work. The poster I wheedled made the erroneous assumption that how you are to think about a game is something for which there was only one right way of doing things, for example that since this is fantasy, it was wrong to think hard about fictional positioning or realism or logic because in his mind firebreathing dragonmen are illogical. Firebreathing dragons aren't illogical if they are a conceit of the setting, but assuming that fantasy means no adherence to realism outside of its conceits is illogical.

But in any event that's not the rules either; that's in his default approach to a particular game. It is very much wrong to assume your approach is the only right one and other people's approach is necessarily the wrong one.

 

[Caliban]

Before I answer that question, I want to point out something I consider very important.

Oh good lord. Nevermind, I withdraw the question.

 

[MoonSong]

I people complained I was off topic...

Back more toward target, and actually addressing the topic of the question, I don't miss attribute minimums or maximums by gender or race, but I did miss them by class enough to actually bring them back for my 3.X homebrew.

For example, the homebrew hunter class had a minimum strength and dexterity of 7, while the fighter had a minimum strength of 9. And, in a nod to the old dual classing restrictions, each additional class you multi-classed into raised the ability score minimum to enter into a class of all classes by 2. So for example, a multi-classed fighter-hunter would need at least an 11 STR and at least a 9 DEX. That isn't a very hard requirement, but it did mean that you couldn't dump stat out of a class's prerequisites (as for example, trying to play a pixie fighter with basically no strength) and also there was a practical limit of 3 or 4 classes that you could multi-class into. Further, if you did try to front load, you'd soon be forced into multiple attribute dependency by the system, and MAD is a great balancing element in my opinion because what usually breaks balance is excessive depth of ability and not excessive breadth of ability. "jack of all trades, master of none" is usually balanced or even subpar, where as, "I have a big hammer, and every problem is a nail." is usually broken.

Those, combined with banning PrC's, stopped some of the front loading nonsense seen in standard 3.X that seemed to combine the worst elements of point buy (no balance, no breadth) and class systems (no flexibility, arbitrary restrictions) into one. And if I was converting to 5e, I'd probably bring similar ideas forward.

But I see no point in racial minimums - every race can have inept members. An elf could have arthritis and bed bound, or be born learning disabled. Indeed, I'd expect more handicapped elves than goblins (who'd just kill and eat anything that couldn't pull it's own weight). As a practical matter, the adventuring class, or 'heroic' class if you will, of all races would be presumably not be drawn from the least able members of the society. As for racial maximums, their is no reason to enforce them beyond the practical limits imposed by racial modifiers. Average pixies are more agile than average dwarves, and this comparison is likely to remain true of the most agile members of both races as well.

As for gender, now that things have calmed down a bit, I'll risk a few comments. If there is a game I would want to play where the capabilities of men and women are not equal, then it isn't D&D or anything like it. In D&D, I don't play a female character hoping to get a uniquely feminine perspective on life, or imagining that by my role-play I'll learn anything about real women. I've played relatively few female PC's and really none since junior high, when a I played in Gamma World what would now be a very stereotypical attractive kickbutt no-nonsense action girl Pure Strain Human with a sawed off shotgun and love of wanton violence (I was ahead of my time, even Tank Girl wasn't published until 1988). But again, even then this was pure escapism of the 'imaginary girlfriend' sort, and had nothing to do with real women nor was it intended to be commentary on real women.

Generally speaking, any game that I would want to play where men and women were really different straight out of chargen, would be very much about 'who you are' and not 'what can you do', so that attributes reflecting who you are were more important than ones reflecting what you could do. Actually doing that well might be impossible, and my expectation would be that it would be done wrong more often than not and an endless source of table arguments about whether its assumptions were truly realistic and not merely socio-cultural stereotypes. Regardless, I think there comes a point where you are trying to explore a serious setting or concept where playing a stereotypical kick-butt fantasy female who is stronger than any man is being as goofy as insisting on playing Luke Skywalker, Green Lantern, or Mickey Mouse in 11th century Japan where everyone else is trying as hard as they can to play someone who actually might have lived in 11th century Japan - right character, wrong setting, wrong game.

Do we really want to insist that Pendragon's 'Book of Knights and Ladies' (or Pendragon generally) is a sexist document, and that it's creator is to be denounced, or that anyone that actually wanted to explore a sexist setting like Arthurian Romance was themselves sexist (and hence immoral)? Even if we move the game to another fantasy setting like Tamora Pierce's 'Protector of the Small', so that Knights and Ladies aren't implicitly different categories, part of what makes 'Protector of the Small' more compelling than similar works is while it's protagonist is as large and as strong as believable for a woman (six foot tall, athletic and muscular), the very fact that she's not effortlessly stronger than typical for her sex and has to approach problems differently than a man overflowing with muscles would is what makes Kelandra such a compelling character - especially compared to more obvious wish fulfillment characters like Alanna. Had the author attempted to convince us Kel was just stronger than everyone she met, it would diminish the story. The point was that she could do the job, not that she was better than everyone else, or even had the same capabilities. If men and women were actually equal in all capabilities, one wonders why sexism exists in the setting at all? It's not social pressure or the patriarchy keeping women from being pro linebackers. You can't explain sexism with 'othering' alone, nor can you explore it deeply simply by postulating a fantasy woman who really is stronger than any man.

Would I want to try that in D&D with the average group of beer and pretzel players? Heck, no. But on the other hand, don't tell me either that only fantasy women are worth thinking about or role-playing.

Wow, a long post. Let me try to be short. I think that at heart I'm a simulationist. for me it's important that I can relate to my character, so I'm drawn to down to earth 'realistic' characters. I'm personally not drawn to this "Xena archetype" and I don't like it being pushed so strongly in the media. Hey, chances are I'll never want to play a Str 20 woman -I always try to dump str, and int, but str too-. So, why am I so bothered by the mere idea of the game removing options I'll never use? A couple of short anecdotes.

• Ever watched South Park's Cartoon Wars two-parter? how the manatees refused to work after only one ball was missing? Even if statistically they shouldn't miss it?
• Remember how I'm still not over sorcerers not being proficient with spears despite them being clearly an inferior choice and I doing everything I can to dump Strength with all my characters?

 

[Celebrim]

Wow, a long post.

Oh believe me, that's not a particularly long post for me. It's a tough choice which of us is worse, me or pemerton.

Ever watched South Park's Cartoon Wars two-parter? how the manatees refused to work after only one ball was missing? Even if statistically they shouldn't miss it?

No, I'm afraid I've never seen an episode of South Park at all, so I'm afraid your anecdote is lost on me. All I know about South Park is ugly animation, and someone named Kenny is always dying. I probably haven't seen more than 15 seconds total of the show though.

Remember how I'm still not over sorcerers not being proficient with spears despite them being clearly an inferior choice and I doing everything I can to dump Strength with all my characters?

Sorry, also no. So, why are you bothered by the idea of the game removing options you'll never use?

For example, are you bothered if Green Lantern is not an option in your Deadlands game, or even your D&D game, even if you'll never actually want to play GL in either game?