D&D 5E The Fate of the Smol

[CreamCloud0]

If all races were designed with both options for fixed ASI with negatives but higher positives(say +3, +2, -2) against all positives but lesser floating ASI(+2,+1) i wonder which would get more play?

I don’t mind floating ASI but my preference is fixed due to what they were designed to represent, or at least a note of which ASI bonuses would be ‘default’ for a race

 

[Willie the Duck]

I fully get the desire to be able to effectively play any species as any class, I just feel the species should still play differently. And yeas, some sort of flaw and benefit for the size would be ideal. Three feet and eight feet tall people playing exactly the same just seems like a total failure of the rules system though.

Oh, sure, but how I think is the main question. I definitely think that, in play, the 3' tall character should have to jump of find a step stool to reach the high shelves. Other than that, I'm really not sure. I definitely like getting rid of the inherent Str-penalties (if you want a halfling with a lower strength than a half-orc, you build/assign rolls for a halfling with a lower strength than a half-orc), and I think that might carry through to lifting and carrying*. Long weapons, well, as several of the 'online Youtube weapons 'experts*'' have made episodes about, spears and polearms are honestly some of the better weapons for shorter combatants**. Speed is an obvious choice (although, again, if speed were an attribute you assigned build points to, I'd prefer it be a 'if you want your shorter character to cover less ground, you assign them a lower stat, not make it inherent to the race' situation). That one, however, at least historically, has always been a penalty for the party more than anything else. As in, 'sorry guys, you only cover half as much ground today, as you have no horses and one of you chose a dwarf/gnome/halfling.' Thus I can really see why they are getting rid of it. This kinda leaves me grasping at straws for exactly what the right benefits/penalties ought to be. It really might be best if it is super-situational on both sides (ex. penalty reaching high shelves/ladder rungs too far apart offset by being able to crawl into narrower confines and hide in/behind smaller things.
*although I rather did like 3e's 'your armor and rations weigh less, but you carry less' quirk, even if it ended up being mostly extra fiddliness.
**some more qualified than others
***they were talking about shorter men and women, but I think it applies here even more so.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Oh, sure, but how I think is the main question. I definitely think that, in play, the 3' tall character should have to jump of find a step stool to reach the high shelves. Other than that, I'm really not sure. I definitely like getting rid of the inherent Str-penalties (if you want a halfling with a lower strength than a half-orc, you build/assign rolls for a halfling with a lower strength than a half-orc), and I think that might carry through to lifting and carrying*. Long weapons, well, as several of the 'online Youtube weapons 'experts*'' have made episodes about, spears and polearms are honestly some of the better weapons for shorter combatants**. Speed is an obvious choice (although, again, if speed were an attribute you assigned build points to, I'd prefer it be a 'if you want your shorter character to cover less ground, you assign them a lower stat, not make it inherent to the race' situation). That one, however, at least historically, has always been a penalty for the party more than anything else. As in, 'sorry guys, you only cover half as much ground today, as you have no horses and one of you chose a dwarf/gnome/halfling.' Thus I can really see why they are getting rid of it. This kinda leaves me grasping at straws for exactly what the right benefits/penalties ought to be. It really might be best if it is super-situational on both sides (ex. penalty reaching high shelves/ladder rungs too far apart offset by being able to crawl into narrower confines and hide in/behind smaller things.
*although I rather did like 3e's 'your armor and rations weigh less, but you carry less' quirk, even if it ended up being mostly extra fiddliness.
**some more qualified than others
***they were talking about shorter men and women, but I think it applies here even more so.

I simply don't agree with "if you feel species X should be better/worse at a thing, just assign the individual character a better/worse number at the thing." Again, splats need to mechanically define things or they have no reason to exist. The game don't just say "Any class can take any spell, if you don't want wizard to be able to cast healing magic, just don't take healing spells for your wizard."

But I agree that representing these things well is hard, especially if you want to keep all species equally viable for all classes. I feel there is a fundamental design flaw with ability scores and how they're tied to classes. Granted, the strength is least of the issue, as you can actually function well without it, even as a melee combatant, except as a barbarian.

As for long weapons being good for short combatants, it is true that to certain degree it is good to compensate the reach. But it simply seems absurd that a halfling would be physically able to wield a great sword twice their size.

 

[Vaalingrade]

If all races were designed with both options for fixed ASI with negatives but higher positives(say +3, +2, -2) against all positives but lesser floating ASI(+2,+1) i wonder which would get more play?

That really depends on how many DMs wake up and choose violence in terms of whether their players' fun is less important than ~their verisimilitude~.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I simply don't agree with "if you feel species X should be better/worse at a thing, just assign the individual character a better/worse number at the thing." Again, splats need to mechanically define things or they have no reason to exist. The game don't just say "Any class can take any spell, if you don't want wizard to be able to cast healing magic, just don't take healing spells for your wizard."

It could be a personal background issue. I started with BX/BECMI where races didn't have stat bonuses or penalties (although they did have speed and polearm issues), and later went to the AD&Ds where halflings pretty much had to find gauntlets of ogre power before they could credibly play fighters. Also had a female gamer that wanted to play a Red Sonja/Wonder Woman type character and ran into the AD&D Str rules and the boys going 'it's just realistic that you can't play a good woman fighter, why don't you play a cleric?' So I'm relatively suspicious of 'it just makes sense' stuff. Regardless, I think that a Strength 20 represents being able to do certain things. If you don't think a halfling should be able to do those things, I think the reasonable solution is to not play a 20 strength halfling, and worldbuilding-wise not have a lot of 20 strength halflings wandering around (but the player who wants to play a 20 strength halfling, and has fullfilled whatever game-price-paid necessary to get it, that's the super-outlier halfling, and I'm not sure they need any special side-penalty for wanting to do so.

