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

Your character's starting attributes weren't a representation of their background or life choices, it was a representation of a race in the world. I'm trying to make it work in my mind, how a gnome, a halfling, a human, an orc, and a goliath are all going to have the same starting strength merely because they all spent a few years as stevedores. The dissonance in physical stats is more straightforward, but the mental stats too, most Orc's I've known have struggled to speak common if they even knew it, Orcish is a language without a lot of complex concepts, because the people who speak it aren't typically able to grasp them, It also doesn't have it's own script, a trait common among languages in illiterate cultures, so I'm guessing Orc culture for a while at least wasn't written, gosh the world building!. Yet any Orc player gets to start out speaking three languages.

If you're going to open up character creation to the panoply of races (not all of them well thought out), you've got to give me something, maybe -1 to a stat? Like all Orc characters have -1 Int, even if they can put +2 +1 anywhere they want, just something to remind me that Orcs are not the same as Dwarves.

In point buy, the racial +2/+1 modifiers become much more pronounced. Without the +1 you can't have a 16 in your main stat and you're always behind races that do. You also have to pay more for the stats without racial bonuses, which translates to having a lower ability score total.

You are married to the idea that character attributes represents a uniform biological difference in dnd races. They have decided culture, training and individuality(ie varies more person to person, than culture to culture )is actually the dominant factor in attributes.


It just comes down to your personal preference, you like the idea that race is the primary determiner of a character's potential. Many prefer the creator. The big issue you bring up MIGHT be a lack of guidance/lore about the standard culture, for those who want to lean into the tropes of that background. However, its likely many races will come with recommendations of background.

It makes character creation better imo. In the bonded system, +4 attribute points is a pretty major effect, especially in levels 1-10 where most people play.

- The nice thing about the bounded limits of 5e is that you are, quite literally not always behind the character playing a race that is natively well suited to your class; If you both train hard, learn hard, and achieve your optimum, becoming the best individual that you can possibly be, then at the end of the day you will reach the SAME maximum. They have a head start, but the top of the podium is in the same place and you can both reach it.

And i like it this way, it fits me much better than:
"Congratulations ... you rolled 18 ... add your racial bonus ... and thats it! Your character just reached its full potential right at the very start of his adventures ... from now on tho, he will never ever ever gets stronger, no matter what you do! Have fun."

Yeah Attributes in D&D are pretty bizarre as a construct and could probably use a further overhaul.

I feel what's needed is a bit of a Zeno's paradox type situation for the Attributes, you know where when you get closer to either extreme (high or low) it should push out to create room for more nuance.

Maybe similar to way 18 Strength worked in 2e for Martial classes (from 18/01 to 18/99 or 18/00), but just doing that for every attribute? The high end is now 20 rather than 18 like it used to be, but they could do something similar. Perhaps 20/01 to 20/00, where the second value can capture more of the flavor element?

So say a Human can hit a 20/99 in STR but a Halfling caps out at 20/50 (to represent them being Half the size?) or similarly maybe an Orc never rolls lower than a 20/75 for STR because they're pretty huge? But then Orc might take a hit in INT or whatever, capping at 20/25 there. Perhaps Elves and Halflings never roll lower than 20/75 for DEX, because they're supposed to be all naturally dexterous that way etc. Then do that same sort of thing for all 6 attributes whenever they hit the 20. Sure it's a bit sleight of hand to just move another column over to the right for everything lol, but at least it'd providing for a large spread. Save anything higher than a 20/00 for monsters and demi-gods and whatnot.

I also feel like the low end is kind of wasted. The difference between say a 1 or 2 and a 3 in INT (to accommodate monsters and beasts vs 'intelligent creatures') is fairly huge, but then there's also a pretty massive gap between 3 and that baseline range of 8 and up, for the sort of standard starting range INT for PC's. It's a bit weird to do a scheme at base 10, but then to go all skipping about and having it where only even values make a difference. Almost to the point where it's like why even bother counting up 1-20 if so many of the intermediate values aren't really used for anything? Instead it might be interesting if 2 was the base starting value for PC attributes, and anything lower works similar to the 20 at the high end. Basically 1/01 to 1/00 covering everything from earthworms to the smartest of beasts and children in the case of INT. Just to open up the spread so it covers more of the fullest possible range.

I don't know, obviously that's all a bit vague and I'm just spitballing here, cause none of the numbers in D&D actually mean anything until the rest of mechanics are built out around them, but it just seems like we could use a bit more room with the min/max values at the high and low end. Just to accommodate some of the older ideas about what the attributes were meant to suggest vs how they actually worked in the mechanics of the gameplay.

Like maybe we could change it so that everyone's attributes starts at 1, then they go through a Traveller style lifepath that brings their stats up to around 10, with different races having an easier time of beating the mean.

I like the idea of having each race have a stat maximum that when reached opens up into it's own range, maybe a system like this could be used so that different races have an easier time getting through that range.

I'd be in favor of different races having different Ability Score maximums. Orcs can reach 22 strength; Dwarves 22 Con; Gnomes 22 Int; Elves 22 Dex; etc.

If you plan to add racial maximums to the game for the sake of realism, you may want to consider just what is needed to be realistic.

For instance, compare a human and a halfling. Lets assume same "shape", but the human is twice the height. Since volume is the product of three dimensions, and mass is proportional to volume, that means the human is 8 times the mass.

Strength will roughly scale as the cross sectional area of the muscles, which in turn should scale with the square of the height (again, assuming the same shape). That means that a human built identically to a halfling should be 4 times as strong. A +2 advantage for the human relative to the halfling isn't anywhere close to large enough!

Quickness of movement (ie. dexterity) should scale as strength/mass, so the halfling gets an advantage of a factor of 2 here. Factor of 2, not +2.

I submit that the structure of D&D simply does not allow this difference to be realistically contained within the rules in a fun way. For similar reasons there are no rules to support sexual dimorphism. After all, it is supremely silly to go after a dragon with a sword for ANY humanoid, and yet we pretend that this is OKAY within the context of the game. If a human male can do it, why not a halfling or a human female. The scale of that deed is already absurd enough that it is silly to try to draw distinctions between the various tiny (compared to dragon) creatures that will encounter it.

I seem to recall older D&D had different racial stat caps no? Items like Belt of Hill Giant Strength could be used to exceed those caps(it bothers me that the Club of Hill Giant Strength in BG3 only raises str to 15).

The structure of D&D is fairly flexible and allows for a lot, and should make sense at a broad level, but it's just as obviously fantasy: not a 100% accurate physics simulator. Giving a +1 or +2 bonus to an ability score is more than enough in my mind to reflect racial differences without getting into the complex, nitty-gritty details of biology and physics. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.