Originally Posted by ArvGuy
Originally Posted by OwlMort
I mean for the most part you can opt out of it yourself by putting the ability score increases on the races traditional stats, there's nothing to stop you from giving your wood elf +2 dex and +1 wis, the only the races you can't do this with are the ones that got extra ASI's (human, half elf, and mountain dwarf).
Indeed, a dextrous elf has become no more dextrus than a dextrous half-orc or human. And an exceptionally strong half-orc has become no stronger than an exceptionally strong halfling. Meanwhile, dwarfs now gain what exactly that they didn't gain before, to make up for the fact that they're as a whole no tougher than gnomes? What advantage does a dwarf fighter have over a gnome fighter, for instance? How about a dragonborn fighter, are they scarier or tougher or stronger than high elf fighters?

I can do a whole bunch of stuff, but there's absolutely no way for me to pretend that any races are inherently stronger or tougher or smarter or more coordinated in their movements, because the game plain and simply contradicts that notion in very explicit terms.

And the end result, like I said, would seemingly be that the meta will end up being martial races for squishy classes and squishy races for martial classes, because the martial races really don't offer any kind of synergy with martial classes.
TBH I find ASI's to be the most boring and flavourless race feature so I don't really care whether they're floating, set, or attached to something other then race. I just don't notice the different between playing a character with 15 in their attack stat instead of 16/17, its only a +1, it doesn't stand out in actual play. When playing instead of building it's features like orcs powerful build letting you carry weight and grapple enemies like your large size, and halfling nimbleness letting you dart through enemy squares, and being able to see in the dark as a dwarf, that actually make me feel like I'm playing something other then a human in a mask. When i play a dragonborn it's because i want to play a awesome dragon person who breaths fire not because i want +1 to my weapon attack, when i play a half orc it's because i want to play a tough orc person whose so tough they keep standing when others would fall unconscious not cause i want +1 to weapon attack. The removal of heavy armour str requirements and tool proficiencies does more to hurt dwarf than the loss of +1 does mountain dwarf - I hope that they've been given new cool flavourful creatures to make up for it. I know other people care about ASI's, and fair enough, but floating asi's don't make races feel the same to me.

(I also hope 5e revised/5.1 replaces things like elves keen senses with something more interesting than a perception proficiency that anyone can get from their BG or class, and that they rename subraces to cultures and seperate out learned things like skills and weapons into cultures and keep race/lineage as only the physical things like darkvision and powerful build. But that's beyond the scope of this topic so nevermind me crazy)