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PC Limitations vs. Do Whatever You Want
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8750251" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>Okay...but your reason for opposing it was specifically because you didn't want people playing Orc Warlocks <em>in order to optimize</em>.</p><p></p><p>The problem is, people won't play Orcs to optimize <em>in the first place</em>.</p><p></p><p>Ever noticed in the 5e race statistics that dwarves are really rare? Yeah, that's not because they don't have good stats. They do. Mountain dwarves get two different +2s. That's the best you can get. And yet, despite being more powerful than many other options, they're substantially less popular than dragonborn...who are sufficiently weak that WotC replaced them in Fizban's.</p><p></p><p>Optimizers will optimize by finding ways to make human, half-elf, elf, or (more rarely) tiefling work with whatever thing you're already intending to do. And it just turns out that those options are both incredibly popular <em>and</em> meaningfully more powerful than pretty much anything else in the game...and two of them (human and half-elf) <em>already have flexible racial ability scores anyway</em>. (Half-elves can choose where their two +1s go, standard humans get +1 to all stats regardless, and variant humans get their choice of two distinct +1 bonuses.)</p><p></p><p>You specifically said, above, "it just lets you have better numbers while typically going against the narrative of the world." No, it doesn't. You could always get those numbers <em>regardless of the narrative of the world</em>. Because half-elf is THAT good. Instead, floating racial ability bonuses lets you have <em>competent</em> numbers for whatever you find interesting.</p><p></p><p>Besides: subverting expectations can be an incredibly useful thing. And, as I said, there's no significant reason to want to play an orc warlock or a dragonborn wizard or a halfling barbarian <em>even with floating bonuses</em>. The only people who will do that are the ones who think a cool story will come from it. Everyone else will stick with either the "default" options (human, half-elf, elf, aka the "pretty but mostly normal" races) or the "powerful" options (...which are mostly variant human, half-elf, and elf.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8750251, member: 6790260"] Okay...but your reason for opposing it was specifically because you didn't want people playing Orc Warlocks [I]in order to optimize[/I]. The problem is, people won't play Orcs to optimize [I]in the first place[/I]. Ever noticed in the 5e race statistics that dwarves are really rare? Yeah, that's not because they don't have good stats. They do. Mountain dwarves get two different +2s. That's the best you can get. And yet, despite being more powerful than many other options, they're substantially less popular than dragonborn...who are sufficiently weak that WotC replaced them in Fizban's. Optimizers will optimize by finding ways to make human, half-elf, elf, or (more rarely) tiefling work with whatever thing you're already intending to do. And it just turns out that those options are both incredibly popular [I]and[/I] meaningfully more powerful than pretty much anything else in the game...and two of them (human and half-elf) [I]already have flexible racial ability scores anyway[/I]. (Half-elves can choose where their two +1s go, standard humans get +1 to all stats regardless, and variant humans get their choice of two distinct +1 bonuses.) You specifically said, above, "it just lets you have better numbers while typically going against the narrative of the world." No, it doesn't. You could always get those numbers [I]regardless of the narrative of the world[/I]. Because half-elf is THAT good. Instead, floating racial ability bonuses lets you have [I]competent[/I] numbers for whatever you find interesting. Besides: subverting expectations can be an incredibly useful thing. And, as I said, there's no significant reason to want to play an orc warlock or a dragonborn wizard or a halfling barbarian [I]even with floating bonuses[/I]. The only people who will do that are the ones who think a cool story will come from it. Everyone else will stick with either the "default" options (human, half-elf, elf, aka the "pretty but mostly normal" races) or the "powerful" options (...which are mostly variant human, half-elf, and elf.) [/QUOTE]
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