D&D 5E Race Class Combos, Design, Roleplaying and the fear of the new

[TwoSix]

Although...that makes me think, stat minimums might be interesting. E.g., "Wookies cannot have below Str 12; if your Str is less than 12 replace it with a 12." Think about how this would effect race choice: if you were going to prioritize optimization over roleplaying you'd pick a class that doesn't need Str, in order to get the bump. So there would be an incentive (admittedly slight) to create Wookie wizards and rogues.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Seriously, though, that's kind of brilliant. I'd probably even go as high as 14. Getting a free 12 is nice, but wouldn't drive my selection as much. With a 14, I'd seriously start to think about starting with a slight penalty (a 14 instead of a 16 in my primary attack stat) just to get free points in a bunch of other stats.

 

[Celebrim]

I am fortunate that this has never been a problem with my gaming group. We have had half-orc wizards, dwarf bards, high elf melee combatants, and yes, even a gnome paladin.

If who your character is, is to you at least as important as what your character can do, then the issue raised by the OP doesn't really happen. Often, you create characters deliberately to play against type - a dwarf wizard for example. This is ultimately about the players particular aesthetic preferences of play - exactly what are you exploring as you play the game. Some players are utterly uninterested in exploring a characters internal space or a character's relational space. Those players play a race for the mechanical bonus alone, because for example they are interested primarily in challenge or affirmation or whatever. In either case, I don't see this as a problem to solve.

Gygax's plan to make a human centric-world backfired, in my opinion, leading to all thieves being halflings...Mechanical bonuses make sense but we are free now to mix things up.

In my experience, all Halflings were thieves, but not all thieves were Halflings. The racial bonuses for dwarves and elves pursuing a career in thievery were really good as well, multi-classing with thief was almost a requirement if you wanted to progress a demihuman into the end game, and dual-classing thief as a human was a very attractive proposition. And of course, the entire interest in the class thief was almost entirely about who you were not what you could do, as the class was underpowered and of little interest to a power gamer except for various narrow dips. What was true was that the racial level caps meant that you had no choice really but to play a thief if you were going to play a Halfling, and little choice as a dwarf (fighter/thief) or elf (M-U/thief) especially before the UA came out.

 

[steeldragons]

The ring is closed.

There are no new ideas.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gnome Paladin Katanas are the greatest race/class and only viable character there has ever been.

 

[Celebrim]

Although...that makes me think, stat minimums might be interesting.

Throw in maximums and you'll be really old school.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Sacrosanct]

I am fortunate that this has never been a problem with my gaming group. We have had half-orc wizards, dwarf bards, high elf melee combatants, and yes, even a gnome paladin. Sticking to mechanical factors is limiting. Gygax's plan to make a human centric-world backfired, in my opinion, leading to all thieves being halflings...Mechanical bonuses make sense but we are free now to mix things up. The advantages of "maximizing" racial/class blends are not enough to worry about.

Well yeah, it's not a huge problem at my table either, but that's because it's a very long term group and we all know each other's preferred style. However, I have seen the attitude often that non-optimized PCs hurt the party, and then you end up with the same class/race combo accounting for 95% of all PCs of that particular race.

 

[TwoSix]

I try not to view things as problems to be solved, so much as conversations to be had.

It's tough to find a middle ground between "I think race should be purely an aesthetic choice, and have next-to-no impact on class selection" and "I think certain race-class combinations are iconic, and the mechanics should strongly favor those combinations."

 

[TwoSix]

If you can conceive to start a character with a 14 in your main stat,
thus to support the burden of a minus 5% efficiency,
you can play any race-class.

I do a lot of crazy things, but start a character with less than a 16 in their primary attack stat ain't one of them.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

I try not to view things as problems to be solved, so much as conversations to be had.

Well, I could believe that if you didn't use phrases like "fear of the new", "the race/class de jure restrictions remained", "instead of moving away from the Gygaxian model of racial essentialism, we move back toward it", and so forth. All of that language suggests that there is a problem, and in particular a problem you have with what you perceive as the way D&D is "de facto" played.

The problem I have is that you assume a problem exists without well defining it or even questioning hard whether it is a problem, and more importantly, having assumed a problem you offer no practical solution.

I suppose you leave your thesis statement to the end, which is fine, but if it is your thesis statement, I'm not at all sure what it means:

"My only cautionary note is that it is easy to fall into the idea that lore and mechanics, when it comes to race/class combinations, becomes the exact type of racial essentialism that we should try to avoid."

I suspect you did not mean for this sentence to mean what it literally means and you need to rewrite it. Taken literally, this sentence cautions you from taking the stance that you took in the essay. That is to say the sentence literally says that we should not fall into the idea that lore and mechanics is a type of racial essentialism that we should try to avoid. I agree, but then that is at odds with your essay.

You have not demonstrated that what you call racial essentialism is bad, nor have you in any way shown that if it is bad, that it is de facto, or that if it is de facto that this is a result of the rules, or that if it is a result of the rules you haven't proposed any fix to that problem.

If you consider this a conversation, what do you want to talk about? Conversations are usually prompted by questions, and not thesis statements. I'm not seeing you asking a lot of questions.

Personally, I think Paladins add a lot to the game. I agree with you about Gnomes, but not with your solution. I don't find either of those 'problems' to have simple or easy to understand solutions.

The problem solver doesn't sell his solution to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his solution.

PS: I have no idea what that means either.