In the current version, Ancestries are 100% feats. Powers were used in the past to justify ability score bonuses, but I pulled back because I don’t want powerful ancestries to be seen as a mandatory choice (e.g. not every Cha caster should feel the need to be a Faery).
The advantage of feats:
- Choose whichever abilities you want, don’t pay for those you don’t
- Power level of ancestry abilities doesn’t have to rise to the level of Powers. Races like Elf, Dwarf, etc aren’t going to have Power-level abilities.
The advantage of powers:
- Better for an all-inclusive approach. “Everything a dragon needs” is much closer to Power than Feat, or even 3 Feats.
- Very powerful ancestries (dragon, vampire, faery) should probably cost Powers, as Feats are too cheap
- The classic “fighter who doesn’t want to be a spellcaster” can lean into powerful Ancestries as a way to spend Powers without gaining spells
Then there’s the side issue of ability scores. Specifically, should there be any way to use ancestry to boost them, compared to the standard ability scores any human might have?
Con argument:
- Ability scores are the single most sensitive number in game balance. Proficiency bonus is a function of level. Ability scores more or less single-handedly determine your peak DCs. Thus, any means of raising them automatically becomes the most attractive mechanic. PCs will choose ancestries based on ability score buffs, not flavor or utility.
- Having ability score bonuses from many sources makes it hard to understand where your ability scores come from and how to calculate them–not including Ancestry among them is one less source.
Pro:
- Race fantasy strongly leans into ability scores. Nobody expects Vi or Buffy to be as strong as a bodybuilder, but thanks to powerful Ancestry, they are. Not sure exactly how to balance this: there are far more ways for a 120 lb, 5’1" clothie to be as strong as Conan than there are for a beefy barbarian to suddenly have a 24 Charisma. As if Strength wasn’t enshittified enough. But if you’re on the pro-race-fantasy side, you probably want ability score bonuses.
- For fans of ‘realism’, it does seem as if the average Dwarf or Orc would have more Str/Con than the average Elf or Halfling. Of course, the average anything doesn’t have a 16-18 ability score, so it starts to smell a little funky–I mean yes, the top 100m dashers in the world are all black men, but we’re talking 0.01 seconds…and do we need that level of race talk in our games? I feel like the kind of people that obsess over this are the kind of people I don’t mind System 8 disenfranchising. If we’re going to obsess over the minor physical differences between races, it seems weird to ignore the much larger difference between sexes, and nobody wants those. But, for the pro side–it may seem odd to some that orcs don’t get a +2 Str and Elves don’t get a +2 Dex.
Alternatives have been looked at: the “minimum stat” mechanic is an interesting alternative. A sorcerer-bard who happens to be a dragon may just happen to have an 18 Str because of a minimum, even though his primary stat Cha is the only one he put full points into. Meanwhile, a fighter dragon would have a 20+ Str, so the minimum 18 would do nothing. This prevents the whole “every fighter is a dragon, every sorcerer is a faery” problem. It’s also very difficult to quantify how much power the ability scores are granting: how useful is Strength to a sorcerer? Charisma to a fighter? Is the mechanic of being halfway between good and useless at something secondary to your build worth the potential alienation of those mere mortals who don’t have these powerful ancestries?
In general, my preference for ancestry is thus:
- For regular races, I basically don’t care about racial bonuses. It’s like WoW–I don’t even think about them. They’re tiny, occasionally useful, and nice to have, but I could take or leave them. While I can map the Elf or Dwarf abilities to a nice set of 3 feats, I don’t see myself spending a lot of feats on these when I could take maneuvers, metamagic, or class feats.
- For powerful ancestry, I go one of two ways:
- Incidental: a draconic sorcerer-bard is basically exactly as effective as a human sorcerer-bard. No pure spellcaster needs anything but their spells to be cool. Whatever you’re looking to do–fly, resist fire, make fireballs–spells can do all of it. It’s nice to spend a mere feat or two on this. At higher level, a power isn’t that rough of a cost I guess…but at level 5, I’m not sure I’d be happy about spending a power on Fey Ancestry. I guess flying is cool, but in the current version I can spend 1 feat on flying.
- Essential: if I’m playing Kaine, or Vi, or any non-caster, powerful ancestry is one of the only ways to keep up. Kaine is happy being a fighter…because he’s super-strong, super-tough, and can sprout wings and fire immunity when he needs to. In this case, I’d happily dump multiple powers into this ancestry, in order to give Kaine the utility and raw power he needs to compete with spellcasters. This is perhaps the strongest argument for Ancestry as Powers.
Since the Vi/Kaine build is so central to this debate, let’s dive in deeper. Every spellcaster should value one thing above all else: Powers. Maybe at level 10+ they can slow down, but they’re not likely to want to sacrifice a single power slot below that. They have feats to spare, and may spend one or two on something cool like wings or scales…but even then, Six spent so many feats achieving baseline dragon powers, she may have actually been willing to spend a power instead. She missed out on a lot of metamagic feats.
Meanwhile, Kaine and Vi probably don’t want a single class power. It’s Ancestry all the way. And yet, useful though they are, Ancestry Feats would compete head-on for the fighter’s most valuable asset: feats. Maneuvers are all feats, and without them, fighters are just d20 rolling machines. While an argument could be made that maybe maneuvers shouldn’t be feats…if they were something else, then fighters would now have two ability types they don’t really need instead of just the one (Powers).
Let’s follow that thread for a bit, rather than discarding it. If somehow, Fighters traded in Powers for Maneuvers, we would achieve the desirable trait of the same mechanic achieving the same purpose: Powers provide the primary source of actions, damage, and overall effectiveness for casters. Feats, for spellcasters, are often defensive, or they enhance the utility of powers. So it’s weird that Fighters get their actions from Feats instead. Another way of looking at it is:
- Ability type 1: the buttons you press in combat. The primary source of your ability to affect other creatures.
- Ability type 2: traits that customize your build, specializing in this or that, modifying the buttons you press.
For casters, powers are type 1 and feats are type 2. For fighters, one could argue the reverse: maneuvers have a ‘type 1’ vibe, whereas Ancestry Powers like Tiefling are very ‘type 2’, offering passive abilities, not buttons. No idea what I would call these abilities, but mechanically, that’s much closer to the truth.
If we magically solved that problem, I suppose we could relatively easily resolve the central thesis:
- Ancestry powers are pretty much always type 2 (what we currently call feats)
- Spells and maneuvers are always type 1
So that’s a mess. Thoughts?