Human vs Variant Human

[Barolo]

In my experience, the basic human is mostly unappealing, and the variant one is overrated.

 

[Nawara]

Depending on game and context, I would potentially houserule that the human bonus feat must be taken from a smaller list of flavor feats or possibly just Resilience. I like the idea that the success of humanity in D&D stems are not so much from being "adaptive" but from being the most resilient. Humans spread much in the manner of weeds that are difficult to get rid of. In this manner, other races find us comparable to goblins and kobolds.

This is what I do. Every human I've made has had either Resilience or a more-flavor-than-op feat like Ritual Caster.

(Ritual Caster is a great non-casting-class feat from an out-of-combat perspective, by the way. You can accumulate tons of helpful utility spells like Identify, Detect Magic, Purify Food and Drink, and Alarm over time, but you need 10 minutes undisturbed to cast any of them. It can also give you a familiar at 1st level regardless of class.)

 

[akr71]

What about restricting certain classes and/or backgrounds to the urban dwellers and certain others to the tribes?

For example Bard, Cleric, Paladin & Wizard are only open to urban v humans and Barbarian, Druid & Ranger are only available to tribal standard humans. It doesn't diminish the fact that v human is still a preferred option, but I always start my character creation with what class I want to be, not what race.

 

[KahlessNestor]

I actually have done that in this world. Maybe that's distinction enough.

Sent from my SM-G900P using EN World mobile app

 

[Illithidbix]

I personally prefer to play AND DM a variant human than a regular human.

The regular human benefits from odd numbers, but how many they can get.

The standard array of course doesn't favour them as it only has two odd numbers.

The relative value of being a standard human with rolled ability scores can end up very good (if you roll lots of odd numbers) or very bad (if you roll mostly even numbers)

But with points buy and the standard human you can have:
16, 16, 14, 12, 10, 10 (+9 total)
16, 14, 14, 14, 12, 9 (+9 total)
16, 14, 13, 12, 12, 12 (+9 total)
16, 16, 16, 9, 9, 9 (+6 total )

Which I think is kinda awkward for what is meant to be the simplest character choice.
It is both the least mechanically interesting option, but also rewards system knowledge.

 

[cbwjm]

Even using the standard array, the basic human benefits by being able to spend an ability score increase at level 4 on two abilities instead of just one which I think is pretty handy depending on what you want with the character. You can either boost that 16 ability to 18 or raise a 15 and a 13 to 16 and 14 respectively.

 

[tuxgeo]

One advantage that the variant human has occurs when rolling stats: if you're stuck with an "interesting" set of ability scores, the availability of a feat at 1st level can liven up the proceedings a bit.

Hm. On YouTube, Matthew Colville has a series of videos about how to play D&D. In one of the older videos, he goes into his own, preferred way of having his players generate their characters, giving one criterion for re-rolling:
Roll 4d6, drop lowest die, in order (STR-DEX-CON-INT-WIS-CHA), but if the result doesn't have at least two scores of 15 or higher, you can re-roll.

If I recall correctly, it's in the video about Types of Players, of which one is "The Specialist"--who always plays the same character. Matt's rolling method is one way to get people to try out new classes (and possibly races). If you rolled an 8 for DEX, you might run with it; or you might wish to have access to a feat at the start of the game, and the variant human would provide that for you. (Yeah, an Elf would get you up to a 10 DEX too, but this thread isn't about Elf vs. Human.)