D&D 5E Racial Minimum Stats?

[Li Shenron]

I'm starting to think that all rules about racial abilities should be optional...

We have generous ability score generation methods by default since at least 3e.
We have ability score bonuses from classes, with some degree of freedom on what to choose.
We have ability score bonuses from level, often enough, and not one by 2 scores at once to promote some character variation.
We have caps at 20, meaning that at some point ALL wizards anyway will have Int 20, ALL rogues will have Str 20 and so on... you can bet on this.

In theory, ability scores modifiers and possibly min/max are very important stats to define a "race" in relation to its biology (of course a race is ALSO a culture).

But the truth is that racial ability scores are currently the least interesting part of a race. Pretty much everything else that appears on a race write-up is more interesting either tactically or for roleplay.

And we have thrown away already the biological explanation/justification when they had to explain why humans now get so many bonuses to all scores, and went with the statistical explanation i.e. "because these apply only to human adventurers" which apparently must be a smaller percentage of the whole human race compared to dwarves, elves etc. We bought that explanation, we're stuck with having a net +8 to human stats.

Because of all these I'm afraid that racial minimums are going to have little to no effect to the game, unless the gaming group makes other changes to this ability bonus bloat.

I would actually be in favor of this, but since too many gamers will just complain that now their PC's will be "unplayable", it's not going to happen openly even as a variant.

In our own gaming groups, everything is possible... We played the current playtest package without using races at all, and it worked totally fine.

 

[malcolm_n]

I believe there may be some overthinking going on here. What if the absolute minimum allowed for a PC stat in DDN is 8? Dwarves get a +1 by default, therefore their minimum is a 9. Makes sense to me. So humans, by default, would have a bare minimum in every stat of 9. Long story short, I don't think it's an actual requirement so much as a head's up.

 

[Kobold Stew]

A good system really shouldn't need that sort of stretching to make it work.

I'm not sure what stretching you mean. I'd say a good system really shouldn't be catering to ridiculous edge cases to make it work.

I'm against this. It's adds a layer of complexity for basically no reason.

This is a better argument, but is it really more complex than (in one case) adding one to every ability roll and then another one to one of the ability rolls? Or picking a race and then a subrace and then adding one to the stat indicated?

Min/max isn't what I'd necessarily want to see, but I'm not sure it's a bad idea, and it makes a lot more sense than small-size characters with strength scores above 12 (admittedly, that's another issue!).

 

[dkyle]

My preferred approach to ability scores is that they be used only for skills and improvised actions that have no other rules (so no ability mods all over the place), and have moderate score minimums for races and classes to represents "Fighters are strong" and "Wizards are smart". But that those minimums should only be there for flavor, not game balance, and I'd want that clearly stated in the DMG, so that DMs can feel free to OK exceptions if the players want them and can develop a reasonable justification.

For example, a 4 INT Wizard might sound absurd at first blush, but I think could be justified by a player as the character being an idiot savant who's gifted with spells, but has little intellectual capacity otherwise.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I think the wizard is a good test case to think with, and it sounds to me like special pleading. I'm fine for the game to allow for the idiot-savant who's gifted with spells, but (a) they're necessarily going to be bad spells (with low DCs -- no getting around that), (b) the game shouldn't need to accommodate silly edge cases [though of course they will emerge whatever the rules permit], and (c) the idea maps naturally onto a sorcerer (or charisma-based spellcater) anyways.

Again, this seems like special pleading.