This might be a touch out of the order you put them in.
Not putting too much weight on it. Reading too much lore into it. Hard mechanics are important, and yes, I stand by that the idea of "playing against race" is a euphemism for playing a character that starts out as gimped. You're literally picking a race/class combination that gives you worse stats to work with for roleplaying reasons. How is that anything but gimping your character? Given how dnd currently and look like it will continue to work, the difference between having and not having good stats for your class at the start can delay your progression by 4 levels.
You might get to lvl 8 in a campaign, but lvl 12 seems much rarer. If you need feats for your playstyle (like 2handed or archery), you can be stuck at that +2 for a long while. So Beatrice Bruiseknuckle is absolutely playing with a disadvantage until lvl 12 at the minimum, since you point out Barbarians specifically. A half-orc Barbarian will be ahead in stats or feats even after Beatrice "catches up".
A very quick look at stats:
H-orc: 16 / 14 / 16 / 10 / 12 / 8 / Beatrice: 15 / 16 / 15 / 10 / 10 / 8
Lvl 4: Great Weapon Master / +1 str, +1 con
Lvl 8: +2 Str / Great Weapon Master
Lvl 12: +2 Str / +2 Str
Lvl 16: +2 Con / +2 Str
Lvl 19: +2 Con / +2 Con
"...you've disregarded all comments about aesthetic, feel, tone, style and character as being without value and meaningless..."It's worse than meaningless. You are using those as arguments to make everyone else have to play gimped characters too without homebrew. It strikes me as a fundamentally selfish and gatekeeping that you value your sense of aesthetic, feel, tone, style and character over giving people the freedom to play whatever they want without punishing them mechanically.
"... different peoples are different. Different species of creature, as our different races are in the realms, are physically, biologically different. This is a good thing, and it's something we should be celebrating - not trying to erase...It might not matter much in a system where these differences do not have as big of an impact, like the Pillars of Eternity, where -3% to +6% (17 vs 20 max. 18-21 with background) of base value gets lost in a wide range of much more impactful modifiers and only a handful of builds are even going to go above the normal cap because they have so many stats that matter. But dnd has few stat increases and each one represents a fairly big part of your progression, so forcing some races to constantly play catchup is definitely not a good thing.
Again, you can gimp your character if you want to. I don't want that to be part of the base rules, where players of all stripes have to be considered.
"...Have I lost the ability to make a character that I currently can, with the new documents? Yes! I have, in fact... If, for example, I play a dwarf who is the dwarfiest dwarf that ever did dwarf..."You're saying you're dependent on a specific stat bonus to know? That's strange, I thought you valued aesthetic, feel, tone, style and character, which can be taken from more than just a +2 bonus on a character sheet. Like the basic lore for the setting you're using. Or features like the orcs' Powerful Build. And I think Powerful Build is a pretty good flavorful feature; it shows that they tend towards high physical strength without limiting what other races are allowed to have in starting stats. I want more of the racial features to be like that: low mechanical impact that doesn't discriminate on the basic stat progression, and still tells you something about them.
That the basic ruleset no longer specifically reflects the Forgotten Realms is also a nice side effect of this. Like a setting where dwarves are known for their rangers, preferring to hunt down and pick off enemies that come too close to their territories with archery, ambushes and stealth instead of meeting them on the field of battle. That would not be covered in the PHB 2014, since there is no dwarf with a +dex bonus. But it would be covered in the Tasha's and One D&D system without needing specific homebrew.
"...That's how performative reactionaries characterise it in order to vilify it, but that's not the case, and it's not how it's ever been...."Call me crazy, but why are people ignoring the fact that fantasy races are very often inspired by real world people? Again, Tolkien's orcs are "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the least lovely Mongol-types" (Letter 210). That's the basis the modern orc is built from, which definitely gives some very bad vibes when they're made to fit the barbarian stereotype. Or when races that are meant to be beautiful to human eyes (elves, angels) tend to be white and often blond. It says a lot about the biases of the creators and their assumptions about their audience. Even more when there is backlash against depicting these as different.
That some people dismiss this observation as "performative reactionaries" strikes me as more than a little strange, and almost like a knee-jerk reaction to have any excuse to dismiss it without consideration.
"...Clarence the orc, who studied his whole life in candlekeep, rarely gets out, hasn't touched grass in years, and love books may still retain some in-born elements that leave him slightly stronger than Charles, the human candlekeep scholar who has followed the same life path and has been his reading buddy for years..."Why should Charles be allowed a starting intelligence of 16 and Clarence only 15? It's not an insignificant penalty, especially on Wizards. That's +1 to int based skills, +1 int saving throws, +1 spell DC, +1 to hit with spells and +1 prepared spells per day in Charles' favor. That last one is particularly brutal. And Clarence will forever be playing catchup with Charles because of his lower initial stats. You call that "playing against race", I call it gimping your character.
If you want to gimp your character, you can. The system allows for it. I don't see why the rest of us should have to homebrew to get around it.
"...Again: different peoples are different. Different species of creature, as our different races are in the realms, are physically, biologically different. This is a good thing, and it's something we should be celebrating - not trying to erase. If we're allowed to say that halflings have a tendency to grow to a certain height, and that is allowed to be an in-born, biological feature of their species, we can also say that orcs tend to grow with a denser muscle mass than equivalent other humanoids, and that gnomes have slightly more crenulated brains that generally give them better information processing and detail retention capabilities than equivalent other humanoids. These are all just features of the species of creature they are; None of these are bad things, and erasing them is only taking away from the game space, not making it better..."I absolutely do consider it a bad thing to punish people for playing a character you think is "against race" mechanically. Racial features should be flavor, not optimization.
