Race Specialization is the crap

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Lago_AM3P
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Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Lago_AM3P »

I really can't think of any reason why a dwarven rogue should be leaps and bounds better than a half-elf rogue to the point where you will never see a half-elf rogue but smart powergamers are always dwarf rogues. Or why an elven wizard is the win but the half-orc wizard is the suck.

I really can't. Someone give me a good reason why race should be that important to the game that it will be a serious imposition to the game if you want something that's reasonable or justified by roleplay but not by the stats.

I know we can do this. Planetouched and genasi, even though they suck rocks, aren't that much better or worse at any role else when balanced among their own kind. And the roleplay difference between a child of the demons and a guy whose grandfather lived fire is frickin' huge.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Username17 »

I remain unconvinced that races should have stat modifiers.

Humanoid races should just have prefered stat arrays, and the basic person should be on a distribution. So Orcs, by default, have their highest stat in strength, halflings have their highest stat in dexterity, and Dwarves tend to have their best in Con. And then if you want to play an especially bright Orc you just choose to arrange your stats differently.

Boom. All the races have "flavor", and that flavor stops getting its cock into our game balance.

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by rapanui »

^
Excellent.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Absentminded_Wizard »

That is a good idea, at least for the standard races and the weaker humanoid monsters. Why should the flavor of the cultures at large be imposed on the iconoclastic adventurers of a typical PC party? The "flavor" of a race isn't created within the PC party; it's a product of the members of the race the PCs meet in the outside world.

That's the reason WotC's policy of inflating ECLs is stupid. The rarity of adventurers of a given exotic race is reflected by the fact that the PCs don't run into any of them, not by the fact that there aren't any in a given party. And if the DM wants to keep certain races out of the PC party for campaign-specific reasons, he's free to create campaign-specific restrictions.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by User3 »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1086159657[/unixtime]]I remain unconvinced that races should have stat modifiers.

Humanoid races should just have prefered stat arrays, and the basic person should be on a distribution. So Orcs, by default, have their highest stat in strength, halflings have their highest stat in dexterity, and Dwarves tend to have their best in Con. And then if you want to play an especially bright Orc you just choose to arrange your stats differently.

Boom. All the races have "flavor", and that flavor stops getting its cock into our game balance.

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That is a great idea :bow:

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by User3 »

Flavor has to be reflected in the rules and system.

I wouldn't mind if Regional feats became all the rage and people from different cultures were only different in that they had different lists of Regional feats and otherwise they were all the same, but people want long lived elves and Small sized halflings and they want that to be reflected in the rules.

Its like people moaning that they have to have a paladin class, even though a paladin is just a multiclassed cleric/ fighter. You can't tell them that a Cleric/fighter is a paladin because they'll say "but his BAB is too low, and he doesn't have unique powers, and the name on top of my sheet doesn't say "Paladin."

Different rules are more flavorful than blanket rules. This is why the Core DnD has 9 different casters all with unique spell lists and progressions and ways of spellcasting, and that's if you plopped the huge number of potential types of clerics into one class. Different rules feel different, moreso than just "and the flavor text says that they are different."

Feeling different is flavor.

Making all 1 HD humanoids into a single thing would be expedient, even logical, but ultimately unsatisfying. Magic logic(problem solving based on emotions) sometimes trumps real logic.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Absentminded_Wizard »

But if I'm reading Frank's idea right, all we're talking about is eliminating the ability score bonuses and penalties. Halflings would still be Small, elves would still live virtually forever, and all the standard non-human races would still have unique special abilities to give them "mechanical flavor."
Doom314's satirical 4e power wrote:Complete AnnihilationWar-metawarrior 1

An awesome bolt of multicolored light fires from your eyes and strikes your foe, disintegrating him into a fine dust in a nonmagical way.

