But I feel that hijacking the discussion about representation and social issues to demand a specific mechanic is frankly bizarre, and personally to me it even seems rather disingenuous.
I was not using human representation though. I'm bringing up a fact about data:
actually real populations very rarely actually fit any kind of "there's an average and it should be represented." Average traits--even when you define "average" to be something
incredibly broad like "the middle 50% of the population"--are actually pretty rare to occur all together. This has nothing to do with representing real-world ethnic groups correctly or incorrectly, and everything to do with how "average" is a really, really useless concept for talking about populations, even when you assume those populations really do have very strong and consistent characteristics.
The sample for
Anthropometery of Flying Personnel was slightly over 4000 airmen from various USAF bases around the time the Korean War started. Probably small compared to the number of living members of a given race in any random person's game, but a useful sample nonetheless. The sample for the 2011 and 2016 Australian censuses was the total population of the country in each collection period (~22 million and ~23.4 million, respectively)--populations I would expect to be pretty large for the typical pseudomedieval semi-European Tolkienesque low-fantasy setting (seeing as how the largest cities in the world before 1500 AD were in the 1-2 million range, and the total population of Europe ranged between ~50 and ~90 million between 1000 and 1500 AD, this would be anywhere between half and a quarter of all living persons, so quite a large sample). When such large, robust, non-biased samples repeatedly produce the clear result that
truly average people don't exist, it becomes difficult to argue that there should be such clear, hard patterns like "all dragonborn have +2 STR because that's what dragonborn just
are."
Instead, it makes more sense to do something like, "Typically, dragonborn do well in tests of strength, endurance, or personal magnetism. As a result, having bonuses to Strength, Constitution, and/or Charisma may be
expected by dragonborn as a group, or by outsiders who know only stereotypes. If your character does not match these expectations, how has that affected them? Does your character feel inferior due to not living up to the expectations of others, or are they defiant and proud of their differences? Have they struggled with things that other members of their race would find easy, or do they see themselves as providing complementary strengths to their fellows? Taking the time to think about these things can lead to many fun or surprising elements in playing a character, even if yours is perfectly ordinary by the expectations of others like them."
Again: my argument has
diddly-squat to do with "some groups of IRL humans have been represented
really really really badly, and that's something to avoid." My
entirely separate argument is, "Real populations of real beings--such as humans, but it's true of basically all living things--almost never actually contain any
truly average members,
everyone is an outlier in one way or another. Given this is a demonstrable, statistical fact, is it still pursuing verisimilitude or simulation to try to make fictional populations exhibit such a non-factual, unrealistic property? If it is, that doesn't really sound like 'resembling what is true' or 'accurately modeling things that could be real, but aren't,' so what do you actually mean by 'verisilimilitude' and/or 'simulation'? I it isn't, then...those don't seem to be reasons to oppose this particular aspect of inclusivity."
Plus? If it upsets you so much, start handing out skill proficiencies. Those are clearly still 100% okay as the Elf Keen Senses trait demonstrates (and, in general, racial skill proficiencies for a variety of races). Give all Dragonborn and Orcs Athletics proficiency if you think it's unrealistic that there should be no differences in physical strength between them and other races--they get for free what other races have to work very hard for (and, if you really want to make it go all out, let the feature be of the form "You have Proficiency in X; if you would later gain Proficiency in X from some other source, you instead have Expertise in X.") That seems to me both a perfectly cromulent way to reinforce physiological differences
and embrace inclusivity: ultimately, everyone gets to the same peak condition
with effort, but some have natural talent to give them a leg up, and others have to invest resources and time into it.
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