D&D 5E Why do you use Floating ASI's (other than power gaming)? [+]

[Oofta]

Oh I didn't say you had to run maxed scores.

I said that in 4e, if you didn't follow the threadmill, combats would get very grindy. The monsters wouldn't suddenly kill you. It would just take forever to finish an encounter with unoptimized PCs..

Something similar happens in 5e. The threadmill is just slower. The game assumes some sort of powergaming to prevent slog. If you may a 15 primary character and pickup flavor feats and boost tertiary scores, you are adding to the slog in combat. If many people in you party do this, your combats will be very long. Longer than the designers intended.

That's all fine if all you care about is combat. For some people, having a PC other than a rogue or bard that can contribute outside of combat also matters. A wilderness fighter who knows how to survive the wilds wants a decent [edit]charisma wisdom[/edit] and maybe the player wants a bit of trader/diplomat as well so they have a charisma over 10.

There is no one true way to play the game. There are all sorts of things to consider, especially if using point buy when building a PC other than DPR.

 

[clearstream]

That's all fine if all you care about is combat. For some people, having a PC other than a rogue or bard that can contribute outside of combat also matters. A wilderness fighter who knows how to survive the wilds wants a decent charisma, and maybe the player wants a bit of trader/diplomat as well so they have a charisma over 10.

The ranger who wants an 18 Wis so that they can hedge with some spells that they might not often use. Or the champion who wants 20 strength so they can shrug and with a quick run up clear 25'. Neither of those need be power gaming, they're just thinking about the character's expression in play. What they can say shall be true in the emergent narrative.

 

[jmartkdr2]

If we're defining getting a certain ability score to a certain number, than yes, floating ASIs is about powergaming, because setting ability scores is powergaming.

If we're defining powergaming as only building the character for power, than floating ASIs can definitely be used for other things, such as playing characters who don't follow standard tropes without being weakened for it.

 

[Vaalingrade]

That's all fine if all you care about is combat. For some people, having a PC other than a rogue or bard that can contribute outside of combat also matters.

Someone please tell the game that. It doesn't seem to think this is important or even a thing.

 

[Ixal]

Someone please tell the game that. It doesn't seem to think this is important or even a thing.

Thats a general failure of D&D. There was some hope in 3E that out of combat gameplay becomes more important with having a much better support for out of combat skills, but that hope got squashed by 4E and especially 5Es "back to the (wargame) roots" approach and removing most mechanics not directly related to combat.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's all fine if all you care about is combat. For some people, having a PC other than a rogue or bard that can contribute outside of combat also matters. A wilderness fighter who knows how to survive the wilds wants a decent charisma, and maybe the player wants a bit of trader/diplomat as well so they have a charisma over 10.

There is no one true way to play the game. There are all sorts of things to consider, especially if using point buy when building a PC other than DPR.

This is why Level Up is so great. An A5e character of any class doesnt need great scores to be good out of combat.

 

[aco175]

I never had a big problem with the ASIs. All the PC power can be changed by the DM on the other side. If my group chooses the big feats and has a hit of +10 at 5th level and can deal 50 points of damage, then there is less +weapons and armor. Maybe the monsters have max HP now to counter this. I'm sure some will think this makes me a poor DM, but the point of combat is not to always kill everything on the first round. When I get to play a PC, I like to be challenged as well and have some tension about the risk of dying.

I find having a 16/+3 starting out is about normal for my groups. A few players like to get to 18 and 20 by level 8, but some others are fine with something else. The fighter in the group started with a 14 strength and went to 15 at level 4 and now 16 at level 6. That player never takes feats. Some of this less than optimal is countered on the DM side with using flanking and giving out +weapons rather early on. Some like the coolness of a new magic item over the coolness of a feat or even a basic ASI.

 

[Minigiant]

That's all fine if all you care about is combat. For some people, having a PC other than a rogue or bard that can contribute outside of combat also matters. A wilderness fighter who knows how to survive the wilds wants a decent charisma, and maybe the player wants a bit of trader/diplomat as well so they have a charisma over 10.

There is no one true way to play the game. There are all sorts of things to consider, especially if using point buy when building a PC other than DPR.

A ranger that can afford positive Charisma and not take a hit in traditional ranger aspects?

What is this: 0e?

 

[Scribe]

I've come into this at risk of not having sufficient background, but I have recently read this kind of framing from various posters and it conveys to me something like this -



That can feel very undermining, because I am being told that something I believe to be true is not true, and by the way I also don't possess a virtue (creativity) that I hoped to possess (in at least some measure.) In part, I think this position is provoked by a claim to subjective experience. If you don't share that experience, it might feel unfair that someone in a thread can simply claim to have it with no burden for evidence.

One line of argument I've recently been entertaining is leveraging the idea of possible worlds and pragmatism. It's easy to agree that there is a possible world in which it is true that you are being creative in the way you claim you are. What are the consequences? Do we find those consequences beneficial? What about the other possible world? Are the consequences in that world beneficial?

I don't follow.

If one believes floating ASI allows them more creativity, great.

I don't know what bizarre purity test I need to pass here to get everyone feeling all warm and fuzzy over their character stats...

 

[Oofta]

Someone please tell the game that. It doesn't seem to think this is important or even a thing.

That varies significantly from table to table. If all you do is dungeon crawls, it may not. In the games I run and play, it does.