Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The One D&D project. Thoughts?

Fingers crossed that getting rid of race-based ASI norms will be one of the ideas dumped in response to feedback. I'm not a PnP player myself, but have always assumed that one of the advantages of having a real life DM to debate with is that if you want to play a character outside the norm and can make a compelling case for why they are different and how it's affected their backstory and attributes then that could be accommodated, and it seems all to the good to give permission and encouragement for such flexibility. But that's a long way from getting rid of the norms entirely, and I've always enjoyed how D&D translates normal physical and cultural characteristics of races into specific feats, abilities, etc and found that this in turn gave me an "in" to roleplaying them and made playing different races interesting and distinct.

More generally, I like the idea of clearly separating out which attributes are physical/innate and which cultural, but even with the cultural side there should be recommended norms that can then be swapped if, for example, you're a halfling that grew up amongst gnomes or whatever. I wasn't entirely sure how, for example, they were suggesting elven weapon training would be handled, and whether it would still exist as a concept or whether players are just able to select the same bundle of weapon proficiencies if they want.

Of course, for the cRPGs I play there isn't a DM who can make case-by-case decisions, but that shouldn't be the central consideration in designing the D&D system anyway, and individual developers can always decide to keep race-based restrictions or to default to the norm but give players the ability to swap things around.