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General Tabletop Discussion
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (A5E)
Point Buy Races?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8062996" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8062996, member: 18"] 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. 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. [/QUOTE]
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Point Buy Races?
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