Odd bonuses & penalties

[LightPhoenix]

The reason has already been stated - you can engineer your stats to hide a -1 penalty. It doesn't matter what system you use, you can still do that, and hence it's a bad idea. With a -2, it is impossible to hide that penalty.

 

[Conaill]

I do agree there's a potential for min/max abuse with a +1/-1 race.

HOWEVER, I see nothing wrong with having a single +1 (or -1) modifier. Yes, it's almost as good as having a +2, but not quite. And it sure is a lot better than a +0. Just gives a little more gradation to your custom races.

For example, you might want to add a special ability (e.g. Scent, or a bonus to some skills) to an existing race. Nothing really overpowering, so it's not worth a +1 ECL or a -2 penalty to some stat, but it does make the race noticeably better than the standard one. Solution: add a -1 penalty, or turn one of its +2 bonuses into a +1.

 

[Acmite]

The thing is, if you are using point buy and have a +1/-1 race, you can easily put odd numbers in those two abilities. Thus you get a plus to one modifier without a minus to another modifier. That's better than +2/-2 races, where you are guaranteed to get a minus to balance out the plus.

Exactly what I was trying to get at.

 

[Acmite]

For example, you might want to add a special ability (e.g. Scent, or a bonus to some skills) to an existing race. Nothing really overpowering, so it's not worth a +1 ECL or a -2 penalty to some stat, but it does make the race noticeably better than the standard one. Solution: add a -1 penalty, or turn one of its +2 bonuses into a +1.

Eek! Kinda OT, but I'm of the opinion that Scent is way too good! If I gave this to a character, that alone would make me want to bump them to +1 ECL. I would, however, give them a couple other things to make it an interesting race (like Low-light vison or darkvision, bonuses to certain skills, etc)...but I digress even further....

 

[nsruf]

The thing is, if you are using point buy and have a +1/-1 race, you can easily put odd numbers in those two abilities. Thus you get a plus to one modifier without a minus to another modifier. That's better than +2/-2 races, where you are guaranteed to get a minus to balance out the plus.

Yeah, but as long as both stats are in the 8-14 range, there is no advantage gained! Buying an unmodified 10 and 12 or buying two 11's and applying +/-1 works out exactly the same, point-buy wise. So you have to compensate for the -1 as compared to a character with no racial -1.

OTOH, if you roll, you usually end up with at least two odd values which cost you nothing above the next lower even one. And that is were the abuse lies, as you effectively get a +2/+0.

And claiming that +/-1 skews the cost scale for getting stats 15+: well, that is true but to a lesser extent than +/-2. So with point-buy, it would not be problematic (unless you think +/-2 adjustments are problematic as well).

Nevertheless, I don't like +/-1 adjustments. The 3-18 attribute scale is actually more of a holdover from earlier editions now and could be replaced by a bonus range from -4..+4 for the same effect. And thus it really makes sense to have ability mods affect the bonus range and not the underlying stat value.