D&D 5E Is Tasha's Broken?

[Vaalingrade]

You can have a wide variety of party snaps, but the fact that they're all party snaps makes a basic bottle rocket look like a nuke, which is the 'problem' with Twilight cleric.

That and the other real problem where some DMs really, really want to kill characters and get sad when they can't.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That and the other real problem where some DMs really, really want to kill characters and get sad when they can't.

I know you have a fondness for blaming everything on the DM (it's like a shtick?), but I'd say the following-

1. If you really don't like the division of authority that allows DM discretion, maybe 5e isn't the game for you?

2. 5e is a very low-lethality game. Incredibly so. That said, if there is buy-in from the table, it can become much more challenging in terms of lethality. Simply play with gritty healing. And have intelligent monsters play intelligently (attack players while they are down in order to avoid whac-a-mole, etc.). Conversely, if you think D&D is far too hard on the regular settings (!!), just use the healing surges rule (DMG 266-67). Then you get your healing in combat!

3. Shockingly, DMs are people, too, playing a group activity. Which means that they are trying to have fun with everyone else. Usually, that means that the vast majority of DMs, if they are "favoring" something, it is favoring player success. Because they have to interact with these people outside of the game, and it's a lot more fun if the players have cool stuff than a TPK.

But you probably know that.

 

[the Jester]

While I'm not a fan of floating ASIs, there's a legitimate argument to be made that it makes it easier for players to create and play the type of characters they want to play. The proverbial halfling with a 20 Strength, or the Pocket Hercules, being my favorite example.

...which you can do fine without an extra starting +2 Str bonus. I mean, if it's about being able to customize, you put your stats in whatever order you want anyway, and in most modern character generation methods, you can even pick the numbers.

The argument you are making remains grounded in optimization, which I am just not really sympathetic to. I'm more a "setting first" guy, so when there doesn't appear to be any argument that justifies floating ASIs that isn't "players can get that extra +2 where they want it", that isn't "this is why it works in the world", well... it may not be for me.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

I just can't get behind this. Especially with the huge emphasis on bounded accuracy, that extra +2 is really not necessary. The whole argument for floating ASIs boils down to optimization, and I am just not sympathetic to arguments based on optimization. It would be different if having a slightly lower score had a huge impact, but it just doesn't.

Never really understood this viewpoint, because it's pretty much the opposite of how the matter appears to me.

Yes, it enables your hardcore char-op people to pick their package of racial traits while also getting their ASI of choice, but there are always going to be people looking to leverage their system mastery to gain as much player power as the rules allow, so lowering that ceiling doesn't change the fact that they will always aim to be at that ceiling. By contrast, people who don't have that level of system mastery still feel the selection pressure to align their racial ASIs with their class's primary ability scores - if you don't understand the system math well enough to be able to accurately judge how "necessary" that +2 is in the long run, all you're left with is the general knowledge that "higher numbers are better" and mountain upon mountain of online character creation guides telling you that any race without a +2 in what your class is good at is dead in the water.

You may not be "forced" to play a race with ASIs that align with your class, but there is a strong incentive to do so. Sure, you can play that orc wizard, but no matter what you do, it will take four extra levels (or eight, if using the pre-errata orc with the -2 INT penalty) before you're "as good" as you'd have been if you were playing an elf instead, and those class level ASIs you have to sink into INT to catch up could have gone into something else, like shoring up your CON score or taking a feat.

Floating racial ASIs eliminate that incentive and put every race on a level playing field, ability score wise. It's no longer mandatory that your orc wizard be dumber at level one than another player's elf wizard. You still have the option of playing with a non-optimal ability score array if you so choose, but people who just had a cool idea for an unorthodox race/class combo are no longer punished by default for picking it, and I think that the benefits for newer and less experienced players far outweigh the cost of letting optimizers eek out a bit more player power in a system for which, as you yourself note, it doesn't really make THAT much of a difference.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But that's not poor healing.

Sure it is.

If you actually got healed for a meaningful chunk of HP, you wouldn't see the "pop up" healing technique. Instead, because in-combat healing is smaller than most incoming attacks, there's never a reason to try to hold onto your HP if you're already super low. If in-combat healing were actually stronger than a single hit, meaning you might actually go a full round without being on the floor again, then there would be a reason to try to hold onto that HP, rather than just gleefully leaping into the fray like so many people dislike.

