As far as i know, Humans was allways weakest Race in all fantasy i know ... maybe except Dragon Age, where city elves seem to be even weaker ...
Human power is not in stats, since individual human is in any matter worse than litteraly any other race, their strength is in numbers.
Not sure about other settings but Humans dominated D&D through 3.5e. Not sure about 4e. 5e is the edition where humans got the shaft.
Early editions, only humans had unlimited levels in any class. In 3e, they got a free feat and bonuses to skill points and no restrictions to multiclass.
5e humans are pretty weak. It’s like the developers wanted people to move away from humans. Very odd.
I'm in the camp that thinks D&D should ditch the term Race and replace it with the term Species, in part to get away from Tolkien-esque turns of phrase like "the race of men" or language which sort of worked at that time and in that fantasy universe, but which feel less well suited to 5e D&D. In the Silmarillion it was heavily implied all the Tolkien races eventually converged into humans as time went on, and that the big 3 shared the same essential source in Eru, so it worked. But in Faerun we got all these monstrous races now like Gith and Tiefs and Half-Orcs and such, where it feels like it would make a lot more sense to think of them as different species. I think one consequence of the 3rd ed experiments was to frame the races in such a way where any race could push basically any sort of stat/class build combo they wanted. Even the way ability bonuses are allotted now. All the races feel way more like a riff on 2e Human/Half-Elves. Its cool for flexibility of imagination but does have a way of making Humans kind of boring by comparison lately. Esp as mentioned above without the variants to spice it up. I don't really know what they could do, but I was thinking the other night that there are very few magical equipment type items that have class restrictions in BG3, and I don't think any that have racial restrictions.
That is one way to liven up bonuses in the game that don't necessarily have to be totally baked in to the class/race/ability choices at char creation. BG1/2 used special items/abilities more as a feature of the NPC companion characters rather than for the main PC, companions with their personal amulates or armors or moonblades or whatever. But something similar could be done in BG3 just geared more towards the main PC. I think you can get a lot of mileage out of magical equipment like that which is acquired early on for characters with specific builds. I don't mean like circlets that raise anyone's intelligence to 18, but things that are geared more specifically towards char creation choices tied to being Humans, or Drow, or Dwarves or whatever. Probably not what the OP was driving at, but its another way to try for an entertaining balance achieved more on the go than at the outset.
