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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 9724297" data-attributes="member: 57112">The problem is that the character is still being penalized within the gameplay function of their primary ability. Especially when in 3.5 where your Halfling Barbarian has a worse chance to hit, has a smaller bonus to damage, and has a lower damage die to begin with. And hitting things, really hard, is your primary role as a Barbarian, and there was little to nothing in the rules to support compensating for lower strength in a strength-based class. I'm the last person to support character optimization and I have a history of making mechanically weaker in 3.x, but it's hard to deny that optimization was the prevailing way to approach 3.x (at least in the places on the internet where people talked about 3.x). I did, by the way, play a Halfling Barbarian in an Eberron campaign in 3.x, and I was deeply unhappy with how the mechanics consistently got in the way of me trying to play the character that I wanted to play.Maybe if the system was built better to accommodate suboptimal statistics I would agree with you but that has never been D&D's strong point, and it certainly wasn't in the era where you could (a) playing a halfling barbarian while (b) halflings suffered strength penalties. The rules, in practice and I would argue by design, are clearly communicating with its stat penalties which character archetypes not to play. That's not encouraging creativity in the least, and it's been a positive development that they've been resigned to history.</blockquote>

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