NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9109107" data-attributes="member: 18">The PHB?It's incredibly unbalanced. You've got Mountain Dwarves with +2/+2 to great stats and really strong abilities and darkvision, you've got High Elves and Wood Elves with excellent abilities, free Perception, and darkvision, you've got Half-Elves with +2/+1/+1, two skills of choice (!!!), crazy nonsense like the Wood Elf speed boost, and of course darkvision.The at the other end, you have humans, with +1/+1/+1/+1/+1/+1 which sounds nice but is nearly entirely worthless in practice (certainly for most characters it is worth less than just +2/+1 - there are some corner-case point-buy situations, though even those work better with V-Humans +1/+1/+1 and Feat), and a single extra language, and Dragonborn, with their absolutely mediocre full-action breath attack, and single, specific damage resistance (most of which rarely come up, and even Fire ain't that great).That a vast gamut. And that's just the PHB. There are races later on that go even further.The class balance is much, much better. The worst class is about 70% as good as the best class, which is really pretty surprisingly good balance. Whereas the worst races are an absolute joke next to the best ones.What you've described by the way, isn't balance. It's not even arguable as "balance". That's just pigeonholing. It's fine to like pigeonholing, but you can't lie and call it balance. That's me picking up a pork sausage and saying "A mushroom!". They're just entirely different things.The claim that people picking the "wrong" race ruins games?No, that's not valid. If you were willing to say "I absolutely WRECKED both those games by playing that Yuan-ti!", you would at least have an anecdote that supported your claim. But you don't even have that. You have an entirely imaginary situation. You imagine, that in another group, some other person, picking that Yuan-ti, might possibly, theoretically, in some unexplained way, have wrecked that group.Let me put this to you - either you're a person who enjoys ruining groups (unlikely!) or more likely, you knew playing Yuan-ti would be just fine in both those groups.And the the same true for virtually all race choices. That the vast majority of D&D players just simply don't pick ones that'll cause a problem for that specific group. Indeed most players run them by the DM first if they're anything outside the PHB, in my experience.</blockquote>

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