A poorly balanced straw man

Fighters are linear, Wizards are quadratic.

This is an old adage about RPGs, both tabletop and video games which applies, and was probably originally applied, to DnD. It relates to the fact that at level one, fighters in DnD can reasonably easily get a good AC, good attacks and a reasonable number of HP, meaning that they are pretty effective in combat, meanwhile Wizards have a combination of low HP, poor AC and a very limited number of spells, making them relatively less useful. However, by the time Fighters are at level 20, they have not really progressed beyond having good AC, lots of HP and being able to attack well, meanwhile level 20 Wizards can bend reality, move between planes and manipulate time.

Why does this matter?

Well, I think it puts paid to the idea that DnD is a balanced game.

Why does that matter?

Because WotC just released some Unearthed Arcana which builds on the changes made to racial ability modifiers in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. Essentially, Tasha’s allows you to swap the ability score increases granted to you when you choose a race for a different ability score. So if you want to play a strong gnome, you can swap out the intelligence modifier for a strength modifier. The unearthed Arcana signposts that for future races (now described as lineages, which is a much less loaded term than race), you will just be able to allocate a +2 to any ability score and a +1 to another, with no specific standard abilities linked to the lineages.

What does this have to do with the game being balanced?

While the response to Tasha’s was generally speaking positive, there were some people who criticised the move, saying that allowing you to change your racial ability score improvement unbalanced the game, because there are a small number of races that give you two +2s, rather than the standard +2 and +1, meaning that a Mountain Dwarf for example, is objectively better than a Wood Elf because you get an extra +1 to something.

But the game is not balanced. Fighters are linear, Wizards are quadratic.

It has always been the case that certain builds in DnD are objectively better, particularly in combat, then others. Even if you make choices as to your race, class, subclass and background to maximise your abilities, certain classes and subclasses are just better than others.

Is this a problem?

No.

So why am I writing about it?

Because I think it’s important to highlight that the argument amount unbalancing the game is either a straw man argument intended to deflect from the real issue people have with the changes currently being made to the core of DnD, or it’s just a terrible argument.

The argument itself is self-defeating. If you say that allowing a Mountain Dwarf to change the two +2s from Constitution and Strength to whatever they choose unbalances the game, you are making the assumption that either a +2 to Constitution or a +2 to Strength is currently only worth a +1 to any other ability score. You’re saying that the game is unbalanced already, because one of the six abilities upon which the entire game is built is less powerful than the others. This might be true, but it means that the game is unbalanced at a foundational level, so it’s meaningless to criticise a rule change for being unbalanced, as you are holding the game up to a standard to which it does not currently and cannot ever attain.

Fighters are linear, Wizards are quadratic. The game is not balanced. It does not even try to be balanced. The one edition that they actually made a concerted effort to make the game balanced, 4th edition, was widely derided as poorly designed because it tried to change the fabric of how the game worked.

Oh.

I think we have removed the straw man and found the real reason why some people object to the way in which DnD is moving with regards to lineages.

Dwarves are Strong, Hearty, and Stubborn. Elves are Elegant, Intelligent and Wise, Orcs are Strong, Stupid and Angry. This is how the game has historically characterised some of its core races. I could go on, but it would be tiresome. It’s not just DnD. The above is exactly how Dwarves, Elves and Orcs are characterised in Lord of the Rings. These are staples of the fantasy genre, particularly the pulp fantasy genre that helped to inform DnD as it was being created and as it grew to popularity.

Is this a problem?

On one level, no, not really. If you want to play in a Lord of the Rings-like game, where all the elves are ineffable god-like near-immortal beings, and the Orcs are just mindless evil things for you to slay as you make your crawl through dungeons, then more power to you. The changes to the game included in Tasha’s and the new Unearned Arcana do not preclude this style of play.

But on another level there is something fundamentally wrong with having built into the rules of the game that certain groups of people are inherently more intelligent, or more charismatic than others. Especially when you use the word ‘race’ to describe those groups of people. To have Orcs by necessity be evil, stupid grunts, and yet also making them close enough to humans to interbreed with them and allowing players to play as Orcs in the game, DnD perpetuates a racist idea that some groups of people are fundamentually different and, especially combined with a compulsory negative modifier to an ability, inferior to others.

There are some things which are fundamental to the fabric of DnD as it is currently written. Fighters are linear, wizards are quadratic. Some of these things don’t need to change. It’s ok that the game is not and does not try to be perfectly balanced. There are other things that appear to be fundamental to the fabric of DnD, such as the way in which races work, that are actually deeply problematic and need to be changed.

It’s time people who don’t like the way lineages are changing in DnD (or who don’t like innovation like the combat wheelchair for that matter), stop hiding behind straw man arguments about balance and come to terms with what it is about the changes that they really don’t like.

Because then they might realise that the problem isn’t with the rule changes. The problem is with them.