I'm not liking the idea. I'm all for humans being the gold-standard as it were, and the jack-of-all-trades. But I don't like the superior race feel.
Humans as jack-of-all-trades isn't a sufficient theme or consistent with most portrayals of humans in the fantasy setting. If anything the unique characteristic of humans is their ability to pick anything from a huge diverse universe and fixate on that one thing and exploit it.
They shouldn't be better at everything all at once (as across the board +1 bonuses plus a floating +1 would be), but I'd like to avoid the 4E model where a human was always an also-ran statistically to a non-human race that had paired stat bonuses to make the best Warlock / Paladin / Sorcerer / etc.
Now humans are just as intelligent as high elves, while generally being stronger, hardier, more dextrous(!), more charismatic, and wiser.
That's the problem with moving to the "11 Standard" for humans (+1 to everything). With two floating +1's to different stats you'll see a specialist human who is as intelligent as a high-elf and slightly hardier (+1 INT, +1 CON) but lacks Free Spirit, Keen Senses, and Low-Light Vision.
I don't think races being pigeonholed into weapon types is quite on par, especially with classes and concepts that don't end up using those weapons.
It's a cookie reflecting their cultural stereotypes. Not everyone is going to fit that mold. It does mean that the average high elf guard might is handier with a long bow than his human counter-part.
Just seems to me that it's flipping the scenerio of say playing a dwarven rogue and thinking "I could do all this better as a human".
That was already the scenario based on raw stats in every prior edition. Dwarf characters never got a bonus to Dexterity so things could get rough. Heck, in OD&D Dwarf was a class, basically just a fighter. In later editions it was what came outside of ability scores that really helped out. Apparently low-light vision is so useful to being a good thief that they needed to give an analog to the Rogue just so Halflings and Humans could keep up.
I'm not really sure where that leaves the Dwarven Rogue, though. He's slow and he's wasting almost all his racial benefits (weapon dice, low-light vision, stat bonus) in that class. I guess complete immunity to poison would come in awfully handy if you were that sort of a rogue, though.
(Note to self, stop accepting drinks from dwarves. They can drink several gallons of paint thinner and live.)
How human-centric a world is should be determined by the setting, not the generic core rules.
There have to be cultural defaults for races, or they are meaningless. Part of the human cultural assumption is that their race is naturally or socially inclined to produce a disproportionately large population of adventurers (as well as super-villains).
And unless the setting dictates, at the very least the main races will be fairly well inter-mingled, much like the real world is with the various human ethnicities.
Actually, I think human ethnicities are terrible example because humans are biologically compatible with one another - ethnicity / "race" is almost entirely superficial outside of a few genetic conditions.
The lack of a viable mix-race family among demi-humans to produce cultural evolution over generations is a huge social hurdle, though - especially among the common folk. Lack of marriage avenues is a major political hurdle too - devastating among the noble folk. (Only those wacky Tieflings and Elves/Half-Elves provide avenues for families and political marriages, and both of those have severe draw-backs.)
Intermingling is going to be limited to the extent of common interest (trade), common cause (struggle), and common enemies (war). Cultural Balkanization will generally be even more severe.
In fact, most "mingled communities" in D&D's history and fantasy literature are culturally human at the core, because the adaptable nature of humans is the grease in the wheels of such communities. Elves don't generally move their families to Dwarfton, nor do Halflings lay down roots in the Elfhame, and Dwarves don't hitch their clans to a Halfling caravan. Humans are traditionally unique among the races because their ambitious nature encourages them see diversity as a form of opportunity.
- Marty Lund
