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Greg: "And that's basically been true since 1st edition; humans could anything that elves and dwarves could do, potentionally even better" Me: Yeah, except see in the dark! lol
Yeah and I think it’s really good if someone wants to be maybe a half dwarf half gnome and you don’t want to do through creating a whole new race but you don’t want to just pick one of the existing ones
I actually added this before but instead of changing the races, I shifted it to backgrounds applying a +1 to a select stat, for instance, a soldier provides a +1 to Strength or Charisma. Typically related to the skills related to the background or to whatever stat most suits the background as well as one additional language of your choice
Please give the kobold a +1 in Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma. They really could use the buff. A skill proficiency or getting a trap making or avoiding bonus would also be really cool and thematic
why would u want to give a race that is KNOWN for their low Intelligence, low wisdom, and low charisma (because that is their NATURE) a buff to make them LESS like what they are SUPPOSED to be. Thats like saying can you nerf a Giant's strength to make it equal to a human's for balance's sake? The answer is a clear no - Giant's are SUPPOSED to be stronger than humans, that is why they have crazy strength. its not about balance, its about the world feeling intuitive and natural despite being alien and fantastical, and making the most of the deficiencies unfairly given to a race because of its place in the fictional world & lore, and about enjoying the benefits of the races/classes that naturally excel at things simply because of their place in the world/lore. Gods are supposed to be...godly. Kobolds are supposed to stupid, disgusting vermin like creatures - of course you can change what you like in home games to be the "Exception". Balance is WAY overrated in gaming these days - and thats not to say "fuck balance" but more that it should not be the overriding factor in making changes and decisions - it limits creativity and imagination. Honestly, most fun games are not balanced, its figuring a way around weaknesses and overcoming challenges, not having equality baked into every challenge from the start.
@@jeromeace1282 Pack Tactics is great, but thats all they have. Darkvision is a nice touch, but not stellar. If WotC aren't willing to remove Sunlight Sensitivity then Kobolds really need Superior Darkvision. Grovel, Cower, Beg is a bad ability, its tool circumstantial. I'd recommend adding on the trap building/avoiding and a stealth, thieves' tools, or perception proficiency
i'm so deeply exited about Lizardfolk STR characters. Lizardfolk barbarian and ranger are so perfect. there's the mechanical standouts with this like mountain dwarf or half elf, but everyone gets a day in the sun. and the best part is that it works well for new players who want the cool race with the cool class and don't have to feel behind in their performance at the table!
Particularly looking forward to the option to build a lineage from scratch. My boggle, derro, dryad, half-hill-giant and cambion characters will be thankful! I might even be tempted make a yuan-ti or aaracokra, too (they always seemed too powerful before). :D Also could be a tool to bring back the odd UA subrace that didn't make the cut. I'm thinking specifically of the sky elf.
Not 100% sold of these rule changes. I like the modifying of the back story to change stats, but I do think races have certain traits (size, shape, colour, intelligence, speed) that would make it them more suitable for certain roles. D&D is a game, would chess be better if all the pieces were the same? Sure you can apply what ever rules you like, and playing against type can be fun if you come up with a good back story. However, part of the fun of a game is the constraints, it forces different styles of play, it gives it replayability.
I'd love to see something that gives mores structure and more _weight_ to the Personality/Ideal/Bond/Flaw stuff, and even something that links characters together and/or into the narrative of the story more. I know, I know, we can just make up backstory stuff (that gets ignored). But it'd be neat if there was some "bond" I could have with one of the other players that, when able to be brought to bear in the current situation it grants me advantage or perhaps grants me a spell usage or recharges a spell slot (and this would recharge on a short and/or long rest depending on the strength of the bonus). I haven't run a D&D game in a little bit (playing in two games, though) so I haven't had the opportunity to implement this as a homebrew yet, but I do think it'd really help group cohesion and player investment. In both of the games I'm playing in, besides the character I've made, the rest don't really have a reason to _be_ there, they seem quite disjointed from the events of the story and the setting. And in the one game, half the characters don't have any real reason to stick with the group, and given some recent story developments it really seems odd that their characters keep tagging along. So yeah, I just think giving some incentives for players to tie their characters to one another or to the campaign would be pretty helpful. Because a lot of people tend to make their character in a vacuum. Some of the options provided in the campaign settings books -- such as in Curse of Strahd with the Haunted One background -- are nice for tying a character to that campaign, though it's usually limited to just one of the characters. And even so, many players and DMs I've played with will ignore the Personality/Ideal/Bond/Flaw stuff because it doesn't provide anything concrete.
