Level Up (A5E) Racial Ability Score Improvements: you can now officially put them anywhere

[Haldrik]

The recent Adventurers League Players Guide has already adopted the official ruling that will appear in the upcoming Tashas Cauldron of Everything.

Essentially, when your race (heritage) or subrace (culture) gains an ability score improvement, you can instead put it on any ability you want. So if your high elf is Dexterity +2 and Intelligence +1, you can instead make it Charisma +2 and Intelligence +1. Or Strength +2 and Constitution +1. Any ability you want, depending on your character concept.

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If you’d like your character to follow their own path, you may ignore your Ability Score Increase trait and assign ability score increases tailored to your character. Here’s how to do it: take any ability score increase you gain in your race or subrace and apply it to an ability score of your choice. If you gain more than one increase, you can’t apply those increases to the same ability score, and you can’t increase a score above 20.

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With this official rule now the reality, Level Up might as well decouple the ability improvements from Background. Or rather, allow the Backgrounds to "recommend" a certain ability, but let the player put the ability improvement wherever one wants.

 

[CapnZapp]

Or, it could keep them, and just say "if you want to use the optional rule in Tasha, you can do that."

There's a difference between providing race/ancestry information (which some gamers can then ignore) and not providing it at all.

In the first case everybody can use the product. In the second, gamers who do like racial ASIs are left in the dark as how to implement them in LU.

 

[Haldrik]

In the second, gamers who do like racial ASIs are left in the dark as how to implement them in LU.

In Level Up, if a player wants their dwarf to have high Constitution, they would pick a Background that grants a Constitution improvement.

Perhaps, there are Backgrounds that are specific to dwarven cultures. "Dwarven Miner" could be a background that makes sense to improve Consitution, picking at rocks all day long is endurance training. In addition, the Background would give pertinent proficiencies, and special assets, perhaps to mine magically in some way.

But ultimately, the player can choose which ability to improve, even when taking the Dwarven Miner background.