Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Fextralife Video - Race and Class and ability scores discussed! *Major Spoilers*

We have this in Real Life. Several countries have mandatory military service which includes training with very specific weapons. Several U.S. states value hunting in a way that leads to either rifle and/or shotgun proficiencies being a near universal skill there.

What about it?
He was wizard, and if you make him anything else, he still was ...

Respec =/= memory loss.

When you talk with him a lot, in different dialogue he tells you that he still have all knowledge, but lacks strong connection to weave, that would allow him cast things as he did.

Indeed. Though they made a point of saying that bards have numerous voiced taunts and I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the lines that have made it in.

Yes, countries. Not races. Would the elves of one nation in the south have the same mandatory training as one in the snowy north? Would a human in the big city have the same training as one in the country? It really doesn't work once you try and think about races as anything beyond stereotypes of themselves. Even racial ASIs, much as I think there are better ways to show racial differences, can at least be argued to denote some sort of innate, majorly biological difference.

We do have those exact differences in the 'subraces' which are the equivalent of nations. Drow and Wood Elves have different racial weapons. Shield/Mountain Dwarves have armor training that their Hill/Gold counterparts do not.

If you don't want to compare races to nations, but species instead, then we have that same real life equivalent. Humans have a racial predilection towards hand wielded weapons, while canines prefer natural biting weapons, and mantis shrimp prefer unarmed blunt or piercing strikes.

In the case of Battleaxes, Handaxes, Light Hammers, and Warhammers for Dwarves and the Militant Githyanki with Longswords and 2-handed swords I feel like those do make sense culturally.

However, adding humans to that mix does not make a whole lot of sense. It would seem to reduce humanity to a monoculture despite there being a lot of different races of humans with a lot of different backgrounds.

I'll admit, I am not in agreement with the human changes. I am at a bit of a loss given how strongly the community requested Variant Human - and that would have been popular with the community, new players, old players, Santa clause, most of The Beatles, the New York Giants and left-handed proctologists.

Well, hopefully it gets changed or we mod it out.

Pathfinder has country origins as an option for backgrounds that have area specific weapon proficiencies, and even their regular backgrounds float between skill, weapon, and armor rather than just skill +tools/language. That probably would make more sense from your point of view.