Opinions on Racial Ability Modifiers

[TwinBahamut]

This is what I should have voted. I don't give a rip if the race get's a -1 for every +1. I just want each race to have appropriate differences from humans. That might mean some races get no stat adjustments, but some really wild "at-will" (or something). It might also mean that a race gets a huge stat bonus, no penalty, and no powers. Or something totally different.

That line of thought brings me to balance, though. How important is balance? What if you have a race like goliaths that has a net stat boost or break even and an awesome ability? The 3e option was to use a level adjustment. The 4e option was to take away/tone down the ability. I find the 4e way of handling it to be very, very unsatisfying. The 3e way had some glitches, too, though. The other options are the 1e way, where balance came from the GM, or just saying "sorry, you can't play that". Both of those have a certain amount of suck attached to them. The best of the above seems to be 3.5 w/ UA buy-offs, but there may be something else.

Balance is important, giving races powerful abilities is important, and approaches like level adjustments or level limits are a terrible solution. What is needed is an entirely different approach.

I think an important part of the solution is recognizing that the choice to be human should have really huge benefits to it. Not silly stuff like bonus feats and such, but rather core aspects of humaness. Things like "can hold weapons" or "can wear armor" or "can write" are racial advantages inherent to being human. Races that are significantly different from humans may not be able to do these things, and would get a different set of bonuses. The difficult part is figuring out how to quantify and balance this sort of benefit.

I'm a fan of separating racial choices into two broader categories: species and sub-species (species and race, or major race and minor race also work, but I'll avoid those for clarity's sake right now). Humanoid would be a species, with humans, elves, and dwarves all being sub-species of human. Something like talking animals would be another species, with talking dogs, talking cats, and talking bears all being sub-species of that. Dryads and nereids could be sub-species of nymphs. Fire and ice giants could be sub-species of giant. Different species would have a large pool of major mechanical differences from each other, while sub-species would only have a small pool of minor differences between each other. Sub-species could be differentiated from a baseline like most races are differentiated from humans now, but different species are completely different choices from the ground up.

It is something of a complex and potentially problematic system, but it has its interesting elements. For one, it can be dialed. One campaign may only use species variation and ban sub-species variation, while another may do the opposite. It allows for both small and large differentiation to exist.

The main problem is figuring out what abilities are in the realm of "humanoid" and what characters need to give up from that pool of abilities in order to access the other species...

 

[JamesonCourage]

Close. You have the right idea, but your numbers are wrong. Strength (measured as power or force) is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the muscle (and only when you assume the number of sarcomeres per unit area is constant). Doubling a creature's size in all dimensions will increase mass by 8x, and muscular strength by 4x. (I studied Biomechanics in university).

So if you take a 4' tall halfling's strength as X & weight 65lbs., then a 6' tall comparable human would have strength 2.25X and weight ~220lbs.

Any place where I can look some of this stuff up? Ratios on size to strength comparisons, etc.?

 

[Grydan]

(And as an aside, Chimps are not that much stronger than humans, it's a myth. They're also bigger than you think about 5' and 150 lbs, more like dwarves than hobbits)

The article you link to was one of my references.

"Repeated tests in the 1960s confirmed this basic picture. A chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier."

 

[underfoot007ct]

Things like giants are literally impossible - 7 1'2 feet is about as tall as a person can get without serious issues. (Look at poor Andre the Giant)

Therefore any system is likely going to break down well before that, at least if it is based on human norms.

The same goes for hobbits - in any real sense, they would be hopelessly weak. (And as an aside, Chimps are not that much stronger than humans, it's a myth. They're also bigger than you think about 5' and 150 lbs, more like dwarves than hobbits)

So all this stuff really has to be heavily abstracted anyway. That's one thing that really drove me crazy about 3e, having different weapon sizes for different size monsters. So much effort was spend in solving a problem that shouldn't even exist, since the system needs to be abstract, not realistic.

AS per the link you provided, Chimps are twice as strong as humans. "Twice as strong" is still might powerful, x2 any damage mods.

Aside from that, are we not looking at a fantasy realm, where realism sometimes takes second place behind magical & wondrous things.

 

[dangerous jack]

At the risk of veering this conversation too far from D&D...

I was fairly sure that it was different than bone strength, though, so is bone the one that only doubles?

I studied muscles primarily, and it was 15 years ago and I don't work in the field today, so I can't speak to bone strength (meaning resistance to breaking).

Any place where I can look some of this stuff up? Ratios on size to strength comparisons, etc.?

Most of this is from memory (and it's stuck with me because I had a great prof who gave me 1 question on my oral final exam about why shorter people are often better high jumpers)
* Strong Ants – Why Are Ants So Strong? – How Can Ants Lift Objects 50 Times Their Body Weight? mentions the cross-section bit
* Muscle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is also a decent primer


Now back to D&D...

Of course, this is only talking about direct muscle power, which is a bit different from effective strength because of all the other factors...
[...]
Hmm, not sure if I'm explaining this correctly or just rambling, so maybe I'll explain my views a different way... Let's look at a different stat that makes this distinction a bit clearer. Dexterity is a good choice.

This is a good point. Out of the 6 stats, strength is really the one that lines up with quantitative measurements in the real world (although I suppose you could do balance testing for 1 aspect of Dexterity, IQ testing for part of Intelligence, etc. ).

Elves traditionally are portrayed as dextrous in all senses of the word, often exceeding human limitations. Interestingly, as I'm writing this I don't recall them been portrayed as lacking Constitution (and in the LotR movies, Legolas is shown to out-drink and out-pace Gimli ), although you could make an argument for them having less strength.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Other: I'm down with positive modifiers only, or positive and negative modifiers, or no modifiers, as long as there are other distinguishing mechanical traits too (like stonecunning, or low light vision, or weapon proficiencies, etc).