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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8515234" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Thread has moved quite a ways since you posted this, but it felt warranted to reply nonetheless. So, you want more inclusiveness, but still want verisimilitude and simulationism. This leads to two questions.First: Verisimilitude to what? Moving to genericized modifiers, for example, is exactly meant to represent the fact that even if there is a "norm" or an "expectation," there's always going to be outliers and divergences. That's part of what inclusivity generally represents, awareness that truly "average" people don't actually exist.(See, for example, the results produced by Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels' Anthropometry of Flying Personnel, which specifically led to the development of things like adjustable seats. Even if you can say with objective certainty that the average dragonborn is physically stronger, taller, more persuasive, hardier, etc. etc. compared to an average human...the odds are actually strongly in favor of no individual dragonborn actually fulfilling all of those things.Human variability is already so wide that even with tens of millions of individuals, no average people may exist. For example, the average Australian in their 2011 census, would have been a 37-year-old woman, living with her husband, 9-year-old son, and 6-year-old daughter, in a three-bedroom house in one of the state capital cities of Australia, with two cars. No such woman existed at the time, despite having done their best to survey the entier over-22-million population of the country. Even using the most relaxed and minimal definitions they could in the more recent 2016 census, Matt Parker reported that they could only find ~400 Australians out of 23.4 million that were very loosely average--and all of them would be eliminated by adding even a single extra criterion.The "truth" that you wish to have similarity to--that there are clear, identifiable, and consistent trends across variable populations--simply isn't true. Perhaps, if you just pick two or maybe three things to filter for, you can get a reasonable slice that are "average." But for most actual groups, truly average people are rare...and when you're looking at Adventurers, there's even less reason for them to be Truly Average to begin with.Second: Simulation of what? There are no other sapient races on Earth, so let's say you're asking of simulation of human-like entities. But that leads straight into the problem above--human variability is too great to capture with averages, even very very coarse ones. If not, then you're asking for simulation of things that don't exist. What parameters should one use for simulating nonexistent things? How do we model them? More importantly, how do we actually check our simulations to see if they produce appropriate results?Note that I am not trying to say that verisimilitude and simulationism are bad things to seek. In principle, they're quite good ones, since it is generally helpful to have background elements or characteristics that are familiar enough to work from. My point is more, where do we draw the lines such that verisimilitude and simulationism actually conflict with inclusivity? From where I'm standing, a rational and empirical view of the way things really are in our world--the basis on which verisimilitude and simulationism necessarily must be built--actually seems to say that a pretty inclusive attitude with regard to ability scores is reasonable, even desirable, due to more accurately representing the ways real populations look.And other than ability scores...it's not like that much is changing in terms of capabilities. Skills remain a clear difference between races, for instance, and can represent physiological differences that make certain tasks easier, e.g. all Elf races get Keen Senses, providing Perception proficiency. Physiology often remains relevant in terms of statures, natural weapons/armor, or innate defenses against certain kinds of spells or effects. Rates of aging and maturity remain different (e.g., dragonborn mature extremely quickly compared to humans), and dietary differences may be relevant in some cases. One of the few physiological differences being removed is Sunlight Sensitivity, and that's probably just because it's more an annoyance than an actual limitation.</blockquote>

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