Making healing be only small amounts actually encourages such behavior. And, of course, people then try to solve it by eliminating in-combat healing entirely, turning it into rocket-tag combat, repeating exactly the same mistakes 3e made.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I know you have a fondness for blaming everything on the DM (it's like a shtick?), but I'd say the following-

A shtick or 'observational skills'.

And this response addresses nothing I said about a tendency among a small subset of DMs who complain specifically about how hard it is to kill PCs as if that was the point of the game and so think decent healing is the Enemy.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Bits of it are. I wouldn't allow a twilight or peace cleric at my table without some modifications, but they're the obvious ones.

Tasha's is an experimental book. On the player option side of things, Xanathar's was (imho) more about filling in fairly obvious conceptual gaps that wouldn't fit in the PHB because of space restrictions. The non-evil death cleric, the celestial warlock, the swashbuckler and so on. And from a power level, it's pretty conservative. Classes like the Mastermind and Arcane Archer look to me like they were designed very cautiously to the point of being underpowered, presumably WotC was being reeeeeal careful to not introduce too much broken stuff in their very first player-facing supplement. Tasha's get a bit out-there and creative both mechanically and thematically - new uses for wildshape for instance, a big block of quasi-multiclassing feats - and some of the blindfolded darts it hurls miss the mark pretty significantly for mine. That happens when you push the boundaries.

An experimental book that radically increases player options and power is obviously going to sell well and be successful, and encourage WotC to continue in that vein. So obviously, in fact, that i have a hard time believing they expected any other result from its publication.

 

[Lidgar]

What’s great about Tasha’s is that it can be (mostly) ignored.

We have exactly one player that uses it for its subclass options (Rune Knight). Rest of us looked at it and said “nah.”

What’s awesome about today’s D&D is the number of options we have. And as 4e showed, if there is significant dissatisfaction with the direction of a new edition, the market will provide options.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I know you have a fondness for blaming everything on the DM (it's like a shtick?), but I'd say the following-

1. If you really don't like the division of authority that allows DM discretion, maybe 5e isn't the game for you?

2. 5e is a very low-lethality game. Incredibly so. That said, if there is buy-in from the table, it can become much more challenging in terms of lethality. Simply play with gritty healing. And have intelligent monsters play intelligently (attack players while they are down in order to avoid whac-a-mole, etc.). Conversely, if you think D&D is far too hard on the regular settings (!!), just use the healing surges rule (DMG 266-67). Then you get your healing in combat!

3. Shockingly, DMs are people, too, playing a group activity. Which means that they are trying to have fun with everyone else. Usually, that means that the vast majority of DMs, if they are "favoring" something, it is favoring player success. Because they have to interact with these people outside of the game, and it's a lot more fun if the players have cool stuff than a TPK.

But you probably know that.

I don't know if I agree with that last part. The majority of optional and homebrew rules actually make things more difficult for the PCs. Less encouraging PC success and more increasing challenge.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Never really understood this viewpoint, because it's pretty much the opposite of how the matter appears to me.

Yes, it enables your hardcore char-op people to pick their package of racial traits while also getting their ASI of choice, but there are always going to be people looking to leverage their system mastery to gain as much player power as the rules allow, so lowering that ceiling doesn't change the fact that they will always aim to be at that ceiling. By contrast, people who don't have that level of system mastery still feel the selection pressure to align their racial ASIs with their class's primary ability scores - if you don't understand the system math well enough to be able to accurately judge how "necessary" that +2 is in the long run, all you're left with is the general knowledge that "higher numbers are better" and mountain upon mountain of online character creation guides telling you that any race without a +2 in what your class is good at is dead in the water.

You may not be "forced" to play a race with ASIs that align with your class, but there is a strong incentive to do so. Sure, you can play that orc wizard, but no matter what you do, it will take four extra levels (or eight, if using the pre-errata orc with the -2 INT penalty) before you're "as good" as you'd have been if you were playing an elf instead, and those class level ASIs you have to sink into INT to catch up could have gone into something else, like shoring up your CON score or taking a feat.

Floating racial ASIs eliminate that incentive and put every race on a level playing field, ability score wise. It's no longer mandatory that your orc wizard be dumber at level one than another player's elf wizard. You still have the option of playing with a non-optimal ability score array if you so choose, but people who just had a cool idea for an unorthodox race/class combo are no longer punished by default for picking it, and I think that the benefits for newer and less experienced players far outweigh the cost of letting optimizers eek out a bit more player power in a system for which, as you yourself note, it doesn't really make THAT much of a difference.

To me, social pressure is just not a good enough reason to change the rules.