Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Some Suggestions after 300 hours

At this point it's mostly pointing out differences in opinion and pointing out logical fallacy on both sides.

As a general rule I don't speak in absolutes unless I've looked through the material being discussed in that moment because I don't necessarily know if the statement is absolute from memory, but if you must know after looking through them now, you can only really make a case that culturally Dragonborn might not need strength, but you could equally make a case that their self sufficiency gives them the strength and that a dragonborn raised with a silver spoon might not have worked their muscles to that degree.


This fundamentally takes away individuality, though, and that's not how this world works. My mother and father have always been very talented artists and can both draw life-like pictures with a pencil. One sister became a tattoo artist, the other is an art teacher. That's every member of my immediate family and also a true story, my only tattoo I got from my sister and I have a painting of an eagle on my wall from the other. I, however, do not share this creativity. I'm a logistics manager and deal in hard numbers, not artistic expression. At no point in my life was a good at any art stuff, and at some point my family wasn't either. They nurtured their artistic expression (which I guess would be Cha) and I nurtured my work with numbers (Which I guess is Int?) and I'm not "just more artistic" than any other human being out there because of my lineage, if you were to translate this into D&D stat blocks it would be to say my birthing had no bearing on my stat blocks. Saying "all members of x race are like this just because they are" gives off real "Asians are model minority" vibes, not to make this real life racey, but just being honest with how it comes off to me.


A case could be made either way. Tabaxi being naturally stealthy makes sense to me, as does races with different eyes having Perception like the Harengon. I suppose it would depend on which skills are being questioned, so I think we can chuck this one up to conjecture.


We're not abolishing racial propensities, we're letting the player choose where their racial traits come from to make their character unique. Putting the racial ASI in the stat block should be default, not to force a player to use those stats, but to display the general tendencies of a race, allowing the player to adjust them later for a unique case. Yes, there are people that purely choose based on mechanical advantage, but there are also people that do not, these choices do not exist in a vacuum, and the decision to remove those was not to remove racial traits, but to allow player agency in the character they want to make. The player character should be different and should be special.

And on a side note, people already picked race/class combinations purely for mechanical advantage. There were certain combinations you just rarely saw, especially at a table that had min-maxing style of gameplay. Floating your ASI has allowed min-max tables to not subside off "meta" race/class combinations, which racial discussion aside and in terms strictly about the game health, is a good thing.


I have to firmly and strongly disagree. A Half Orc also draws eyes when he walks into a room. So does Elton John, Goliaths, goblins, bugbears, Lizardfolk... All of that attention is external, not internal. A good example of how you can say Tieflings in general tend to be charismatic is using their spellcasting, which MotM has washed away and I personally dislike. Tiefling Spells used to cast off Charisma, but it doesn't necessarily mean Tieflings are naturally charismatic. That's something I wish MotM kept for sure, now you can just choose any mental stat, which makes little to no sense to me since the origins of your magic should be what determines your spellcasting mod. But for the sake of argument let's say I did agree with this decision, the choices of what the spells are is also an impact, like one variant of Tiefling getting the Friends cantrip for free, another getting Minor Illusion, etc, is still a good expression of that specific bloodline.

And on the topic of Tieflings, if you count Variant and Variant Feral, there are 12 different subraces, and you mean to tell me every single one has to be charismatic by nature? I have to disagree with that.


This is where I think you contradict yourself. Players already do that kind of thing, the only thing Tasha's system did was put it in the players hands instead of asking the DM for it. The player is now allowed to create a unique circumstance because they want to, and can, rather than asking DM-senpai if I can please make an Elf raised by Orcs who worships Bane and doesn't have normal elven elegance.


Some arguments for physical ASI's I accept for being racial, there will be physical differences, but my counter argument is always racial traits. Stones Endurance and Relentless Endurance are paragons of this and wonderful expressions of being naturally durable, higher movement speeds for typically nimble classes, climbing speeds, swimming speeds, unarmored defenses, etc. Mental stats, to me, cannot be justified by race, it makes no sense to be born smarter, wiser, or more sociable, that's just straight up not a thing.


This fundamentally takes away individuality, though, and that's not how this world works. My mother and father have always been very talented artists and can both draw life-like pictures with a pencil. One sister became a tattoo artist, the other is an art teacher. That's every member of my immediate family and also a true story, my only tattoo I got from my sister and I have a painting of an eagle on my wall from the other. I, however, do not share this creativity. I'm a logistics manager and deal in hard numbers, not artistic expression. At no point in my life was a good at any art stuff, and at some point my family wasn't either. They nurtured their artistic expression (which I guess would be Cha) and I nurtured my work with numbers (Which I guess is Int?) and I'm not "just more artistic" than any other human being out there because of my lineage. Saying "all members of x race are like this just because they are" gives off real "Asians are model minority" vibes, not to make this real life racey, but just being honest with how it comes off to me.


A case could be made either way. Tabaxi being naturally stealthy makes sense to me, as does races with different eyes having Perception like the Harengon. I suppose it would depend on which skills are being questioned, so I think we can chuck this one up to conjecture.


We're not abolishing racial propensities, we're letting the player choose where their racial traits come from to make their character unique. Putting the racial ASI in the stat block should be default, not to force a player to use those stats, but to display the general tendencies of a race, allowing the player to adjust them later for a unique case. Yes, there are people that purely choose based on mechanical advantage, but there are also people that do not, these choices do not exist in a vacuum, and the decision to remove those was not to remove racial traits, but to allow player agency in the character they want to make. The player character should be different and should be special.

And on a side note, people already picked race/class combinations purely for mechanical advantage. There were certain combinations you just rarely saw, especially at a table that had min-maxing style of gameplay. Floating your ASI has allowed min-max tables to not subside off "meta" race/class combinations, which racial discussion aside and in terms strictly about the game health, is a good thing.


