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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6331995" data-attributes="member: 1465">Well apparently they were needed a long time ago, to differentiate the races for narrative or strategic reasons, while maintaining a basis of 0 for the humans. Thus not NEEDED in the strict sense, as pretty much nothing is strictly needed in every single RPG ruleset.Indeed the psychological effect is there, and perhaps it is even the most important one, since increasing everyone by +1 can be effectively nullified by increasing the opponents (NPC and monsters) as well, but the feeling delivered can vary.Ultimately, ability score penalties are unneeded just in the same way that ability score bonuses are unneeded. People want them for the feeling, and that explains the general trend slowly upwards across editions, every "new" product trying to deliver the subtle feeling that "your character will be better than before".Narratively, there has always been the idea that races are different, so maybe elves are more agile but less robust than humans, or dwarves are more robust and less agile (or whatever, depending on the concept which might even change between editions). Core playable races are wanted to be on par, so it was easy to design them so that average human characters set the zero level, and other core races have a bonus here and a penalty there for a net zero average again. Feeling notwithstanding, that is IMHO the truly most elegant design, but eventually WotC designers value the sugar feeling more in this case. From a mechanical point of view, one way or the other doesn't matter much.</blockquote>

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