At-will: Martial, Weapon
Standard Action Melee Weapon ("sword", range 10/20)
Target: One Creature
Attack: Con vs AC
Hit: [W] + Con, and the target is slowed.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Username17 »

Right. This is just for ability modifiers. Many, if not most racial abilities should be selectable off a list for anyone. Certainly, elves shouldn't have a monopoly on free longsword proficiency and dwarves shouldn't have a monopoly on Stonecunning - if as a human you want one of those particular abilities you should just have it. The unique racial abilities should just be the ones which make the race actually unique. Dwarves see in the dark and are slow and have good saves, elves live forever and don't need sleep, etc. You should just get some finite number of backstory abilities and just get to pick whichever ones you want.

To further the rant about abilty scores, however: I think that monsters should be on a projection as well, with their stat bonuses on top of that being the benefits of their class levels/hit dice.

I mean, a creature with a 28 strength makes for a vaguely average CR 7 sort of encounter, and a character whose whole schtick is that they have a strength of 28 is actually not that impressive at 7th level. But if that 28 strength is supposed to be the equivalent of a 10, and thus the 7th level character version has a strength of 37 - that's fairly intense.

But if the monsters are on a projection just like the people, that 28 corresponds to the assignment of a 14 or 16 - so when the PC becomes one his strength isn't actually going to be stellarly titanic compared to the monstrous version.

The only reason that monsters are really unplayable right now is that monsters are given stat lines as if they were 10,10,10,11,11,11 - so any PC automatically takes a fully playable CR X prime requisite and adds 8 to it (plus levelling bonuses). It's ricockulous. If the monster stat lines corresponded to a default array or something, their prime requisite would only go up by like 3 when they were taken over as PCs. And that's like manageable for most creatures.

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by User3 »

Since the issue doesn't come up with demi-humans(since a "+1 mod,-1 mod" is virtually undetectable), and it is about monsters, what's the problem?

With the ECL system, the cost you pay of a lower HD, lower max skill ranks, and fewer skill points kicks you so hard in the nuts that having one unbalanced stat is not unbalanced at all. Its barely a token nod to making a playable character. Since monsters are innately glass-jawed while being specialized to an insane degree, having your good stat added to a big monster stat mod is not unreasonable.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Username17 »

With the ECL system, the cost you pay of a lower HD, lower max skill ranks, and fewer skill points kicks you so hard in the nuts that having one unbalanced stat is not unbalanced at all.


Yes it is. You can do one thing better than anyone else could ever dream of, and have lower minimums than anyone else can have.

In short, you are breaking the level system by your very existence. That's bullshit. So either you figure out some way to pay things that you shouldn't be able to pay for more stuff than you're supposed to get, or you figure out some way for someone to stick a corkscrew up your ass sideways - either way it's unbalanced.

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by User3 »

Not everyone min/maxes to such an insane degree that having lower minimums is an issue. Skills are mostly flavor text for most classes anyway.

Being better at one thing than anyone else is built into the game. Every class specializes in something, and foregoes something else. Mages are crappy tanks, tanks are crappy spellcasters, rogues are great sneakers, and most everyone else is crap at it.

Not everyone can be the druid who can fill any role as well as anyone else. Its not even fun to play a druid.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Maj »

Frank wrote: either way it's unbalanced.


Unless you make everything mechanically identical - all the races have the same stats, spells work like attacks... - and change the flavor text to provide some sort of reason why someone would want to do something, there will never be balance in this game. The minute you offer someone the chance to be different from someone else mechanically, you will have to deal with the fact that some players will min/max and some won't, and this inevitably leads to unbalance.

Sometimes, I totally admire your efforts to balance the game, but other times, it just seems so ridiculous when it's never going to happen given any remnant of the current system. You can't balance the races, the magic vs. skills, the leveling, the non-combat and combat abilities, or the ability scores within the current system of D&D. Scrap it and start from scratch so these remnants don't taint your desire for balance.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Username17 »

The minute you offer someone the chance to be different from someone else mechanically, you will have to deal with the fact that some players will min/max and some won't, and this inevitably leads to unbalance.