20:30 gets to my issue with current D&D. This isn't a slam against the "new D&D", but having a party that is mostly human is so rare that the setting is what has become a problem. I think it is hard, at times, to DM a party without any humans in the classic human centric worlds. I love playing Dwarves, Gnomes, Elves, Kenku, Goliaths, etc... but when I join a group I play human if there are few of them just to help make life easier for the DM. All that said, any party that is all one race, such as a party of Halflings or a party of Minotaurs is fun to DM for and to play... maybe because it too solves some of the "why are we together?" and "what do I generate for them?" in a very natural way. I need to be clear; the difficulty I mention here does not affect everyone - your experiences may vary. It could also be generational. The DMs I've talked to who started in 1st or 2nd edition seem to have the issue more than the DMs starting in 5th, for instance.
I am stoked. I implemented a similar idea when my friends played Ravenloft and it was rad to just play a more effective feral tiefling barbarian without being constrained by ability scores. I think it really opened up my players to more options because our rime of the frostmaiden party is human free. I don't think that has ever happened in a campaign I ran.
You can really just Homebrew a Half-Dwarf by taking the Half-Elf, replacing Fey Ancestry with Dwarven Resilience, and moving the +2 to Charisma either to Constitution or MAYBE to Wisdom. Still, you do you.
I've been waiting for this. My campaigns always have strong concepts. The one I'm working on is a Tabaxi only campaign in the jungle. Opening up bonuses and other choices to players will make each character unique instead of having racial photocopies with a class slapped onto it. Well done!
The funny thing is that they were assumptions, plenty of people were already doing it like that. It's nice to see it read-as-written and easily applied.
Please, can someone clarify if I take the "Elven Accuracy" for a Custom Origin character? The feat has a racial prerequisite but the rules won't make it clear for me if you cannot use those.
So the take home point I’m getting from this is that a warlock doesn’t throw an eldritch blast, it originates at the target and like touhou’s them? Is that accurate ? Cause it seems v odd and not how eldritch blast is generally flavoured... if it is accurate what implications does that have on creatures trying to benefit from cover?
I imagine they’re still going to apply to those races. If you’re a tiefling you’re probably not gonna be able to take a Dragonborn-specific feat without some level of homebrew.
I think what they'll do is that you can use that amount of bonuses and redistribute how you want, you just can't have a +3 or more in one attribute. A human would then be able to have 3 "+2"s. That's similar to what we do in our table now, but we only allow the player to move 2 points of the amount of bonuses the race grants. So you keep at least somethingfrom your heritage, but can customize enough to have at least a +2 in your primary stat, whatever it is.
The character I wanted to make was a Tiefling who was born to 2 human parents, one of the ancestors made a deal with a devil and every 5 generations a child would be born as a Tiefling as a result. The parents couldn't bare to take care of a "demon" so they abandoned her and she was found and brought to and raised in a monastery to be a monk, it didn't make sense that she would be intelligent and charismatic to me, she's been doing physical conditioning and meditation her entire life, charisma more often than not is built through experience and in 5e intelligence is basically studying books. So I think this is an incredible update/addition to the rules.
Or very little difference. They could still bump an 8 to a 10 or a 9 to a 10. If anything they compensate for cunning and charisma. They do still make a difference. The general flavor behind the ASIs of Tieflings is that they learn to be cunning (the intelligence; it’s not necessarily all book smarts but your logic and reasoning, too) and how to talk people down so they don’t immediately get mobbed out of town for having horns and a tail and skin like a tomato or a grape... or blud.
Eager to see this swap table. If a martial class can choose elf and just get all the tools via race that feels a bit ridiculous. While I don't like the idea of a Str gnome meme becoming a reality, it is neat to think of Str Wis female drow clerics of lolth or dex wis male two handed drow males. This is going to be a "DM Approval" thing for my table 😕
You realize in real life there are animals smaller than humans that are also stronger physically, right? Str gnome can work, but go ahead and potentially ruin someone's fun because you deem it unrealistic in a fantasy game.
I believe to have great chaos, you need a very good underlying structure. I love how the dnd team figures out what chaos they want to bring to the game and digs at it to control the chaos in a fair and equal manner. I think that speaks volumes of the dnd structure and team, accepting change and implementing fairly.
