Level Up (A5E) Point Buy Races?

[LuisCarlos17f]

Pathfinder uses points if you want to create your own race, in the advanced race guide.

5th Ed has got racial feats, at least in Xanathar Guide.

Ancestry and society feats are right, but we should take care about abuse by munchkins.

* What about echolocalitation as racial trait? In the real life some blind people can be trained to learn it, and I mean ordinary humans.

 

[R_J_K75]

I'm honestly not sure how you change those particular flaws.

Never gonna please everyone, but if they look at what was done before and try to design a system avoiding the "mistakes" that were made, perhaps they can find a better system.

 

[TheSword]

PF1 Advanced Race Guide had rules for building your own race with points...

... it was a car crash of rules.

The rest of the book was awesome just not that bit.

 

[Haldrik]

I would rather pick from about 4 arrays.

Something like

• 18, 14, 10, 10, 10, 10
• 16, 16, 12, 12, 10, 10
• 16, 14, 14, 14, 10, 10
• 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14

 

[Xeviat]

I don't like how flat the races feel in Pathfinder 2 at level one. I like my character having little abilities from my face (like stonecunning) that I didn't choose the race for but may still prove useful later.

But it is frustrating to, say, get weapon proficiencies from a race and have those do nothing because my class gave me the same thing. So an amount of choosing how your racial abilities grow would be cool, but I wouldn't want it to restrict what they start with at level one.

Aside from ability scores. I'm totally down to debate moving ability score bonuses to class and background.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Point buy for races is pretty much inevitably dreadful, looking at the many games which have attempted it. Skills and Powers certainly had a pretty lame implentation.

It's fiddly, unsatisfying, and potentially strongly encourages the worst, least-interesting kinds of min-maxing. On top of that, it's extremely vulnerable to bad "pricing" decisions from the designers. I mean, that already happens a bit - for example low natural ACs and weak natural weapons, together with largely-pointless combat abilities (due to the action economy causing huge opportunity costs) are wildly overvalued by WotC, balance-wise, but it's not formal. Once you formalize it, it becomes even worse, as races can quickly become drastically over/under-valued.

Fiddly and unsatisfying is exactly how I'd describe it. It takes a lot of time to do and it doesn't accomplish much because racial abilities are often small potatoes.

In my experience these kind of point buy systems become about optimizing the features that work best for one class and then just hitting repeat over and over. People "give up" Elven sleep immunity for something like treating longswords as finesse weapons because how often does sleep immunity come up?

Flat values are bad too, because a lot of racial abilities are amazing for a certain class or subclass, but totally worthless for another. Weapon proficiencies, for example. Even things like Darkvision are pointless if your subclass grants the same or better (as a number of subclasses do). Whereas other ones can be amazing but only for certain classes - the Wood Elf hide-in-plain-sight thing is amazing for a Rogue due to the action economy and the Rogue bonus action feature (I forget the name), but it's going to be nearly completely useless to a lot of classes.

Along that same line, i'm certain that Mearls or Crawford gave an interview or an answer early on. The balance weight given to Darkvision was 0. It was assigned entirely based on what flavor made sense for the race, because in reality it's not difficult to just have a light source (i.e., it's a very overvalued ability) and Darkvision's penalty to Perception and lack of color is actually pretty debilitating if your DM is playing it right.

Ancestry is important, but I don't really want it to be a huge driver to the game or a major component of character development or progression.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Fiddly and unsatisfying is exactly how I'd describe it. It takes a lot of time to do and it doesn't accomplish much because racial abilities are often small potatoes.

In my experience these kind of point buy systems become about optimizing the features that work best for one class and then just hitting repeat over and over. People "give up" Elven sleep immunity for something like treating longswords as finesse weapons because how often does sleep immunity come up?



Along that same line, i'm certain that Mearls or Crawford gave an interview or an answer early on. The balance weight given to Darkvision was 0. It was assigned entirely based on what flavor made sense for the race, because in reality it's not difficult to just have a light source (i.e., it's a very overvalued ability) and Darkvision's penalty to Perception and lack of color is actually pretty debilitating if your DM is playing it right.

Ancestry is important, but I don't really want it to be a huge driver to the game or a major component of character development or progression.

Interesting. Did they say anything about natural armor and natural weapons? Because the usefulness of those features is very dependent on available gear and class proficiencies.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Along that same line, i'm certain that Mearls or Crawford gave an interview or an answer early on. The balance weight given to Darkvision was 0. It was assigned entirely based on what flavor made sense for the race, because in reality it's not difficult to just have a light source (i.e., it's a very overvalued ability) and Darkvision's penalty to Perception and lack of color is actually pretty debilitating if your DM is playing it right.

That's very interesting.

I wish they'd given zero balance weight to a lot of other features - I know I bring this up over and over, but natural weapons/low natural AC seem like the perfect thing to assign zero weight to. They're objectively worse than even stuff like shortswords in virtually all cases (shortswords can at least be used as finesse weapons). Yet if you look at the races which have them, and they're clearly treated as serious balancing points.

I think the general idea that it's okay to give a race an ability just for flavour is a good one though.

EDIT - lol I see Micah said the same thing!

 

[Bacon Bits]

Interesting. Did they say anything about natural armor and natural weapons? Because the usefulness of those features is very dependent on available gear and class proficiencies.

That's very interesting.

I wish they'd given zero balance weight to a lot of other features - I know I bring this up over and over, but natural weapons/low natural AC seem like the perfect thing to assign zero weight to. They're objectively worse than even stuff like shortswords in virtually all cases (shortswords can at least be used as finesse weapons). Yet if you look at the races which have them, and they're clearly treated as serious balancing points.

I think the general idea that it's okay to give a race an ability just for flavour is a good one though.

EDIT - lol I see Micah said the same thing!

I don't remember any follow-up being asked at all. It was either an early interview, a Twitter conversation, one of Mearls' Twitch streams, or an AMA on Reddit. It was just a one-off question that I can recall. I'm 100% certain that I saw it or read it, but I've done some searching and I've not been able to find it again. I remember it striking me as odd because I don't think any player I know would value darkvision at 0. It seemed like they were vastly underestimating a player's instincts to not rely on anything.

Heck, the reason I don't like to play Halfling rogues is because I hate scouting without darkvision.

It does maybe explain why Devil's Sight is so irritating.

 

[Haldrik]

@Bacon Bits

Darkvision ≈ cantrip ≈ skill proficiency