wraelk
3yr ago
Making my way through the Wheel of Time: I read many of the books as a child but had difficulty finding them in order at the library, and as a result feel like I missed out. With the Amazon series coming out, felt it was a good time to go through them start to finish. I'm just a little bit into A Crown of Swords now.
Judging by the reread, something happened after the first two books: I mostly remember those events, but everything else is disjointed, I think there were characters I didn't care about as a kid and so wasn't really paying attention to.
Honestly holds up well, and I'm impressed by how many "main" characters they can keep going, and how willing they are to move characters in and out of viewpoint status, as their importance to the story changes. The magic system is also very good, keeping a good balance between standard fantasy tropes and weird creative stuff that characters can innovate with.
Interestingly, I think the reason they're looking at this from a non-political perspective is because this kind of was the case for 5e: a great many races got passed over for serious character creation because there were better options. Optimizing characters in 5e often fell to one of:
Variant Human: got ability bonuses in whatever abilities you wanted, got a free feat at level 1. Worked for basically anything, and often got fighter builds relying on specific feats up and running up to 3 levels earlier than they normally would.
Half-Elf: got 4 extra ability points instead of most races that capped out at 3, 2 of which were in CHA (a useful spellcasting stat) and the other 2 could be in any. Had a grab bag of useful abilities like darkvision, access to a powerful racial feat, and save bonuses.
Aaracokra: could fly as long as they weren't using armor, which would make casters largely untargetable for much of the early levels (typically the most dangerous phase of a campaign for casters).
Part of the issue was that the balance was a little off, but part of the issue was that things often had to line up just right to make a race playable. Take Mountain Dwarf for example: +2 ability points in both STR and CON , free proficiency with some strong melee weapons, and free medium armor proficiency. But while this all lines up thematically, when you combine them with an actual class it starts falling apart. STR and CON bonuses say Fighter/Barbarian, but they don't care about the extra proficiencies, they get them already. Those would be better suited to a weaker class that doesn't get armor like Wizard, but now you're wasting the ability points that were a big reason you were choosing that race in the first place: a Wizard generally won't care about Strength. Or Bugbear, which got a neat ability (extra reach with melee attacks) but got a +2STR/+1DEX ability bonus, which was generally guaranteed to waste some points since a melee character will generally focus in STR or DEX but not both. It's no accident that the races that did well are very generically useful stats and bonuses.
In a late 5e book they basically got rid of racial bonuses: each race gets the same quantity of ability bonuses, but an optional rule now says you can swap them into other abilities: your Mountain Dwarf still gets +2/+2, but the STR becomes INT and now you have your heavily-armored wizard with all his traits working together well.
This helped a lot with opening up other races: tons of builds that weren't really going to come together now worked well, and even if they weren't as optimized as just running the old straight lines they worked, particularly good news for players that have played many campaigns and have run through all the cookie-cutter builds. But it was kind of a weird thing thematically, because now you're really inclined to play directly opposite tropes. A Goblin Rogue doesn't make any sense, because the Goblin's nimbleness overlaps with the Rogue's nimbleness and wastes space (they both get similar features that you wont' want of). Instead you want a Goblin Wizard, or even a Goblin Barbarian, because now the Goblin abilities are completely new to the class. And I think that kind of points at why people don't want classic racial bonuses, mechanically.
5e is a really condensed game, trying to simplify away from earlier editions' huge slew of bonuses. And in the process they've reduced how many levers they can pull to incentivize things: everything overlaps with everything else, it doesn't stack. This means there's a limit to how much you can optimize on any one axis: you can't build out in one direction, the game doesn't have any new bonuses to hand you other than deep in the class trees. So instead you build wide, trying to eliminate character weaknesses, and in the process run into an inherent conflict. A Gnome fighter works better than a Dwarf fighter, because they aren't giving a Dwarf things a fighter doesn't already have, but a Gnome can branch out into new things. The race-tied ability bonuses end up heavily reducing build space and promoting feel-bad decisions, because now you have to choose between good stats and good bonuses, and a lot of the time the less-exciting but very powerful stat bonuses win out.
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