This is amazing, it's really cool to not feel like I have to pick from a certain list of races when creating a spellcaster or a really ASI-locked character like an arcane trickster or something.
I imagine there doesn't need to be an option. As I understand it, I don't think it's a requirement to say that aasimar are the product of celestials and humans only.
Word. In some future edition, the Tieflings, Aasimar, and Genasi should all be templates that can be added to any playable race in lieu of using a subrace. Universal subraces, basically. Sorta like how the Half-Dragon is a template.
Maybe this is in regard to the league play or whatever it's called. But otherwise... why do you need "permission" for this? I played a dragonborn in a game that was reskinned as a human who had been corrupted by his Great Old One patron (and that's why sporadically he could shoot lighting _out of his eyes!)_ And then with the DM's permission I took cold resistance instead of lighting resistance that would otherwise be paired with the lightning breath weapon -- it being assumed that under "normal" circumstances I wouldn't hurt myself with my own lightning. And my character had grown up in a tribe that was destroyed when some discrete micro-portals opened up and began emitting far-realm energies into that hamlet (the reason why this happened I left to the DM to surprise me, which he was cool with). Presumably others survived. But that character found himself thrown about through time and space, his mind and body being warped by the experience, and eventually stepping through a multidimensional hypercube and falling out (vomiting ice and crying lighting) into an alleyway in the big city the game started in. Also, provided your DM isn't awful, it's not a big deal in customizing your character to simply move a +2 or a +1 to some other attribute that seems more fitting. Or maybe swapping out a skill bonus or some ability (darkvision) for something else of approximate but different utility . I suppose if you're all about min-maxing you can abuse it, but min-maxers are a whole other can of worms. I'm sure this addition in Tasha's is cool, but it's not going to be a big necessity for me. I am curious to see the final book, though.
Not trying to rush or pry but those two older setting books still happening? Also I’m sorry for the hate you guys are getting I wish your company luck in this stressful time
Stay tuned to find out. However, I am certain that Planescape and Spelljammer will be upgraded to 5e. Then which other setting is coming to 5e? Which setting is unique? Which setting has the fan base?
Recent errata have removed the negative ability score traits from Orcs and Kololds in anticipation of the release of TCoE. So in future builds, there will not be any negatives to reallocate.
I houseruled this for us long ago. You just said "I want to play an Elf, but I want the Tiefling stats" and done. Right now we have a human cleric with dwarf traits in our party because he doesnt like dwarves, but didn't want to compromise on subpar racial traits. Also looking forward to more Drow Wizards and so many other race/class combos you wanted to do but the stats proved badly for this.
If it's about rebalance then change the elven accuracy feat. This makes them disproportionately much more powerful as rangers and magic users as anybody else.
This is honestly one of the best changes overall, and quite frankly solves a lot of the pigeon-holing that some people feel when it comes to making a char. While I like meaningful choice what are ability scores from race but a number that represents the abstract of genetic inheritance and/or natural ability. This makes it so nature v.s. nurture is much more prominent and it makes sense, why would a dwarf be strong if they were adopted and raised in a cloister on the ideals of pacifism and non-violence? What of a goliath that was whisked away from a cruel world by an eccentric wizard, so lonely they are looking for a protege and instead of the rigors of the wild the child is instead educated and becomes an intellectual that weaves the aether? All in all I feel this is good.
This really takes a lot of the fun out of playing different races. If they restrict the amount you can adjust (ie choose one plus or minus) then I'm on board. If you can just have whatever adjustors you want it seems pointless.
How does this race thing benefit humans? 👀 I can see that a human balancing system was the fact that they can put stat increases anywhere. Now that everyone else has it, what does the human get now?
Basic humans get a +1 in every ability and any language of their choice, so I assume they wouldn't change at all. You can't diversify "better at everything" any more than that.
@@Ahglock That's a load of shlock! If you take the standard scores and play a standard human, you have scores of 16 (+3), 15 (+2), 14 (+2), 13 (+1), 11 (+0), and 9 (-1). That's four odd numbered scores! At level four, you can take an ability score improvement and raise two ability modifiers at once! raise the 15 by 1 and the 13 by 1; and your scores are now 16 (+3), 16 (+3), 14 (+2), 14 (+2), 11 (+0), and 9 (-1). Good scores!
