D&D General What are humans?

[James Gasik]

Thing is the argument here was that orcs were innately stronger than humans.

An orc who studied books all day and never worked out would still be stronger than a human who also read books all day.

The problem was that the starting scores required to have fun were so inflated that it basically meant no orc wizards allowed.

Sure for example, many years ago, I was making custom lineages for a Pathfinder 1e game. I quickly ran into the problem that a race with advantages in combat wouldn't be taken by someone who wants to play a spellcaster, and vice versa. If you have a strength bonus or the ability to wield oversized weapons, that's not useful for a Wizard. And if you have a penalty to Intelligence, that's even worse!

Like take 3.Xe Orcs, who have +4 Strength, but -2 to Intelligence and Charisma. We're told that Orcs have shamans, witch doctors, and the like, but no PC is going to play one, and by the rules, every Orc is bad at these things (they might be ok as Clerics if they don't have uses for Turn attempts, but oh wait, it turned out that Turn Attempts were worth their weight in gold in 3.5!).

And some orcs should be good casters or rogues or farmers or whatnot. I ended up taking the 4e approach and having flexible stat arrays (like in 4e, all Halflings have +2 Dex, but you can have either +2 Con or +2 Charisma), but in the end it didn't really matter- as usual, the players just zeroed in on that cross-section of "cool ability" and "best stat bonus" streets, lol.

Which is pretty much what I expect to happen in a world of flexible ASI's. People are still most likely to play a race that supports what class they were going to play. The majority of Orcs probably won't be Wizards, even if you can have +2 Int. I mean, in Pathfinder 1e, Half-Orcs had a +2 in any stat they wanted, but I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few people who saw that and said "wow, I can be an Orc Sorcerer!", lol.

 

[GMMichael]

A human is a miserable pile of secrets!

Or a virus...

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Sure for example, many years ago, I was making custom lineages for a Pathfinder 1e game. I quickly ran into the problem that a race with advantages in combat wouldn't be taken by someone who wants to play a spellcaster, and vice versa. If you have a strength bonus or the ability to wield oversized weapons, that's not useful for a Wizard. And if you have a penalty to Intelligence, that's even worse!

Like take 3.Xe Orcs, who have +4 Strength, but -2 to Intelligence and Charisma. We're told that Orcs have shamans, witch doctors, and the like, but no PC is going to play one, and by the rules, every Orc is bad at these things (they might be ok as Clerics if they don't have uses for Turn attempts, but oh wait, it turned out that Turn Attempts were worth their weight in gold in 3.5!).

And some orcs should be good casters or rogues or farmers or whatnot. I ended up taking the 4e approach and having flexible stat arrays (like in 4e, all Halflings have +2 Dex, but you can have either +2 Con or +2 Charisma), but in the end it didn't really matter- as usual, the players just zeroed in on that cross-section of "cool ability" and "best stat bonus" streets, lol.

Which is pretty much what I expect to happen in a world of flexible ASI's. People are still most likely to play a race that supports what class they were going to play. The majority of Orcs probably won't be Wizards, even if you can have +2 Int. I mean, in Pathfinder 1e, Half-Orcs had a +2 in any stat they wanted, but I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few people who saw that and said "wow, I can be an Orc Sorcerer!", lol.

Ultimately there is nothing you can do about that beyond removing species as a mechanic completely. Certain people will always latch onto literally anything for optimisation and never play anything else. They're in DnD to 'win'.

Though 5e itself is especially harsh when it comes to this. If you pick a species without a bonus in your classes main stat, and then jump into lost mines, you're going to be spending over half your turns missing. It gets even worse if you play a drow strength fighter. Pretty much every outdoor scenario is going to result in 'attack, miss, go back to looking at your phone'.

I feel that at level 1, you should be hitting ~60%-70% of the time on the average enemy if you have a 14 or 15 in your primary stat.

 

[James Gasik]

Ultimately there is nothing you can do about that beyond removing species as a mechanic completely. Certain people will always latch onto literally anything for optimisation and never play anything else. They're in DnD to 'win'.

Though 5e itself is especially harsh when it comes to this. If you pick a species without a bonus in your classes main stat, and then jump into lost mines, you're going to be spending over half your turns missing. It gets even worse if you play a drow strength fighter. Pretty much every outdoor scenario is going to result in 'attack, miss, go back to looking at your phone'.

I feel that at level 1, you should be hitting ~60%-70% of the time on the average enemy if you have a 14 or 15 in your primary stat.

I would have preferred proficiency bonuses be more important at low levels than ability scores, where now, they become more important only at the very highest levels of play. If the level 1 proficiency bonus was say, +3, and the game was stricter about starting ability scores, I think that would make things a bit smoother. But WotC knew very well that a some of the gamers they wanted back for 5e were the ones who rejected stat arrays and point buy and wanted the "lottery" aspect of rolling stats to be normalized, as it was in the TSR days. So it was put front and center, and the proficiency bonus is less important than having high stats- at least until everyone has 20's.

