Originally Posted by SaurianDruid
If we were playing a game where every attribute was meaningfully valuable to every class in different ways I'd be all for racial ASIs. If a Wizard with high STR could open portals between themselves and their opponents to throw long-ranged punches or enchant their fists with fire and skin with stone to maul people in melee an orc wizard with +2 STR and -1INT wouldn't feel nearly as bad. If a gnome fighter could use their INT to come up with complex battle maneuvers that out-pace their opponents and catch foes off guard with feints and trickery their +2 INT would compensate for a lack of STR.

Sadly, that is not the system we're in. Not have that +1 in your primary stat just makes you universally less useful than someone else with a more optimal race choice. What do they get for being less good at their core mechanics in every way? A minor bonus to skill checks they'll probably never use, more or less.

And not everyone wants to roleplay mediocrity.

And for those that do? You still have the choice to just distribute your attributes in an unoptimized way.

Multiclassing is a thing.

Also, additional artificial self-restrictions on top of the non-restricting rules are disastrous for balance. In the current iteration, whether you are building an optimal or a sub-optimal build, you are all still operating within the universal set of restrictions and the power curve between the player1's unoptimized build and player2's perfectly optimized build would not be very different. When you unlock everything for everyone and abolish the rules, the powercurve will dramatically shift towards the hyper optimized builds. This will ruin both fun and balance for parties where players want different experience and have different priorities in terms of their characters.

Last edited by neprostoman; 09/07/23 10:10 AM.