D&D 5E The Fate of the Smol

[Baron Opal II]

That’s the problem though. You can absolutely have your weaker halflings. That’s 100% supported by the rules.

But I can’t have my strong halflings? Why not?

[Side Note - Define "Strong". As strong as a human, strong human (Bullroarer?), goliath, strong goliath? Any numerical value allowed by the rules regardless of how high?]

Because having Hervé Villechaize and Andre the Giant being able to dead lift the same amount without magic is jarring to the suspension of disbelief. Because having realism in the game means that you can apply your real-world experiences to the game world with reasonable extrapolations. Sure there is magic involved, but the baseline should have some reasonable extrapolations to our general experiences.

Now, I'm excluding a middle here. If you want to put a 15 in your halfling's strength go for it. But, the average goliath should be stronger than the average human which should be stronger than the average halfling. The strongest halfling should be weaker than the strongest goliath. Again, barring magic like a girdle of giant's strength.

The rules should encompass this, as well as having a sidebar to allow for generic, point based races where you can just play whatever you want without limitation.

 

[Charlaquin]

I genuinely think that a lot of people would be happier with this. There is incessant complaints about any restrictions or limitations, as well as desire for approximately seven thousand new classes so that every imaginable character concept can be realised in exact detail.

That's not what I want from D&D, but I feel that a lot of people don't actually like the implications of a splat based game, but fail to understand the root of their problems as they have no experience of games other than D&D and its derivates.

Well the thing is, point-based games get way more complicated very quickly. I loved World/Chronicles of Darkness on paper, but every time I tried to actually introduce people to the game, just building a character was a massive chore. They’d have all these dots to spend and all these individual abilities with different dot costs, often with prerequisites of certain numbers of dots in other things, and it was just like… “There’s just no way to be casually into this game, is there?” If you’re not deeply invested, you’re going to struggle to keep track of the simplest things.

With D&D, you can pick a race, class, background, maybe a subclass, and that’s basically it. There are recommended builds you can follow if you don’t know where to put your ability scores and proficiencies. Very low buy-in, which is great for people who don’t hyper-focus on games like I do. But, once people get familiar with it, the depth doesn’t scale well. You can pick a different subclass, or put proficiency in different skills, but for the most part if you’ve played one rogue (or whatever), you’ve played them all. Spell choices are one of the only avenues a player who wants to get into character customization really have for doing so.

I think there’s got to be a happy middle ground between those extremes. The ability to just pick a splat and go, and the option to tailor your character just the way you want. Maybe alternate class features are the way to go to achieve that? I don’t know.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I tried to pull together the differences between M and S races here. It does affect some builds significantly, but not most.

 

[Laurefindel]

I understand the desire to keep the gap between big(ger) and small(er) creatures as narrow as possible, but I'd prefer granting a small benefit (ha!) to small creatures rather than making medium and small a difference in aesthetics only. Some kind of situational defensive bonus could be appropriate I guess. My preference would have been to give small races one additional perk to offset the small-size "negative trait", but that goes out the window if a choice of size is offered.

[edit] or perhaps changing the grappling rules to include a minimal size (i.e.: The target of your grapple must be no more than one size larger or smaller than you and must be within your reach) would mean large creatures would suffer disadvantage on grapples against small creatures. It would also imply that huge and collossal creatures would also have disadvanatge on grapples against medium-sized creatures however.

 

[James Gasik]

So barring a few rare circumstances, we're left with "being small either doesn't matter" or "it's a trap!". It's not the worst thing in the world, I guess. Feels a bit lame, but given that the game is designed to avoid complexity (except when it doesn't, lol), that's just the way it is.

 

[Mythos Enthusiast]

The question is: To what degree does WoTC want to accept that biology/physicality effects what a person can or can't do? So far, they like most people I think, are hewing closer to hand waiving than important all the consiquences that such physically diverse races would bring.

 

[Kobold Stew]

So barring a few rare circumstances, we're left with "being small either doesn't matter" or "it's a trap!".