To one degree or another, sure.

But the class system does mean something. That something that it means is that you have minimums and maximums on everything you do. Wizards can't trade their BAB for more caster levels, Barbarians can't trade their saves for more Strength.

But if you try to balance racial bonuses with Level Allowance, you've just let people do that. Maybe it will be shitty deal (like is the case for LA in D&D), but you've still let people trade their level dependent minimums for more of their piece of primary character whupass.

Once you've opened those flood gates, there's no point in even having a level system anymore, because you can just play point based instead. How are you supposed to look your players in the eye and tell them that they can't trade Saves and Skills for more Strength when you have an Ogre - who trades Saves and Skills for more Strength? How are you supposed to tell your party Wizard that he can't just take more caster levels instead of going up levels?

If you are going to play point based, it has to be for everyone. Everyone gets to spend points and be totally hardcore at whatever they want. The double standard in which some characters play with character classes and level advancement and some characters don't is absolute fucking madness.

Before you can even pretend to approximate game balance, everyone has to be playing the same game. And if there not everyone is playing with the same set of level strictures, that's not what's going on.

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Maj »

The more I play this game, the more I see no reason for it to be point based. In fact, when Ess asked me what changes a newbie to D&D like me would make to the classes and races, I created a point based system disguised as a class system, and a point based race system - because anything else is too annoying to work with. It didn't solve the balance issues, though. It just brought in a whole new set of them.

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Desdan_Mervolam »

Every so often I mention things I've read here to my RL group, and I am met with stares and remarks of "That's totally broken", then I try to defend what I said, and remember that I can't, because it took a four page thread full of hypothetical scenarios and complex mathematics to convince me of what I'm talking about.

I'm really starting to think we've gotten ourselves so close to the rules here that we can't really tell the difference so much between being what's broken, what's bent, and what's just a minor quirk of the system. Because of that, I've been laying back with these boards lately...

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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by User3 »

Yup. My min-maxing is weak, but my fringe case brokenness is strong.

Luckily, as someone who plays as a strategy gamer/roleplayer, I nerf myself in-game. As a strategy player, minmaxing for every little +1 or obscure rule exploit feels like cheating, and as a rolepayer I take no pleasure in abusing the rules as it makes the game go boom.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by User3 »

Maj at [unixtime wrote:1086719501[/unixtime]]
Unless you make everything mechanically identical - all the races have the same stats, spells work like attacks... - and change the flavor text to provide some sort of reason why someone would want to do something, there will never be balance in this game. The minute you offer someone the chance to be different from someone else mechanically, you will have to deal with the fact that some players will min/max and some won't, and this inevitably leads to unbalance.


This is perhaps the most insightful thing said here.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by Draco_Argentum »

Desdan_Mervolam at [unixtime wrote:1086726697[/unixtime]]
I'm really starting to think we've gotten ourselves so close to the rules here that we can't really tell the difference so much between being what's broken, what's bent, and what's just a minor quirk of the system.


I don't think so, the point of knowing the rules is being able to tell the difference.
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Re: Race Specialization is the crap

Post by The_Hanged_Man »

Maj at [unixtime wrote:1086719501[/unixtime]]
Frank wrote: either way it's unbalanced.


The minute you offer someone the chance to be different from someone else mechanically, you will have to deal with the fact that some players will min/max and some won't, and this inevitably leads to unbalance.


I'm w/ you up to a point, but it everything's relative. PC race mods are relatively inconsequential, and don't affect balance much. But other mechanics are quite a bit more affective.

IOW, if the only way to min-max your PC was to use racial ability mods, who would care? So your dwarf is slightly better at some minor things, has slightly better saves, and has a better con, than my half-elf. So your half-orc can pound holy thunder, but can't turn as well. Woot. OTOH, spellcasting and LA are so drastically fubared that it really matters what choices you make.
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