Playing against type can be very fun, and satisfying. I don't understand why you would want to make it less so by taking away the inherent challenge of doing it.
Does the game have no challenge if your character is a Half-Orc Barbarian with the standard +2 STR/+1 CON? Of course it still has challenge. I don't know where people get the incredibly bizarre notion that someone putting a +2/+1 where they want is some kind of magic spell which makes that character great at everything and bad at nothing, yet in these discussions whenever the idea of floating ASI's comes up, so does this "THAT'LL MAKE THEM A SUPERMAN GOOD AT EVERYTHING" strawman.
It should not be confusing to you that different people have different opinions and thus not everyone agrees that the fun of playing against type
requires having a mechanical penalty making them much less effective compared to the rest of the party. That's especially true in the pen and paper version when you can actually play a character and have a real DM to interact with to better express playing against type.
Well for me personally, the appeal of playing against type is in roleplay, not mechanics. I want the world to penalize my character for trying to break out of typical racial boxes, not the system.
Exactly this. I have ideas for two pen-and-paper characters who are playing against type. Who are told that their desired path is wrong for one of that species. They have their own flaws and their own internal self-doubts to overcome. That is part of the challenge they face. That is the part which is interesting to overcome. Trying to overcome a -1 is not nearly as interesting.
Obviously those aspects aren’t going to be in the pre-written, artificial DM of a video game.
Our characters are special only because we roll an extra die during character creation, we might not even choose to do this. What kind of person wants to roleplay adversity without actually having to deal with it?
The kind of person who – and you may want to take a seat, because this could come as a shock –
has a different opinion than you do. In fact, perhaps the person wanting to play as a race/class combination of their choice doesn’t want to roleplay adversity at all, and is just a casual who wants to play a race/class combination of their choice without a mechanical penalty?