I just went from. DMing a party of all humans with no Homebrew, to the same players making 3 changelings (one blind, one who serves 8 gods, and one who deals with hearing their dead family's voices) and an elf who is two people in one body...all except the one changeling using heavy Homebrew..
So wait a minute. Jeremy Crawford was just saying that the racial bonuses and minus had nothing to do with balance, then when he talks about mountain dwarves he says that it is in no uncertain terms. Look, guys, there is nothing wrong with releasing multiple rules sets that you think will appeal to most people, and then promptly, but politely, telling those who don't like your products to deal with it. I think D&D is big enough now that if you tell the masses you want to appeal to all your players that the brand won't get cancelled but the newer generation of fans.
This comment just smacks on some kind of agenda politics. You have to really go far out of your way to completely mishear everything he said in this video, and intentionally misrepresent their approach to it. Intentional because, in addition to getting everything the man said wrong, you're also implying that this isn't an optional rule set that many players won't ever even buy. It's optional. It's optional, and nowhere does he get the issue of balance wrong. If you don't like it, don't buy the book and don't play like this, but definitely don't make stuff up about this video.
Jeremy, I appreciate the work you put into D&D 5e, but you gotta get your history right. You're forgetting the White Box set from 1974! Although, to be fair, it also coincides with what you're talking about. With the initial release; there were four races: Human, Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling (then called Hobbit). There were also only three classes: Fighter (called Fighting Man), Wizard (called Magic-User) and Cleric. Basically, with this core set alone, Dwarves and Halflings could only be Fighters, and Elves could only be Fighters or Wizards. So, this basically demonstrates what you said even more.
What made Elves be good at Dexterity was their creation by Corellon, It is part of their very being, if you are so obsessed to make a clumsy Elf put an 8 in their dexterity score. A clumsy Elf is as graceful as a normal Human. He also says Races are not balanced, yet goes on to say that Dwarfs and Tiefling were designed how they were for balance. If you are getting rid of the lore and making it so not all members of a race share features, why not make 6 foot Gnomes, Elves with normal ears, why not change it so Drow are not dark skinned or even elves, why do all Dragonborn look like dragons, why cant some look like humans or tiny Rats.
If you pay closer attention he is saying that the Mountain Dwarf’s +2, +2 ability increases are balanced against other races who get only +2, +1 because those other races get other special things. His example of another race getting these is the Tiefling with its innate spellcasting. He is talking about races being balanced against each other (which, I think, they are not all equal, but only relatively balanced). At the beginning he is saying that overall game balance is not the overriding consideration behind the races and their traits, but the evocation of the traditional fantasy archetypes that passed from ages old folklore and myth into the D&D game.
So is 6e going to use a full point buy system? ;-) I'm all about these changes, but then I spent years playing the Hero system where character creation was 100% point buy. D&D originally didn't intend for you to create whatever character you wanted. You rolled all your stats, and chose everything else (race, class) to make the best of those results. The challenge was to loot the dungeons with the character you got, not tell a story with the character you chose. I sense the current design team is caught between what they (or the market) want a TTRPG to be (which again, I'm totally on board) and what D&D actually is, which is all about archetypes. The proliferation of subclasses and character options feels like a poor man's point buy system.
I mean I feel like are always forgetting what 5e has and always said. You can play with just the core books. These are ALL optional. Even feats and multiclassing is optional in the core books. I get that this seems to be a bit much dm can and should be open about what game theme is.
Racial adjustments mean YOUR character gets that bonus, not that all dwarves or elves are like that. Once you adjust your perception of racial adjustments to mean your character (who is by definition exceptional for their race), then it's easier to accept dwarves who have a bonus to INT, or whatever.
I think this a step in a good direction and I like it a lot ... but maybe not the best direction. It feels like, with this system, race+class combinations are only going to be more optimized, resulting in the player-side bias of the system leaning even more heavily in favor the players. I would much rather see racial ability score bonuses removed entirely (and I think they should have been removed back when negatives were removed), along with racial bonus skills. Just let race features (like Fey Ancestry and so on) be the things that make the different race choices distinct. It accomplishes the same design goal by rendering now singular race optimal for any singular class but it also avoids power creep.
In comic books, like DC Comics, the various alien and non-human Earth-based races have genetic bonuses (Braniac's race is more intelligent, Kryptonians have better constitution, etc). Getting rid of the bonuses for having a different genetic advantage make the other races no different than humans, thus might as well they all be humans. Merely using point buy for ability scores and moving the points around results in the same thing as moving the ability bonuses. This change is basically for show and not beneficial, and might even be harmful.
