Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7799375" data-attributes="member: 7006">At that point, I'd question the need for stat bonuses at all.  If you're going with the idea that a particular person in a particular race is more geared to a charismatic diplomat or a physical specimen, then their actual stat array shows that off just fine.  The way you assign your stats shows us exactly what type of person they were-- no adding of bonuses is necessary.The whole point of racial bonuses was to differentiate races from humans.  If humans are the default race, then the entirety of elven culture will be more dexterous on average because they have the additional point in DEX bonus over humans.  Same way that dwarves as a race are one ability point more hearty than humans because of the extra bonus point in CON.The problem of course (and why I think racial bonuses have really become unnecessary) is that adventurers are not average.  And when you have a party of five adventurers at a table, there is absolutely no way to know or visualize the elf being slightly more dexterous than the human, or the dwarf slightly more hearty than the human because their actual ability scores show us what each of them are individually.  It doesn't matter in the slightest that an Elf Cleric with a 11 DEX (rolled a 9 and added +2) is part of a race that got that extra boost to go from a 10 to 11 when put up next to the Human Rogue with a 15 DEX (rolled a 14 +1).  Will anyone at the table ever care or be able to conceptualize that the Elf Cleric is slightly more dexterous than they otherwise might have been had they been Human?  No, of course not.  All the players at the table will know is that this particular Elf Cleric AIN'T AGILE and the Human is agile as all get out. So the elf bonus to DEX is completely masked and essentially non-existent.  So why bother giving them the bonus in the first place?The only time players can visualize a race being more than their human counterpart is when they get the additional +1 modifier bonus when they add their big bonus to the maxed-out ability score.  The Elf with a 16 (+3) DEX has an obvious difference in the party than the Human with the 15 (+2) DEX.  At that point, everybody can tell that the Elf's racial bonus has been an actual bonus because they got something the default humans couldn't get.  The demihumans could get a +3 bonus while the best the humans could get was a +2 in their primary racial score.So at the end of the day if you are going to just let people gain an extra +2 and a +1 to ANY two ability scores regardless of their race... then sure, you can do that I guess.  Or you can just give people more points in Point Buy to get to those same numbers, or give them more dice to roll if you are rolling for scores or whatever.  The bonuses themselves are meaningless... only the final score matters-- however they reached that final score.</blockquote>

Verification