As to splats needing to mechanically define things and wizards not casting healing spells, I don't see how they are relevant. Things are allowed to have boundaries. I'm saying I do not see a strength limit (or penalty at character creation) is a boundary that adds to the game. At least not in the new paradigm where most gamers don't want to restrict certain races to certain subsets of playable roles. Class role boundaries are a separate category of boundaries and, for the most part (healing magic in particular seems to be spreading out like spilled oil), is still being considered a primary set of limitations within which an individual character can work (barbarians limited to str-weapons and rogues to dex-ones being good examples).

But I agree that representing these things well is hard, especially if you want to keep all species equally viable for all classes. I feel there is a fundamental design flaw with ability scores and how they're tied to classes. Granted, the strength is least of the issue, as you can actually function well without it, even as a melee combatant, except as a barbarian.

I'm rather vocal about thinking that the game would work better if attributes were mostly separated from primary-class-function and mostly cover things like skills, maybe saves, carrying capacity, extra languages, henchmen rules, etc. The move to 'you really want an 18-20 in your classes' main stat as soon as possible' seems to homogenize characters more than size benefit/penalties ever could.

As for long weapons being good for short combatants, it is true that to certain degree it is good to compensate the reach. But it simply seems absurd that a halfling would be physically able to wield a great sword twice their size.

I agree. It seems absurd to me as well* . But... (I like that word, don't I?) I dipped out of video games around when they made a second nintendo system. However my understanding is that in one of the late-90s Final Fantasy games, there was a protagonist who walked around with an absolutely bonkers!-sized greatsword. He was human, and it was like 12' long. That's about what a halfling with a human greatsword would be like. It's not my fantasy, but I can see the merit to it for someone who grew up with that media (and it certainly seems less absurd to me than 3.5's spiked chain or 5e's one-handed-quarterstaff-and-shield-and-doing-back-end-attacks-with-the-polearm-master-feat).
*personally I miss 3.0's specially-sized weapons for smaller races, but I understand that also was a 'unnecessary fiddly bit' scenario

So again, I do not disagree that small size should have some benefits and penalties, but other than trivial things, everything I come up with seems like grand fiddliness, a penalty for the party over penalty for the player, restricting of race-class combos (which I do think is a reasonable goal, considering the modern games' audience), or the like.

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah it's hard to think of something that won't cause problems. Because some classes don't care what size you are. Being a Halfling -might- be a detriment to certain builds of Fighter, or to Barbarians, but you can also build Fighters who don't care much. And a Wizard has no real reason to care about size.

So you have to balance out benefits with the fact that what you give up for being Small, the ability to easily use Heavy weapons, is only a hindrance for some classes, and not others.

Like in 3e, why wouldn't you want to be small as a Wizard? More AC, better ability to Hide, sign me up! Hell, they even got a better attack bonus for their ray spells!

So yeah, I definitely don't want to go back to that kind of paradigm.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Yeah it's hard to think of something that won't cause problems. Because some classes don't care what size you are. Being a Halfling -might- be a detriment to certain builds of Fighter, or to Barbarians, but you can also build Fighters who don't care much. And a Wizard has no real reason to care about size.

So you have to balance out benefits with the fact that what you give up for being Small, the ability to easily use Heavy weapons, is only a hindrance for some classes, and not others.

Like in 3e, why wouldn't you want to be small as a Wizard? More AC, better ability to Hide, sign me up! Hell, they even got a better attack bonus for their ray spells!

So yeah, I definitely don't want to go back to that kind of paradigm.

Do you think instead of a spell focus if magic users had to use some sort of spellcasting ‘weapon’ that had different attribute specialties, and could come in different sizes like regular weapons it would help? It would probably be way too big of a mechanic addition just to solve the matter of small races imbalance being martial or caster

 

[James Gasik]

Well one of the things I like about 5e is that nothing stops a Wizard from picking up a weapon and using it with skill (other than proficiency). Sadly, they usually have much better things to do with their time.

But yes, going back to the 4e Implement rules would be fun, and when I first read about Arcane Focuses, I thought that's what WotC was going for- then I realized no, other than a few rare magic items, it's just to take up a free hand (or both hands) when casters cast.

Which honestly I think is mostly ignored, at least at tables I've played at. Nobody really talks about their focuses, and I remember the rules for holy symbol implements, while it seems they were intended to be less finicky, still presented problems for Clerics who wanted to wield a one-handed weapon and a shield; a problem I never saw any DM enforce when I played (so I didn't really bother to when I ran 5e, since it really felt the juice wasn't worth the squeeze to do so).

 

[Charlaquin]

include carry capacity reduction to 10lb per STR point for small characters.

Now for advantages: armor is half the weight as is most size appropriate gear,

Seems like extra math for the sake of extra math to me. In theory this benefit and this drawback should more or less cancel each other out, so why bother?

 

[Lord Shark]

Who says a halfling can't be modeled more on Bullroarer Took than the stereotypical burglar?