But where they will differ is if they are from a Mountain Dwarf, Hill Dwarf or Deep Dwarf culture because each Dwarven culture has a different set of norms and beliefs to go by.
Fair enough! It's fuzzy because subraces blur the line between learned and innate traits-- mechanically and narratively-- but if the game had separate cultures/backgrounds for nonhuman PCs (including the 'raised by aliens' that everyone keeps bringing up) that would be
fantastic. The PHBRs in AD&D even had something like that with the 'sundered dwarf' subrace.
But nobody's doing that. The difference between a Hill Dwarf and Mountain Dwarf in 5e is whether your character needs Medium Armor Proficiency or already has it (or Unarmored Defense) and needs more HP instead.
I think most of us would agree that's neither cultural nor biological-- a purely mechanical abstraction-- and I'm not willing to speculate about how many people would agree that's a tremendous missed opportunity.
I'm not familiar enough with A5E to say they handled
this specific issue better-- but it certainly handles
this kind of issue better with other heritages.
They're going to have the learned traits of a human.
I could agree with this, but the lines between "learned", "acquired", and "innate" traits are blurrier in
real-life humans than you're accounting for, much less beings that are (by definition)
nonhuman in a world with universally acknowledged non-biological non-material developmental pressures.
There's a kind of diversity in accepting (
promoting!) that things don't always fit into their tidy little boxes. But there is also a vital, necessary kind of diversity in acknowledging and celebrating that
different things are different, not merely statistical distributions across all-inclusive natural spectrums of variation.
The human species in itself is not as uniform as you are trying to impose upon near-human (and not-so-near human) fantasy races.
A bit RL, don't you think?
I do not want to speak to real-life issues of cultural identity and nature/nurture that I don't have the expertise or experience to speak on. I'm a different kind of minority and a different kind of statisical outlier.
I will say that
real-life humans that wrestle with these issues are a small (but valid!) minority of the
billions of humans that define the norms they fall between. In a dwarf-centric campaign, your dwarf might be one of the dozen or so dwarves that exist in the entire universe; even I would concede that there's a more compelling place for an outlier dwarf in such a campaign than in most games, where your dwarf is the only dwarf and the dwarven norms they're defying are a dead unicorn.
Maybe we can go further and make all dwarf PCs the same class. Like a dwarf class you have to take. Same with an elf and halfling class. That works for you?
You jest, but the answer to your question is 'yes'. It's
too limiting and far from the ideal solution, but race-as-class is one of the
myriad ways that Moldvay/Cook and Mentzer and Allston were better than Advanced D&D and
every edition (except Fourth!) has made it worse since.
Fourth Edition did an
amazing job making the different player races substantially different, narratively and mechanically. The only other times these rules have been used to good effect have been in D&D offshoots-- notably PF1 and A5E and certain OSR games.
Racial archetypes, paragon classes, and scaling racial options are all part of what I'd like to see. Class restrictions were a decent idea, poorly implemented, but every fantasy ancestry should have a different slice of the game's myriad character options available to them.
I'm not particular about
which slices should be available to
which ancestries-- the important thing is that different things are different, and are allowed to maintain their own (different) reasons for being so.
There is Mythral Hall or the Great Rift of other lands with high dwarf populations that have cultures that people might regard as "dwarven" but other species who grew up in Mythral Hall would have those same cultural traits.
This is a very postmodern and materialist take on culture-- and 'nature'-- that I don't think fits well in a fantasy setting. And, again, imposes more psychological/spiritual uniformity across magical 'fantasy races' than exists within the supposedly materialist and determinist traits of our singular human species.
The one defining trait of all nonhuman fantasy ancestries is that they're
not human. Forcing them into human homes and human schools shouldn't give them human personalities any more than it gives them long legs and poor night vision.