I have to firmly and strongly disagree. A Half Orc also draws eyes when he walks into a room. So does Elton John, Goliaths, goblins, bugbears, Lizardfolk... All of that attention is external, not internal. A good example of how you can say Tieflings in general tend to be charismatic is using their spellcasting, which MotM has washed away and I personally dislike. Tiefling Spells used to cast off Charisma, but it doesn't necessarily mean Tieflings are naturally charismatic. That's something I wish MotM kept for sure, now you can just choose any mental stat, which makes little to no sense to me since the origins of your magic should be what determines your spellcasting mod. But for the sake of argument let's say I did agree with this decision, the choices of what the spells are is also an impact, like one variant of Tiefling getting the Friends cantrip for free, another getting Minor Illusion, etc, is still a good expression of that specific bloodline.

And on the topic of Tieflings, if you count Variant and Variant Feral, there are 12 different subraces, and you mean to tell me every single one has to be charismatic by nature? I have to disagree with that.


This is where I think you contradict yourself. Players already do that kind of thing, the only thing Tasha's system did was put it in the players hands instead of asking the DM for it. The player is now allowed to create a unique circumstance because they want to, and can, rather than asking DM-senpai if I can please make an Elf raised by Orcs who worships Bane and doesn't have normal elven elegance.


So I did miss that, but to my credit I assumed standard array because that is meant to be the standard character, meaning that every single race is literally incapable of having a negative modifier on the stat they have a +2 in, which is an egregious thing to say. Rolling for stats is an optional rule and definitely not intended to be what a standard character is meant to look like. I'm playing an Artificer in my game that had 2 18's (lucky day for me, really) and so started level 1 with a 20 in Intelligence and 18 in constitution. This is in no way representative of a standard character and rolled stats often lead to outliers like my artificer, which I admittedly did choose mechanical advantage over roleplay, but I also did explain that mechanical decision with roleplay, and the table I'm playing with is very much a high power gaming style table in that particular game, so this character even with this sort of decision is still not actually the most powerful character at this table. All of our characters have at least 1 20 at level 4 and this is not normal, but it exists because we rolled for stats. Standard Array is what I use to determine the standard character, with point buy being acceptable in the discussion but even still not allowing you to go below 8 or above 15 and posing the same issue; your race cannot have a -1 modifier to your main ASI bonus with few exceptions like Triton, and I see that as a problem.


See, I cared so little about Fairies and how thematically, mechanically, and flavorfully weak they are that I didn't even notice they were actually nerfed. The only Fairy player I've ever seen was a Fairy Monk who played the character as a literal joke the entire time (which at that table was fine, it was kind of a nonsense game) but I have yet to see anyone seriously play a fairy either mechanically or thematically... The race is a joke, but that's basically just a side note. Fairy should have gotten some way of expressing their fey ancestry other than a couple spells. Where is the normal Fey sleep resistance? What about the usual mental save fey PCs sometimes get? Fairy was just made so poor nobody even considers it a viable option at neither power gaming tables, nor roleplaying tables. I guess what I'm saying is Fairy doesn't belong in this discussion because nobody actually cares they exist.


Anything under 100 years and above 70 is pretty much still a human lifespan. It's not like humans just live until 90 and then die at 90 every time, it's an estimation. And anything 100 and under is literally within the century as it describes. It's not homogenization, it's generalization, which is it's own beast to overcome, but should not be treated as homogenization. What's way more important than lifespan is definitely the rate at which a race matures. I think that's what really needs to be discussed over the lifespan. The vast majority of PC's I have seen that aren't elves are usually less than a century old, so this generalization, while maybe not a good thing (especially for DMs who want to make wise old NPCs) is not as vile as you're making it out to be. Very few people make characters above their own age, most aim around 20's-30's in my personal experience. Most, not all, but still.

Note: Generalization is very bad in my opinion, but it's definitely different from homogenization. Custom Lineage is homogenization, since that was literally just WotC saying Variant human is making everyone play only humans, so let's just give Variant Human to every race and call it good. Basically homogenization is when you say it's all the same, and generalization is when you stay away from specifics. And I like specifics. I want to know how old the average Triton lives because I want to push that age. So it's 200? PC's find a Triton that's 225 who knows things others don't because of his age. But I think it's important to recognize the difference because if you think it's something it's not then you begin arguing things that don't make sense. WotC has a habit of making a book with partial information and saying "IDK DM You make it up. $40 please" which is what they did with age. DM has to do it now, which is lazy on WotC part and I definitely have not purchased any material that reads like that, recent books included. The resources are online and I'm not paying someone else to have me do their work anyway, which is what generalization does.


I think what it means is Halflings are small, and organic matter for them weighs about the same as a human, so while a Halfling is 3 feet tall, they weight about what a human that is 3 feet tall would weigh. Basically, a human of x size would weigh x, so a goliath weights what a human of 8'2" would weigh. At least that's my interpretation.


Exactly this. People already chose mechanical advantage over roleplay anyway. Pre-Tashas I don't think I saw a single caster pick Half Orc or Goliath, they were all martial classes. Any mechanical argument can be easily countered with the fact that it's already happening. Mechanical arguments are literally just "The thing that's already happening will continue to happen but in a different, more versatile way!" and when speaking about the mechanical advantages and disadvantages of the Tasha's ruling, that's when you get into the "If you don't like it don't do it" territory because mechanically speaking, that's what it really comes down to. Either you want your martial-inclined races to stick to being better at martial classes, or you don't. That decision will always be table-to-table.

EDIT: And to your credit, these arguments and points are way more valid than what was seen before, that's the only reason I'm engaging in the debate.