Originally Posted by Talismina
Originally Posted by Halycon Styxland
- Change Human to : 1 extra feat, 1 extra skill, 1 extra weapon proficiency
An extra feat would be way too much. It would allow them to duplicate a key perk of many other races, and often exceed them. Wood elves, for example, are often picked for that +5 to movement speed. Well, now humans can start with +10... with added movement related benefits. That +1 hp per level that one dwarf race gets? Yeah, humans can now start with +2. And just that it would mean that humans can start with a 19 in their main stat... The only way to balance such a thing would be to give the humans a serious disadvantage, like giving up the +2 to a stat, or else the +1 to a stat and having a limited selection of feats they can choose.

Note that alt humans, the reason why people bring up the "give humans an extra feat" idea, do just that... they give up stats to get that feat. This allows for human flexibility, while still letting the other races have their specialties.

I could see giving humans a second +1 to a stat, which is essentially a half-feat. This means they could start with a 17 and two 16s, so it is quite a strong perk, but it wouldn't allow starting with a 19.

Humans having +1 skill, +1/+1 to stats and +1 feat (AKA Variant Human / v-human / vhuman) has been a D&D 5e alternative statline since 2014 in the tabletop and it really isn't as strong as it sounds, and even less so after Tasha's was introduced (freely assigned stats for everyone like in BG3). They're usually only a good choice for feat starved builds and not without drawbacks. Even in your given example of a wood elf versus vhuman isn't as straight forward as you present it, because wood elves still get perception proficiency, darkvision, stealth proficiency, Fey Ancestry (sleep immunity, charm resistance) and some pretty good weapon proficiencies (shortsword, longsword, shortbow, longbow). The wood elf also gets a +1/+2 while the vhuman only gets +1/+1.

Vhuman was a reasonably good choice for a lot of martial builds in tabletop (until Custom Lineage was introduced who also get a free feat, free stat allocation *and* darkvision, because humans can't have anything nice in D&D), but that has a lot more to do with how feat dependent martial characters are as a result of the base classes being really bad compared to spellcasters. You don't pick vhuman on, say, a Barbarian because having a feat is "nice". You pick vhuman on Barbarian because the class *needs* to have Great Weapon Master at lvl 1 to be worth playing next to spellcasters, because most martials aren't even noticeably better at using weapons than spellcasters until lvl 4 or 5 without a free lvl 1 feat. But if you're not playing a feat dependent martial, or the campaign starts above lvl 4? Then the wood elf is still going to be the overall better choice a lot of the time, as will most other non-human options.

Last edited by TomReneth; 05/10/23 10:27 AM.
Don't you just hate it when people with dumb opinions have nice avatars?