I don't prefer it, either, generally, although I don't mind it in a game that's OSR inspired. But it's not what I think should be the default for a modern fantasy game. The WoW-type model, where race is 5% mechanical and 95% aesthetic, makes much more sense for current trad/neotrad fantasy games.
I really dislike that percentage. It's IMO quite unrealistic for one's heritage to matter that little.
I think there are ways to split the difference. Let race carry relatively little weight at character creation, but have racial feats, and racial subclass and even class options to both demonstrate the tendencies and let players lean into the racial concepts if they wish to.
if your choice of species determines which feats or other options you can or can't take then i think your species is mattering a little more than 5% mechanically, even if what it's adding is not being added to your character immediately at level 1, but you also get very little of your class abilities at level 1
It's an issue of aesthetics vs mechanics. I tend to prefer race to be a more aesthetic choice because I prefer to make choices around theme, appearance or sometimes a cool piece of art and I hate having to determine if the combo is mechanically viable (or even allowed). For me, one marquee feature (spells, wings, breath weapons, aquatic ability) and a few minor ribbons is good because then I feel I can pick my species without having to determine if it was the best mechanical option.
I get that preference, but for me I want setting to matter the most, so having strong distinctions between different heritages is a benefit to worldbuilding. This dovetails into my general preference for PCs not being so very special that they are essentially divorced from the people from which they ostensibly sprang.
Agreed. It has to be higher than that. A number of D&D races over the last 50 years have been given ample amounts of backstory. And while that backstory is mostly fluff, it has given everyone who has played D&D an idea on what these races are like. And there have been attempts to inject more race mechanics into a character as they leveled up. There was 3e's Racial Substitution Levels in it's various Race books (Races of Stone, Races of Destiny, etc.) and it's Racial Paragon Classes (Unearthed Arcana). 4e went about it by giving a given race's racial traits a boost at each tier.
Intellectually I understand that, but if that’s how DnD worked I would not be in the hobby. Being able to make and play a character is pretty much the whole point for me; I don’t just want to explore a setting. (And the former absolutely does not exclude the latter).
That interest no doubt has ties to people being right about how the +2/-0 & basically fr exclusive catering of fluff+mechanical ribbons on them made it unreasonably difficult to run a game in non-fr baseline settings like eberron & darksun. This is something they can fix by including options with equally strong mechanical ties tothose non-fr baselines as the FR baseline ones
Well, this is why games cater to different tastes. I like both things, but I've always favored setting over character. In my opinion, D&D used to too.
