I would always lose something I care deeply about: world integrity, to gain something I care nothing about: someone minmaxing a character.
It's therefore a fallacy to claim your proposal "costs me nothing". Or anyone else against it, nothing. One may as well propose removing all class restrictions preventing magic users to pick and swap spells, because you see... my character has that backstory. You just stick with standard cleric spells! (Result: killing much of multiclassing for convenience).
There is a point where a wild west of internal logic starts to feel grating. We disagree where that point is. Nonetheless, when rules become suggestions, depth is exchanged for convenience. Sometimes, that is necessary because of technological limitations. On the matter of becoming op quicker, that's... not a "feature" of any type added to the game in my book. It's just something that takes away and gives nothing back.
Again it's not always about minmaxing. There is also roleplaying benefit to having the choice. At the end of the day if other people making choices you don't like hurts your experience then I pity you. And I hope you can enjoy this game in the future even knowing others play it differently
Originally Posted by mrfuji3
Originally Posted by Scoonster49
Originally Posted by mrfuji3
So no mutual agreement that PCs should have significant inherent racial differences, gotcha. One human with darkvision, gnomish cunning, dwarven resilience, and/or draconic breath weapon please. :P
First off we have not been talking about any of that just the ability point scores. But hell if you want to talk about those too my 2 cents is I will usually go with the traditional but if I have a character idea that includes something out of the ordinary then heck why not pick it if I have the option. If others want to stay rigidly with whats canon then fine, if others want to go hog wild, fine neither hurts me. The main point is If I am given options but choose not to take them I don't care if others do in their own game. You seem to be very invested in others playing the game the same way you do
We weren't originally talking about that but I shifted the focus of the conversation to try to find a point where we could possibly agree. I understand, sometimes one misses something when reading and responding to a lot of people's posts. I've certainly done it myself.
To me, it's good to have a world system that emphasizes the differences of entirely distinct creatures and incorporates those differences into character concepts instead of allowing players to ignore them. Ignoring racial features (again and importantly, without penalty) veers much too close to the "the backstory of my character is that they're smarter than everyone and thus should start at 20 Intelligence" phenomenon. Rules provide a framework for playing a game/telling a story, and imo racial ASIs add more to that than they restrict mechanically.
In Pathfinder you can spend a feat to gain the abilities of different ancestry (race). This allows freedom but at the cost of dedicating a feat to this. I'm fine with this solution. In D&D 5e, I'm in favor of the "everybody gets a free starting feat" homebrew rule, which allows any character to start with 16+ in a stat by taking a half-feat. (but some races can start with an 18 or get a Full Feat instead)
I mean generally agree having uniqueness for each race is best and if it were a MMO or something I would agree with you but this isn't. I mean I would definitely make certain I had narrative reasons to veer from the standard attributes and pick penalties to make certain I am not giving myself an extra advantage overall but I still feel giving us more choices than less is best so we can tailor to ourselves how close to lore we want to anchor ourselves to
