To me the purpose of the rules is to represent the fictional reality. This doesn't mean they thy must do so in excruciating detail or that things couldn't be abstracted. But the underlying fiction should be the starting point. When I play a RPG I have no interest engaging in a game that is disconnected from the fiction. If I wanted to do that, I could play Tetris while listening an audio novel.
Who said it's "disconnected"? There's still clearly
a connection. It's just not connected in this
one specific way--a way that, as I've said, isn't statistically accurate, and as others have said, has some potentially unpleasant subtext.
I am really not following you there. I have no idea whether it is a character choice in fiction has to do with anything. It is all player choice in reality. And it is not like people in the setting choose to be porn into sorcerous bloodline either...
Why should racial ability modifiers
have to follow the expected norms of a species when, by definition, the player is opting into playing not only a specific being (who may not have any specific relation to the norm, because that's how variability
works)? With spells, there is a clear relationship between why there are some silos and not others in both fictional terms and design terms. With ability scores, there is no such clear relationship, because ability scores aren't
traditions and tools developed by people, they are
abstractions applied by game rules. Spells are, in several relevant ways, completely unlike ability scores--and, more importantly, have absolutely no relation to either verisimilitude (since, by definition, they can't resemble anything true since spells
do not exist IRL) or problems of biased representation of the disenfranchised IRL (though, as noted, biased representation of such groups is unrelated to my argument).
So why did they need to change how the races work if adding the custom lineage would have fixed the thing?
Because some people will have more in common with the "expected average" than others? I thought that was obvious from my phrasing. These are
different levels of conformity--because no population conforms perfectly to any set of averages, no matter how wide you try to make that average. That's why I keep harping on this "there is no average person" thing.
Nobody conforms perfectly, so we should actively prepare for quite a range of deviation,
particularly if we're already looking at a population that deviates in some particular way...like how the vast majority of ANY race you consider won't be adventurers.
Sure. Exactly as I said earlier. Class is what dictates most of your ability scores, not the species.
I mean, if we're going for our personal preferences,
mine is to do what 13th Age did. You get a choice of one of two ability scores from your race, and another one of two from your class, so long as you don't get the same stat twice. E.g. Wizard provides +2 Int or +2 Wis, and High Elf provides +2 Int or +2 Cha. This means "iconic" pairs, e.g. Dragonborn Paladin, are locked into only one option, because both their class and their race offer +2 Cha or +2 Str. The player is always able to choose a stat boost that is valuable to them, so race is
informative rather than
determinative.
And that's really the whole point here. People are saying, "Race should not
determine so much about what a person is like." I have tackled this from the facts of the statistics of populations, rather than appeals to morality or sentiment: It is a simple, straight
fact that the amount of measurement present in things like D&D ability scores precludes the existence of more than a small portion of any given race ACTUALLY meeting all those standards. An
actual simulation of a
real biological race would have much too much variability, even if you were sampling from the whole population, and not just a HIGHLY divergent subgroup (adventurers).
If you desire simulation that produces results consistent with the actual dynamics of observable populations, then you should
not desire that every PC race has a neat, clean, specific set of traits they all share. Even if you looked at their entire population, you would not actually find that they met these requirements. Indeed, you would find they failed them
far more often than they succeeded--even though the average would still objectively describe the central tendency of their population.
I can houserule things, and I don't mind doing a little bit of it. But there is a point where it is just easier to use a different game than even create one from scratch, than trying to fix a game that is going into different direction than you want.
I honestly fail to see how "racial ability scores are fixed to +X/+Y in my game" is such an onerous change, but okay, if that's the straw that broke the camel's back...
My thesis is that D&D's appeal is in big part based on being able to play easily recognisable archetypes, and if people start to feel that the mechanics actually do not reflect the archetypes, it will lead to disengagement. At some point people might say "What you mean that my massive half-orc that looks like Hulk is no stronger than a halfling?" or "What you mean that my Legolas clone is no more dextrous than a dwarf?"
First: I fail to see how this change
prevents "play[ing] easily recognizable archetypes." At most, it makes those archetypes less
enforced, which is very different from preventing playing them, and definitely not the same as making it
harder to play them. (Removing a law that
requires all sports cars to be painted red has no effect on whether it is
easier or harder to buy one.)
Second: You're pulling a bit of a bait and switch there. You're speaking of
a singular character, and then comparing them to
the collective of all X, for some other race X. That's not correct. The
correct statement would be, "What do you mean that my Legolas clone is no more dextrous than
the most dextrous a dwarf can be?" Because that's really what's going on here. You've painted this as EVERY dwarf is dextrous, EVERY halfling has incredible mighty thews, and neither is true. Instead,
any given dwarf MIGHT be as dextrous as your Legolas clone--but odds are good they won't be. Any
given halfling MIGHT be as strong as your massife half-orc that looks like Hulk--but odds are good they won't be. And that's EXACTLY the situation we already had, we just forced players to jump through dumb hoops to get there. The race
suggests certain things, but does not
mandate them--because the real variability of real populations is, provably and statistically, too broad to be correctly captured by such mandates.
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