I still don't get it. If you want a +2 to an ability score, currently you can just swap one of your scores that's higher with one that's lower. If you want a bad strength and great charisma on a Dwarf, Why would moving the bonus be any different? Why make this change and why keep it a part of the "race"?
the problem is, why can kobold be stronger then goliath? I understand the change to ability score reworks and why they were made. Just seems weird that a race that is built like a small 8 year old, can be as strong or stronger then a 7 foot tall line backer.
You can already do that even without the options in Tasha’s. It’s a little harder because you don’t get that +2 strength, but it’s fully possible as is. :/
Also, no matter what a Kobold's strength score is, a Goliath with the same strength score will still be able to carry twice as much (unless you use the lineage system, of course).
I'm not a huge fan of this. I understand it and the appeal to players, but I feel like it completely undermines the very idea of "racial" bonus. As an example, Half-Orcs have a +2 STR, and Halflings have a +2 DEX. This is to account for the fact that Half-Orcs are naturally/racially stronger than Halflings, and Halflings are naturally/racially more dexterous than Half-Orcs, which is logical and makes proper sense. If you were to flip these around, it would imply that the Half-Orc is naturally more stealthy and Halfling is naturally stronger, which is just ridiculous. I'm not even against unnatural builds. Go ahead and give your Halfling a 15 in his strength, or Half-Orc a 15 in his dex. But at the end of the day, the racial bonus' should stay the same in these builds, making your dexterous Half-Orc naturally stronger and your strong Halfling naturally dexterous to account for their race.
I appreciate the flexibility but i fear we are edging towards some 4e type thinking here where mechanics are being divorced from narrative. Or said another way, crunch divorced from fluff. If you do too much of this with your system you will create a situation where narrative choices like playing a halfling or dwarf are just a coat of paint with no mechanical meaning. Its your game and you can do what you want but you should think of consequences of your design choices.
This is crap. You can play against type but races are based off being normally better at certain ability scores than humans. Which means the least dexterous elf will always be more dexterous than the most dexterous human. You get that really charismatic dwarf by putting the highest stat you rolled on 4d6 into charisma. Changing the stats around will only appeal to power gamers.
The most dexterous a human can be at level one is with a score of 19; the least dexterous an elf can be at level one is with a score of 5; and both can get there scores no higher than 20 unless they have a feature that is completely unrelated to race. So, that "...the least dexterous elf will always be more dexterous than the most dexterous human." statement is largely inaccurate.
@@videogollumer Was suppose to say least dexterous elf will be more dexterous than least dexterous human and most dexterous elf will be more dexterous than most dexterous human.
Let's just do away with classes too, hey? Just so people can 'play the character they want'... not the best/most poweful combo... no, of course not ;) At least it is optional... right.
Classes exist as a framework for new players to follow. When you can pick every aspect it actually becomes easier for people to power game or accidentally make a weak character. The system of Pugmire has taught me this. You get to pick everything and I have seen players make an extremely optimal build and another player accidentally picked things useless to them.
I'm not afraid to say no to my player. When it comes to origins of D&D, I listen Mr Bulee himself Tim Kask. WOTC just don't change D&D so much that isn't D&D anymore.
I for one really dislike these additional customization options. It's a sort of power creep. Allowing racial ability bonuses to be customizable just makes all of the min/max characters that much more powerful. Now every character will now just have bonuses in their two primary stats. Do you really think that makes the game more interesting? As a DM, I'm all for trying to support players who want to make a character that defies racial archetypes or build optimizations. But we already have tools to do that. As DMs, we can make exceptions or provide benefits in other ways at our discretion. Putting these tools in the players hands is too much.
I am feeling you. I have the same worries. I do think JC has made a good case for why this is being done. I will have to wait and see the book until I know for sure. I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of, say, the halfling barbarian. With this someone could say, hey, I’m a Halfling but I put my +2 into ST, so I’m a big bad bar-bar. Really? But I guess the game is about living the dream, so ‘dream on little half-pint bar-bar’. I would like to see something in the book to make standard humans a bit more attractive as an option when seen against other races, but the options discussed in this video seem to make the problem even worse.
Rip humans, what made them special was their versatility now you just give it to anyone. Eww For humans at lvl 1, the only good feats are the ones that give you an extra +1 to an ability score or lucky This new book makes non human characters much better, outclassing humans.
