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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 8089087" data-attributes="member: 27957">I want to address the general attitude some people have that this will dilute the important racial identity of the D&D races. For some of us, reducing the amount of hard coded racial essentialism is a feature, not a bug. Quite aside from locking out a lot of character concepts behind a wall of mechanical inefficiency, it doesn't feel cool to be saying in 2020 that "All of those people are naturally that way."Probably the races keep most of their flavor and identity despite this change, just like they did when racial level caps were removed. Maybe some specific associations are lost, like when gender specific ability modifiers were discarded, but some things deserve being thrown out. Is it going to ruin the game by having un-elfy elves that are strong and un-dwarfy dwarves who are smart? Hardly. Elves will still be elfy and dwarves will still be dwarfy.Maybe your strong elf is the exception that proves the rule, or maybe their background is that they trained with the elven Gryphon Knights who unlike most of their people specialize in heavy arms and armor. Either way, the DM is still determining what your average elf is like. Besides, as the AL PDF takes a moment to remind us, the PC racial package was always only intended for PCs. It "doesn’t apply to every dwarf, just to dwarf adventurers, and it exists to reinforce an archetype." Changing the PC racials does literally nothing to change what the average civilian or NPC is like.So no one needs to panic that elves will be less elfy because not all of them are lithe and graceful. Even if the DM decides that remains the most common mode of elven people in their game world, PCs are exceptional and are often exceptions. Now we've just got more mechanical support for the elf who took up bodybuilding so he could show off his pecs, or the dwarven runemage who spent most of her days in the library, or the orphan drow that was raised by dwarves and grew up in a smithy, or the charming half-orc that channels the passion in his blood into song and dance.</blockquote>

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