This is overstating it, I feel. the "few rare circumstances" include all rogues, some rangers, artificers, and mounted characters. It's only a "trap" for specific builds of great weapon fighters/paladins.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The question is: To what degree does WoTC want to accept that biology/physicality effects what a person can or can't do? So far, they like most people I think, are hewing closer to hand waiving than important all the consiquences that such physically diverse races would bring.

I think part of the problem is that they want to suggest biology can let you do additional things ‘more than the baseline’ but not suggest it can’t let you do other things, or at least puts you below the baseline

 

[DEFCON 1]

If it is pointless, why we have different bonuses for different characters and creatures at all? Why wizard has a higher int bonus than the barbarian, why giant has a higher strength bonus than an orc? If these differences in ability modifier are pointless and do not represent anything, why they exist? Get rid of them. You can replace them with proficiency bonus, if you don't want to completely redo the game maths and it would be close enough.

To me, we have them purely to make the board game rules hopefully interesting to play. That's it. That's all there is to it. If the rules of rolling dice and adding numbers could work out where we only have one ability modifier rather than six... and the game could still be fun to play... then that's completely fine. You could have all characters have NO ability scores whatsoever and the entire dice rolling game could be about something other than your character's physical and mental abilities, and if those dice rolls can keep your interest up, then go for it.

There's not a single number and roll of the dice in the entire game that could be an accurate representation of anything whatsoever as far as I'm concerned. So to single out certain numbers as "That doesn't reflect reality! No halfling could ever be that strong!" is to my mind being completely blind to all the other ridiculous numbers that are just as stupid. Be standing dead center in the middle of a fiery explosion a la a fireball spell and come away with "Eh... that's only worth 8d6 damage." People get so worked up about halfling strength but don't have any concern for being able to walk away from being immolated.

And I suspect the designers at WotC feel kind of the same way... which is why they'd rather let players do what they want, rather than force them into select pigeonholes in an attempt to maintain a sense of reality. Or that could just be a happy coincidence. Either way... it's NEVER been something I could ever get that worked up about. Yeah, I might jokingly bitch about how the mechanics of barkskin don't make any sense and it's the worst spell in the game from a mechanics/fluff perspective... but I don't actually care. Cause if it mattered, I'd just change it myself when necessary. I'm not going to demand WotC actually re-write it (although I certainly wouldn't be upset if they eventually did, LOL.)

 

[Crimson Longinus]

To me, we have them purely to make the board game rules hopefully interesting to play. That's it. That's all there is to it. If the rules of rolling dice and adding numbers could work out where we only have one ability modifier rather than six... and the game could still be fun to play... then that's completely fine. You could have all characters have NO ability scores whatsoever and the entire dice rolling game could be about something other than your character's physical and mental abilities, and if those dice rolls can keep your interest up, then go for it.

There's not a single number and roll of the dice in the entire game that could be an accurate representation of anything whatsoever as far as I'm concerned. So to single out certain numbers as "That doesn't reflect reality! No halfling could ever be that strong!" is to my mind being completely blind to all the other ridiculous numbers that are just as stupid. Be standing dead center in the middle of a fiery explosion a la a fireball spell and come away with "Eh... that's only worth 8d6 damage." People get so worked up about halfling strength but don't have any concern for being able to walk away from being immolated.

And I suspect the designers at WotC feel kind of the same way... which is why they'd rather let players do what they want, rather than force them into select pigeonholes in an attempt to maintain a sense of reality. Or that could just be a happy coincidence. Either way... it's NEVER been something I could ever get that worked up about. Yeah, I might jokingly bitch about how the mechanics of barkskin don't make any sense and it's the worst spell in the game from a mechanics/fluff perspective... but I don't actually care. Cause if it mattered, I'd just change it myself when necessary.

I don't need rules to be perfectly realistic, nor I would expect it from D&D. But I expect some base level of verisimilitude and representation. To me the purpose of the RPG rules is to represent the fictional reality and if they don't do that, I have no use for them.