 

[Professor Murder]

Typically, human's are the baseline from which other PC/NPC species are meant to contrast. A nice change of pace when worldbuilding is to try and shift that narrative. I ran a campaign some years ago where humans were absent from the continent where the game was set until "recently". They came from lands "across the sea" where they had been unified by Fiends and their Tiefling intermediaries into a singular, conquering nation. Their invasion ended up failing but did destabilize the dominant Dragon empire, and the campaign was a century or so later.

 

[TwoSix]

A human is a miserable pile of secrets!

 

[Clint_L]

And some orcs should be good casters or rogues or farmers or whatnot. I ended up taking the 4e approach and having flexible stat arrays (like in 4e, all Halflings have +2 Dex, but you can have either +2 Con or +2 Charisma), but in the end it didn't really matter- as usual, the players just zeroed in on that cross-section of "cool ability" and "best stat bonus" streets, lol.

Which is pretty much what I expect to happen in a world of flexible ASI's. People are still most likely to play a race that supports what class they were going to play. The majority of Orcs probably won't be Wizards, even if you can have +2 Int. I mean, in Pathfinder 1e, Half-Orcs had a +2 in any stat they wanted, but I'm pretty sure I'm one of the few people who saw that and said "wow, I can be an Orc Sorcerer!", lol.

I don't follow your conclusion, nor does it track my experience. My games already allow the players to assigns their ASIs, and players are MUCH more likely to just pick whatever species suits them for conceptual reasons. My most recent school campaign currently includes a human paladin, goliath fighter, shifter barbarian, gnome rogue, dragonborn cleric, and kenku artificer, and inactive characters (so players who tried the game for a few sessions) are a harengon druid, deep gnome cleric, tabaxi bard, and half-elf ranger.

When I look at my older campaigns, without the floating ASIs, there were a lot more of the "traditional" choices. Humans were overrepresented.

This is way too small a sample to prove anything, but to me it suggests that disconnecting ASIs from character creation may lead to players feeling more free to pick the species that they "feel."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Simply put, as a DM, you have to make the setting reflect that, and let the PC's do what PC's do. If they really want to be a smart Orc Wizard, fantastic. Orcs need Wizards the same way Klingons need scientists- but make sure they realize that they'll get the same amount of respect as a Klingon scientist.

Adventurers are typically your oddballs, misfits, idealist, free thinkers, and renegades. That the rules allow you to actually be these things is a benefit, I feel.

Don't get me wrong, I have very mixed feelings about getting rid of racial ASI's- I want to support creativity, and I've always hated entire species being pigeonholed into a particular role, but at the same time, it is weird to have Goliaths who aren't stronger than other races on average.

In my current game, I told the players that we'll be using the racial ASI's, but if you really want to vary them, I can give you +1 to three ability scores instead. No one took me up on that, sadly, because, as usual, their lineage choices sat at the intersection of "cool abilities" and "advantages that line up with my class". Le sigh.

My group is the opposite. None of them see any reason not to use the racial ASIs, which just make sense to us.

At least in my friends PH only 5e game that's what we do. Our other game is Level Up, and they attach ASI to background, so it's a moot point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I would have preferred proficiency bonuses be more important at low levels than ability scores, where now, they become more important only at the very highest levels of play. If the level 1 proficiency bonus was say, +3, and the game was stricter about starting ability scores, I think that would make things a bit smoother. But WotC knew very well that a some of the gamers they wanted back for 5e were the ones who rejected stat arrays and point buy and wanted the "lottery" aspect of rolling stats to be normalized, as it was in the TSR days. So it was put front and center, and the proficiency bonus is less important than having high stats- at least until everyone has 20's.

Ideally for me we wouldn't have ASIs at all, either in chargen or at level up. Don't see much good that comes from them, and feats are more fun. I'd rather go the TSR route for stats and bring back minimums for different heritages.

 

[James Gasik]

I don't follow your conclusion, nor does it track my experience. My games already allow the players to assigns their ASIs, and players are MUCH more likely to just pick whatever species suits them for conceptual reasons. My most recent school campaign currently includes a human paladin, goliath fighter, shifter barbarian, gnome rogue, dragonborn cleric, and kenku artificer, and inactive characters (so players who tried the game for a few sessions) are a harengon druid, deep gnome cleric, tabaxi bard, and half-elf ranger.

When I look at my older campaigns, without the floating ASIs, there were a lot more of the "traditional" choices. Humans were overrepresented.

This is way too small a sample to prove anything, but to me it suggests that disconnecting ASIs from character creation may lead to players feeling more free to pick the species that they "feel."

If that's what happens, I'd be happy with that. And you know, maybe we'll see more Tiefling and Gnome Barbarians and the like from here on out. I can only comment on what I've seen in actual games.

On the other hand, I know some races are played more for reasons that have nothing to do with their stat lines (though people do still tend to play the classes those races are good at), like say Elves.

But on the gripping hand, historically, Elves have had a subrace for anything you'd want to play, so maybe that's a bad example. Who remembers 2e Sylvan Elves running around with 19 Strength?