Originally Posted by grysqrl
Originally Posted by Zenith
1) Charisma is totally irrelevant with Guidance and save scumming dialogue rolls anyways. There's not a single persuasion/intimidation check my elven druid had trouble passing, and it would have been even easier if I was Drow.
All abilities, skills, etc. are irrelevant if you're relying on save scumming. If you roll enough times, you can get what you want. Why is that even part of the conversation?

Originally Posted by Zenith
2) To a single class, and maybe 2 more down the line. That's still out of druid+fighter+rogue+wizard+cleric+sorcerer+warlock+paladin = 3/8 classes it is only relevant for. Dexterity is relevant for all of those.
Four classes use charisma as one of their primary abilities: bard, paladin, sorcerer, and warlock. That's a third of the classes in the PHB. Several subclasses (e.g. swashbuckler, berserker, several martial archetypes) also use it a fair amount. Dexterity is generally not relevant for melee characters that wear heavy armor (mostly clerics, fighters, and paladins). Also, having high dex and high chr are not mutually exclusive.

Originally Posted by Zenith
2b) Let's change the racials, because the result of this racial is you pigeonhole a race to 3 single classes or have your stats go to waste because charisma is worthless in combat if you're not 3/8 of those classes as it currently stands.
Not everything is going to be useful in combat. Fighting is part of the game - not the whole game. You can play any race with any class - not getting that +1 to a specific ability modifier out of the gate is such a small deal; it amounts to a 5% lower chance to succeed at any particular check (which, if you're relying on save scumming, isn't relevant anyway) and is easily boosted with ASIs if you want when you hit later levels.

Originally Posted by Zenith
4) Even if it didn't require concentration, what would it do? Doesn't have enough base strength to even push enemies, and at best you'll be dropping some items on the ground next to your character and have the hand toss it. There's really not much in term of interaction the hand can do for you. Not remotely activate buttons safely or deactivate traps, etc.
Mage hand is a utility cantrip; it isn't intended for use in combat. There's no reason it should be able to push enemies or throw things at them to deal damage. It should be able to push buttons and pick up light objects. For arcane tricksters, it should be able to pick locks and disarm traps and even distract enemies in combat. It sucks that the implementation of Mage Hand in BG3 is so bad; it's incredibly useful in tabletop D&D.

Originally Posted by Zenith
Tiefling racials are hot trash. I could understand if the lv3 skill compensated, but it's utterly unreliable, so another Guiding Bolt gimmick in the grand scheme of things. Shield dwarf gets a total of 4 skill points. The least they could do for Tiefling is add +1DEX and bump dark vision to superior dark vision if they're not going to make the lv3 racial spell worthwhile.
Dwarves get some decent boosts, but they pay for it with reduced speed, which would actually be really important in combat if positioning were relevant. RAW tieflings are quite good, even if some of the details have been implemented poorly here.

- It's part of the conversation because save scumming a dialogue choice is asymmetrical to save scumming an entire fight. When you say it gives you an advantage to have charisma, it's a marginal advantage to begin with thanks to Guidance. Thus, the non-combat use of Charisma is marginal, and particularly so in Act 1 where resolution without violence usually means letting the psychopath go without a fight.

- Dexterity gives you initiative, and first turn advantage is far more useful than you're pretending it is not. Do the Githyanki patrol fight without first turn advantage and then another one where Beretha and the Raider get first move on your group and then get back to me. Besides, AC is never going to be redundant. 2 DEX is still 1AC and a lesser chance to be hit, heavy armor or not.

- Fighting is virtually the main aspect of the game. The largest difficulty checks in the game involve fighting, so aspects that involve fighting are as a result the most important for a character to have. Often to not fight means either sparing a villain or foregoing a valuable item that mob might have had.

- We can go about how it should have been implemented according to your ideals of a table top game, but the fact is I'm more interested with how it's actually implemented in a videogame that actually takes resources to build and create cohesion with instead of just imagining things and writing them down to pen and paper.

-Reduced speed doesn't matter at all to dwarves if you bothered to read because a) There's amulet of misty step, and b) Jump with +2 strength and athletic boots gives you an immense amount of mobility to address all your closing distance needs. And in case that isn't enough, you have boots of speed to give you a metric ton of movement. And that's the thing with utility/movement, you only need so much of it, in this case the only one necessary to land behind an enemy.





Even in a dedicated warlock build, the famed master of solo's and uber-optimized gameplay, sin tee, doesn't even use a Tiefling. Surprise, it's yet another elf. Who knew, with the incredibly trove of advantages sunk into one race, that +2 stats to a relevant attribute would be hardly worth the trade. It's also why come lv4 most people are not even taking the extra 2 bonus attributes, but instead picking up wizard/warlock initiate or grabbing medium armor proficiency.

Last edited by Zenith; 15/03/21 07:38 PM.