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

I'd say that if anyone is putting too much weight on hard mechanics, it's you, TomReneth - you've disregarded all comments about aesthetic, feel, tone, style and character as being without value and meaningless; you've derided them as 'euphemisms' for 'playing badly', to paraphrase your earlier comments.

You've called characters that play against their race's natural propensities as being 'gimped' - yet you've disregarded the fact that the halfling barbarian, the orc barbarian, the elf barbarian and the tiefling barbarian can and usually will all reach the exact same optimum state of ability for what they excel at, and one will *not* ultimately be better at it than any of the others, regardless of where their inborn, natural biological differences and propensities start them.

It's worth stating here again: there is NOTHING about having racial, biologically based attribute propensities that says "X are always big and strong, Y are always fast and nimble". It literally does not, and has never done that. That's how performative reactionaries characterise it in order to vilify it, but that's not the case, and it's not how it's ever been. What is does say is: "X have a tendency towards towards growing stronger than other average humanoids; all things being equal between them and another humanoid of a different people, X will usually be slightly stronger" It says that in generally, that creature, from their heritage, will be slightly stronger than another person, if everything else about them, from their upbringing, life choices, training, and career paths, are all the exact same as one another... because any deviation in any of those fields has a far grater impact on the individual character than this physical, biological trait. Clarence the orc, who studied his whole life in candlekeep, rarely gets out, hasn't touched grass in years, and love books may still retain some in-born elements that leave him slightly stronger than Charles, the human candlekeep scholar who has followed the same life path and has been his reading buddy for years... but they're both weaker by a long shot than Beatrice Bruiseknuckle, the halfling barkeep down the road who likes clubs bigger than she is and regularly has to eject drunk patrons from her establishment.

You say removing these propensities doesn't remove our ability to play against type; tell me how I play against type with an Owlin, or a Fairy? I can't, because in designing them in the Tasha style, Wizards have left it so that there *isn't* a general stated propensity within the biology of these creatures for me to interact with (either for or against); I can't take pride in my racial heritage, and lean into it, because there is nothing for me to lean into with these characters.

Have I lost the ability to make a character that I currently can, with the new documents? Yes! I have, in fact... If, for example, I play a dwarf who is the dwarfiest dwarf that ever did dwarf, who is a proud representative of his people, history and culture, who has been brought up in the traditional ways and undergone all of the traditional training that folk of his culture usually do, and is not setting out into the world to possible learn new things, maybe reinforce his pride, maybe undermine it, and who knows what else.... I *can't* do that now, because the features that I would have had have been removed and I can't get them back in the new design, at least not as it currently stands.

Yes, our characters are meant to be unusual and exceptional compared to others, but if the basic blocks and descriptions lose these propensities, then there is nothing for us to be unusual or exceptional in relation to.

Again: different peoples are different. Different species of creature, as our different races are in the realms, are physically, biologically different. This is a good thing, and it's something we should be celebrating - not trying to erase. If we're allowed to say that halflings have a tendency to grow to a certain height, and that is allowed to be an in-born, biological feature of their species, we can also say that orcs tend to grow with a denser muscle mass than equivalent other humanoids, and that gnomes have slightly more crenulated brains that generally give them better information processing and detail retention capabilities than equivalent other humanoids. These are all just features of the species of creature they are; None of these are bad things, and erasing them is only taking away from the game space, not making it better.

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Feedback for that issue has long since closed, however; if this is thread about One D&D folks should be concerning themselves with bard, ranger and rogue, with the collapsing of everyone into prepared casters, with the forcing of bards into being healers, and the overall restriction of them, making them less flexible and less versatile than they've ever been, the removal of our choice of ranger features, and the removal of the options for melee-focused rangers, as well as loss of access to some of the designed-for-ranger capstone spells, like Wrath of Nature, which they cannot access in the new document. The weakening of sneak attack, and the general blandification of class traits and abilities that leaves them all feeling flavourless and samish.

Might be worth talking about the good things too; they're relenting with hunter's mark again, which is sorely needs, they're improving dual-wielding so that it doesn't eat your bonus action, which is nice, they're reworking exhaustion to be easier to remember and more graded in its debilitation (though it still needs work in its present state)