D&D 5E (2024) Which races would YOU put into the 50th anniversary Players Handbook?

[Bill Zebub]

Bottom or top half?

Just the inner jaw.

 

[Cadence]

Bottom or top half?

Right and Left like Mazikeen

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You do them all.

I fear I don't understand your meaning in the context of the question.

 

[Scribe]

I fear I don't understand your meaning in the context of the question.

ASI tied to race.
Special rules tied to race.
Cultures specific to race.
Gods tied to specific race.

Why limit the design space to a single thing, when a race could contain all these things?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Humans
Dwarves
Elves
Orcs
Gnomes (Halflings will be folded into Small Humans)
Dragonborn
Goblins
Bugbears
Hobgoblins
Tiefling
Aasimar (or 4e Devas, they're cooler)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

ASI tied to race.
Special rules tied to race.
Cultures specific to race.
Gods tied to specific race.

Why limit the design space to a single thing, when a race could contain all these things?

In order:

1. Because race essentialism is a false and pernicious ideology IRL that has done much harm to a lot of people, and things which perpetuate it should be altered so they do not do so. Also, because real variability in actual living creatures is more than sufficient to make beings who fit anywhere on the "this is something a mortal being can be" spectrum, thus it is not merely laudable, but truly more realistic to embrace that variability in playable characters.* Playable characters, I would note, that are already going to be weird for their race no matter what, because most people don't have class levels.
2. I already support using this, so I have no criticism for it.
3. Same as the first answer to #1, but also because culture is an idea, an ideal, a trained or learned thing, not something baked into a person's genetics. You can take two identical twins and raise them in different cultures and, guess what, their cultures will be different! Physiology can have an influence on culture (e.g., as I've said in previous threads, dragonborn mature faster, lay eggs, and have breath weapons; this will affect them regardless of the culture they grow up in, and a majority-dragonborn culture will be affected by this.) But physiology does not, cannot, should not dictate culture.
4. Setting-specific divinities are individuals with their own preferences; if they choose to favor a specific race over other races, that's their prerogative. It has little to nothing to do with the physiology of any given race, and everything to do with that deity's preferences. You may have noticed, for example, that the Romans enforced syncretism of their deities upon every culture they encountered. Worship is a cultural thing, and thus taught; divine favor is an individual-deity-personality thing and thus completely separate from the question of physiology.

Or, in sum? Because there are both unpleasant implications of #1 and #3 when these things are treated as essentialism rather than as real and IRL measurable variability (for #1) or as the product of training/learning aka "acculturation" (for #3), and because it is more grounded, more like the way real things actually behave, to not make these things into examples of race-essentialism. Those unpleasant implications can be avoided, thus, barring some other even more pressing concern, they should be.

*See, for example, the results of Anthropometry of Flying Personnel - 1950, G.S. Daniels. TL;DR: There is no such thing as an actually average person. Just two or three requirements (if strict) or five or six (if somewhat looser) is enough to exclude the vast majority of the population, and "exactly +2 Str, +2 Con" or whatever is certainly going to be quite strict. Or, for another example, the Australian Bureau of Statistics openly stating that, in both the 2011 and 2016 censuses, the average Australian does not exist, because no individual person has all of the average (or, for non-averageable things, most common) characteristics, despite this being based on the full population data of their nation (over 23 million people.)

 

[Scribe]

I do not apply real world nationalities, to fictional races @EzekielRaiden and so I do not care if there is no 'average Australian' any more than an 'average Canadian' or 'average Egyptian'.

An average Dwarf though? Elf? Halfing? Thats a different thing to me, not because they are real, but because they are fiction.

We wont agree on this.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I do not apply real world nationalities, to fictional races @EzekielRaiden and so I do not care if there is no 'average Australian' any more than an 'average Canadian' or 'average Egyptian'.

An average Dwarf though? Elf? Halfing? Thats a different thing to me, not because they are real, but because they are fiction.

We wont agree on this.

Fiction is one of the ways by which we model, analyze, and understand reality. Fiction which completely ignores this fact is fiction which contributes to problems in the real world.

We learn from the fiction we use, whether we like it or not, whether we wish to or not. This is NOT the same as saying people cannot distinguish fiction from reality. It is saying that fiction is often an influence on thought. Consider how poorly-handled "darkest hour" situations are pretty significantly part of why a lot of people cannot grok that depression is an illness that must be treated, rather than a trial which must be overcome.

 

[Scribe]

Fiction is one of the ways by which we model, analyze, and understand reality. Fiction which completely ignores this fact is fiction which contributes to problems in the real world.

We learn from the fiction we use, whether we like it or not, whether we wish to or not.

I understand where you are going, but I simply wont agree. A Goliath being stronger than a Halfing is simply not going to be a problem to me, any more than a Tiger, being stronger than a House Cat is.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I understand where you are going, but I simply wont agree. A Goliath being stronger than a Halfing is simply not going to be a problem to me, any more than a Tiger, being stronger than a House Cat is.

But they aren't necessarily stronger than halflings, are they? A halfling can hit 20 Strength just like a goliath can. And whether you use point-buy stats, or roll-and-assign, or even strict-rolled stats, the gap between a halfling and a goliath will never be more than 4 levels' worth of training (to get the next ASI.) In fact, a fresh-faced level 1 halfling can easily have 5 points higher Strength than a goliath does, a noticeable difference. (I don't know why you would make a goliath with minimum Strength, but it's entirely doable; perhaps wanting to be a more durable Wizard or something.) And even if you compare a goliath with high strength to one without, even with rolled stats so a starting 20 is possible, it will never take more than 3 ASIs to catch up--at which point the halfling and goliath are completely equal purely through training.

And then, from there, natural variability is already a thing that exists. Michael Phelps is physically stronger and hardier than most human beings because his genetics are slightly different (his red blood cells are smaller but more numerous, for example, so his blood is more efficient at carrying in oxygen and nutrients and carrying away waste.) Mozart was an absolute musical genius who got started at age 5. Gauss was likewise a mathematical genius who (at least apocryphally) was proving meaningful results in grade school. Meanwhile, some folks have dyscalculia or dyslexia or dyspraxia or a host of things that impede learning, or have physical weakness outside the bounds of normal, or suffer from a congenitally weak constitution, or absolutely chronic foot-in-mouth disease ( ), etc., etc. Factors that can easily push someone well outside the "norm" for their physiology.

So...we aren't actually ending up with goliaths who are consistently stronger than halflings, not even when training is accounted for. And there are plenty of reasons why an individual person's physiological/neurological situation might be better or worse than is typical for their species. What, then, is actually gained from having players forced to use these statistics?

I can see the argument that NPCs should trend toward these things, because NPCs are generally sampled from the population overall, so there's enough of them for individual quirkiness to be washed out by the masses. I don't see how one can get to requiring that absolutely all PCs strictly adhere to this.

Edit: And your example kinda gives the game away here, doesn't it? You're using something where the difference is not a factor of two or three, but a factor of one hundred. There is no PC race that weighs 100x as much as another. The absolute heaviest goliath (~440 lb) weighs only slightly more than 10x as much as the lightest halfling (37 lb.) In a world of magic. Where anyone with 16 Str can have a decent chance to chokeslam a dragon that is the size of a literal actual bus.