What is your opinion on rigid character attributes(ability scores)?

[Old One]

Non-rigid ability scores have never made any sense to me, but I've been forced to live with them due to their ubiquitousness.

[Norfleet]

Non-rigid ability scores have never made any sense to me, but I've been forced to live with them due to their ubiquitousness.

Nonrigid ability scores are just skills by another name, where you start with some baseline "zero" point and dump level-up points into them.

[maidenhaver]

Age should also factor. Attributes should decline sharply after 40 for professional adventurers. How many spells can your fighter take, before his perception of reality gets so bent he's talking to trees like a druid? Female clerics should be worthless after 23.

[UltraFan123]

I agree with the race thing for the most part.

Dwarves are just humans for burly manlets, halflings/hobbits are just humans for thin manlets, elves are just humans for magic twinks, orcs are just humans who want to role-play a ******, etc.

Anything more exotic than those is likewise just "human but flaming hair or stone skin or red horns", and the likes of animalfolk are indeed just furry or scaly self-inserts.

Mechanic-wise, the advantage that non-human races get are usually balanced out with negative penalties and things like that, and more often than not the penalties don't make the non-humans worth it in the long run.

Likewise, if the exotic non-humans with enormous stats didn't had penalties, then everyone would be defaulting to them for whatever class they wanted to play as.

[WaterMage]

I don't mind rigid or flexible attributes. I don't mind getting attributes by spending points. By doing tasks and random stuff. Drinking mutagens, receiving blessings, and some story events. Fix attributes. I just hate when my character's muscle mass is 100% tied to how fancy his boots are. Very common on WoW clones.

[Lhynn]

If a race option has a mechanical advantage in a given class, it becomes the obvious pick. If they DON'T have a mechanical advantage, then what's the point?

I always thought the more interesting mechanic in this is to set affinity to different factions and communities depending on race and make that matter.

[Brother Chad]

I should be able to powermax everything into gamebreaking territory and anything less is intellectual and spiritual weakness.

[Tweed]

I don't care.

[Norfleet]

I always thought the more interesting mechanic in this is to set affinity to different factions and communities depending on race and make that matter.

Yeah, but that would involve making the game...racist. You wouldn't just be able to create half a dozen different varieties of humans of various rubber forehead and stat-class affinity. You'd have to actually make a world where people hate each other and call each other nasty names. A world where just about everyone, including the player, is racist. Not only would this make the developers and publishers, massively uncomfortable, but it would be a lot of work, since you'd have to add additional dialogue for every permutation of racist interaction.

That's why the best you get is maybe one race that is racist and calls everyone else N'wahs, and so race is either just cosmetic, or a build item. The closest I've ever heard of to a racist game was Evercrack, and that really doesn't stick past the tutorial where your starting zone is determined that way.

[Norfleet]

Mechanic-wise, the advantage that non-human races get are usually balanced out with negative penalties and things like that, and more often than not the penalties don't make the non-humans worth it in the long run.

The problem is that "balancing advantages with penalties" isn't really balance, it's minmax fodder. Giving a race +Int and -Str isn't a balance, it's doubling down on being a wizard. Even if the effect doesn't involve a clear +Stat, -Stat of some kind, but is still something important like "Healed by fire, takes double damage from cold", well, that's definitely a build-defining decision. You know what you're about to do when you play THAT, and it isn't "make a fighter".

The alternative is that the stat adjusts are meaningless, like +5% resistance to some damage type, -5% to something else, meaning race is just cosmetic slop. Unless one of those adjusts is +1% to damage. Then that becomes the powergamer choice and everything ELSE is cosmetic slop.