D&D 5E Races with floating bonuses: Designing from scratch

[Dausuul]

(Please note: This thread is for discussing how one might design races around floating bonuses. If you don't think races should have floating bonuses at all, that's fine, but I'd respectfully ask you not to turn this thread into an argument about it. There are lots of other threads to have that argument in.)

Tasha's introduced the option to change the existing D&D races to have floating bonuses and allow proficiency swaps. Although I like the change overall--it opens up a lot of options in character creation--I have to admit the implementation is a bit of a hack. The races were not originally designed to have floating bonuses (<cough>mountain dwarf</cough>), and the proficiency swaps result in stuff like elf fighters having a boatload of random tool proficiencies because that's the only thing you can trade your redundant weapon proficiencies for.

So, if you were designing the races from scratch around floating bonuses and proficiencies, how would you go about it? Would you migrate racial proficiencies into backgrounds, classes, or feats? What traits would you keep fixed? How would you go about giving each race a distinct mechanical identity without locking it into a particular set of stats? Or do you think giving them distinct mechanical identities is even important, or desirable?

 

[commandercrud]

No bonuses but racial ranges. It's absurd that a halfling can be as strong as a goliath.

 

[DemoMonkey]

You could try giving everyone a single free feat at 1st level. Then package everything each race currently gets (even humans) into feats.

Then let the player pick the feat package they want, independent of actual character race. "DM: You want to play a Dwarf and take the Elf package? Go for it! But pitch it to me. Tell me your story."

Racial "identity" can be reinforced by all the NPCs in the world. The PCs are already freak outliers, or they wouldn't be adventurers in the first place.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Split all features into feat and half feat sized chunks. Then you get a set number of these (maybe three feats worth.) You can also take a +2 for a price of a feat and a +1 for a price of a half feat (no stacking.) You may designate some of these features (or even ability bonuses) to be only choosable by certain races or not, depending on how rigidly defined you want the races to be in your setting.

 

[commandercrud]

If you change the stat bonus from race to floating, it doesn't matter if you move them to class or feats or whatever, it's the same thing wherever it is. A stat bonus to anything you want. I'd have preferred the race maybe have a couple choices for that stat bump, but not just become a free for all +2 whatever you want.

 

[TwoSix]

Custom lineage only, then make some feats that bundle in some of the racial packages together. If you take one of those feats, or any race with a racial prerequisite, you count as a member of that race and can't take any other feats with a different racial prerequisite.

 

[Charlaquin]

Eliminate racial ASIs and increase point buy by 5 points. Standard array becomes 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, if you roll stats you roll 4d6 drop lowest 7 times and drop the lowest of those. Merge racial proficiencies into backgrounds. Races that still stand out as significantly more powerful than the baseline can have some of their features turned into Feats.

 

[Dausuul]

So it seems like the most common approach is "convert racial traits into feats." Presumably "origin feats" would be selectable only at 1st level or with DM dispensation, i.e., you can't just decide on level-up to become fire resistant or grow claws.

Or... maybe you can? There are subclasses that give you such abilities on level-up, and feats past 1st level are effectively class features. But that might be a bridge too far.

At this point, it seems like a PC race would consist of a recommended feat package and a bunch of descriptive text. I have to say, I really like that approach. It would make it so much easier for DMs to create their own races for homebrew worlds.

It does mean, however, that feats could no longer be optional; they would have to be baked into the core rules.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

4e-style encounter powers. Instead of floating bonuses, take some of the xanathar feats and make them mandatory, or allow to trade +2 to a stat dor one of those feats. Get rid of bonuses at all and make an honest point buy, where you get what you pay for. No taxes for certain races and so on.
Stat bonuses make only sense, if you roll for stats, because it shifts the average to that an adventurer from a certain folk. Here you could also just remove it and replace it with a more favourable method of rolling than 4d6 drop lowest. 6d4 drop lowest two comes to mind.

 

[Don Durito]

Is there any reason to use Floating Bonuses rather than to say, increase the point buy pool or standard array?

Or just make them class based?

In any case, there seems an easy mechanism for races(ancestries) make them feats. If one point of distinction for humans is that they get an extra feat at level 1- then just make all the other races into a feat package.

You could potentially have some extra feats you could take later if you really wanted to go all in on Dwarfiness.