wouldn't that be 16 Strength: (12/20) * (2 * 3.5 + 3) = 7
ah, got it
Well I certainly think “more options” and “looks cool” fit, but at least for my views it isn’t necessarily about gaining DPR so much as broadly equalizing. Racial ASI removal altogether would still be a balancing act in this regard while only actually lowering existing figures, which I’d agree certainly doesn’t strike the “powergame” chord either. I largely think it comes down to a split in something that @Scribe mentioned:
Where some enjoy the archetypes of the races to be reinforced statistically in the game design while others find the depictions (and perhaps even just the history/popularity of major archetypes) to do enough at providing those for players. And each group sees how that impacts the desire to play off-type with different importance. I think @Malmuria hit on it well.
It should have been a 3, but 6 was also correct. It ends up being 60% of 10.
"culture shock" and other things of this kind are great for drama in an epic game, so everything that makes the character quite specific and possibly strange to others is something that will generate interesting interactions during the game. Anyway, D&D is an epic game, heroes are larger than life for all the good and bad reasons.
And sometimes it's good to break a trope just as some times it's fun to break it as well, so we are not forbidding anything, especially since the initial ASIs do not even constrain the final results of the character as he climbs through the levels, that's all. But we take every thing we can get to make members of a certain race truly belong to that race, and the racial ASIs (including the negative ones that existed in previous editions) helped with that as well.
We are not our characters, we roleplay them, and it's fun to play characters with strengths but also weaknesses. There was a campaign of Cyberpunk in which I was playing a very ugly street samurai, and it was really part of her personality, she was "that ugly yojimbo", but known for her ruthlessness and efficiency. Following a mission, she saved a vid star, who gave her tons of money and, because she was disturbed by the ugliness of her bodyguard, offered her surgery. So she became very beautiful in that age of affordable beauty. And I got tons of bonuses to social interactions. But the core of the character was no longer the same, so after i got more money, I went to the surgeon to reverse the changes, lost the bonuses and even more money, but at least I was "that ugly yojimbo" again.
It's a hell of a lot easier to add in floating ASIs than it is to go race by race and create racial ASIs on your own. Not to mention human nature makes it worse to remove floating bonuses and add in racial ASIs than the reverse. Keeping racial ASIs the default and making floating ASIs an optional rule(As Tasha's did) for those that want to go that route is the all around best way for everyone to get what they want.
Sure, but every optional rule becomes one more thing to add to the session 0 checklist. So if they can come up with something more elegant, like not-too-complicated racial feats system, that would be better in terms of design (and IMO, it's not a problem if these synergize with particular classes as long as there is some variety to them).
