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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8608638" data-attributes="member: 87792">I forgot to reply to this bit. The +1/+2 is the most bland and generic way possible to mechanically differentiate races and is something that literally isn't seen in actual play for NPCs because they simply don't make enough rolls before either the party moves on or the party kills them. It matters for PCs because the individual PC makes so many rolls.If I want to make one race appear stronger than another other than through description I don't read out a list of bland, tedious statistics. I don't slow the game down doing the math out loud. And I don't get the players to reverse engineer my dice modifiers. Instead 5e gives me excellent tools for different sorts of strength.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The goliath literally has twice the lifting carrying capacity of other races and your average goliath can carry about as much as the strongest human or dwarf ever.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The minotaur can use a bonus action to push people up to one size larger than them around through brute force.  Minotaurs are forceful</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The half-orc can literally hit harder than anyone else because they get the Savage Attack that gives them an extra dice on a critical.  Half-orcs have explosive strength. (And this is a weak-ass ability because it only comes up one roll in 20 - but a +1 on a d20 roll is only relevant one roll in 20 under normal circumstances anyway and doesn't even directly call attention to itself then).</li> </ul>The +2 on the other hand doesn't do very much to make a race different from humans as humans already have a +1. Which means that for about half of all stat spreads there is literally no difference between the +2 Str race and human capabilities unless you are actually counting the individual pounds of weight someone is lifting because they have exactly the same bonus.So no. The +2 is pretty much a waste of time in actual play for indicating anything that makes a race different from humans. Meanwhile not only are the goliath and minotaur strong - but they are strong in different ways. One's much more a slow endurance type of being able to move things, and one's much faster and more forceful pushing people around.And another of 5e's trends is to make all the races extremely different by giving them actual differences in their abilities - like an average goliath breaking human lifting records. The trend 5e has is to ignore things that only exist in the background in favour of actual meaningful differences in play.5e does a much better job of making races that are mechanically alien than a focus on bland and tedious +2/+1/0/0/0/0 against a baseline of +1/+1/+1/+1/+1/+1 ever could. And dropping the bland and the tedious counting that don't actually take you outside the human range means that you have more free time, energy, and headspace to make your races actually different rather than just humans with prosthetic foreheads and a couple of +1s thrown in.Whereas for me, because I like things to be alien dropping the focus on math and redirecting it to a focus on what actually makes things different has been a boon in terms of actually being able to get past the busywork and math that doesn't actually do anything meaningful differentiate the race from humans (an average member of this race is 9% stronger but 9% less agile than an average human! W00t! This absolutely tells me something truly groundbreaking about their culture, physiology, and psychology that in no way resembles a prosthetic forehead alien!) to be able to focus on the alienness of nonhumans.So it is an improvement to me as a DM because the game is making me waste my time on things that don't actually make a difference that much less.</blockquote>

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