So, what is wrong with mix-maxing?
And maybe the features will be closely the same.
Min-maxing changes what the game looks like. If Longswords are the best, then people use Longswords. If Old Dirty Bastardswords are best, they will be the weapons people use the most.
The more I think about it, the more questions I have. If the best mixed-species options are acquired by mixing warforged and dragonborn, then the most common cobbled together "species" will be a biomechanical dragonman. A medium-sized mechagodzilla. That is an interesting option to explore, but if most tables have at least one mechagodzilla, that is a weird story narrative for the campaign. Rather if the mixed species option was primarily cosmetic, people would play what makes sense for their campaign setting and the story the player wants to tell. They wouldn't feel pressured to play something whacky because it was the mechanically superior option. I still see people telling others they could have been better if they made better mechanical design choices. Optimizers, min-maxers, munchkins, and mansplainers do that. I am a bit of an optimizer, too, and I have done it in the past. I have had to learn a hard lesson after being confronted in the past. It sucks for people on the other end of the advice. It REALLY does. No one likes being told they are doing it wrong when it
isn't wrong.
In our world, humans are humans. Mixed-race humans don't make a new species with different tangible racial abilities. There. Is. No. Mechanical. Difference. In a TTRPG a human can be cosmetically depicted however you want, but they still have the same game mechanic abilities, even if they are malleable like choosing a feat.
I support the concept of Mixed Species options in D&D. I love them. I am mixed but I absolutely despise the narrative of being called "Half" anything. I used them historically in game because that is the language the game used. Looking at genetics, so few people are literally "half" of two specific human races, because our parents may also be mixed (usually not half). More often than not, calling someone a "Half" race is a flat out falsehood. There is a far more diverse percentage of what "race" people are. But despite that mixed percentage we all still have HUMAN stats. That is the baseline. Our genetic differences are certainly there, but they don't modify our stat blocks like our society, environment, and individual learning impacts us. I would say trying to assign different racial abilities to different human races in a game would be very problematic. It's even worse when as part of a humanocentric game you can pick and choose the race aspects you want. That would be creepy.
In a fantasy world, there is a new paradigm that surpasses what we know in our real world. Different species can interbreed. Now we can say that in a fantasy world, where species interbreeding is far more rare, and more likely to result in "half" species. But that rarity comes with so much negative baggage in historical representation, and in many games where race/racism is a big factor/motivator. And if interbreeding is so common, how is anyone really "half"?
Back to the melting pot of racial abilities, even historically, half-races didn't get a pure melting pot of abilities from parent races. In older game designs, Half-Elves and Half-Orcs and Muls got abilities that neither parent had (or in the case of the oldest versions just worse abilities from the non-human race, different ability modifiers, and they were multi-classable), so that would not be reflected in a potential melting pot racial ability system. They were designed different so they would be different. But each "Half-race" has negative origins, despite trying to sterilize things in later editions.
Going forward, I will advocate for the removal of "Half" in favor of "Mixed" which better represents not only "half" species, but the fuller spectrum of potential mixed heritages. Mechanically, I would prefer something akin to what the Mixed Species sidebar suggests, or perhaps even a single stat-block that has options (kind of like a can be used to create your own preferred mixed (or even chimeric) option.
CHILDREN OR CHIMERAS OF DIFFERENT HUMANOID KINDS
Thanks to the magical workings of the multiverse, Humanoids of different kinds sometimes have children together, or are created chimerically from more than one species through magic. For example, folk who have a human parent and an orc or an elf parent are particularly common. Other Humanoids may have been created through magic to have the qualities of more than one Humanoid species, and are considered to have a Chimeric origin. Through either of these origins, many combinations are possible.
If you’d like to play the child of Mixed heritage or Chimeric origin... Choose an option below that best represents your character's origin.
Option 1 (Use a refined version of the Children of Different Humanoid Kinds rules in Playtest Packet 1)
Option 2 (have a number of open-ended options like vision, skills, and feats, and a number of chooseable abilities (not all), build-a-bear-like.
I honestly don't think they will build every existing race to have modular abilities in the PH. That seems so far beyond scope of the 2024 update, requiring the redesigning of every species from the ground up to balance the value of every ability outside of the specific species package they are designed for. "I choose Wings, Fast Movement, and Lucky! Hell yeah!" Nope.
