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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 8116983" data-attributes="member: 6787503">That's assuming they get the same rolls, but in the scenario I presented the gnome rolls a 12. I realize this is a bit ridiculous, but I think it illustrates a point that I'm not making very well, but it has to do with randomness, which is why I brought up insurance. It's a bit like the butterfly effect. We can imagine a white room scenario where a player makes a choice of race and then rolls the same set of scores no matter what they chose, but in reality the different circumstances involved in making a different choice would have untold minor effects on the die roll such that you could never repeat the experiment the same way twice.Because it results in scores that regularly fall 2 or 3 points above or below the average, rolling for scores interjects randomness which outweighs the bonuses from race, so sure a race that compliments your class offers a modicum of insurance against one or two bad die rolls, but like insurance, much of the time you don't end up needing it, and when you do it often isn't enough. You might as well just play the race/class combination you want to instead of thinking you have to choose something optimal. I don't get into a lot of discussions about mechanics, but a thread I started a while ago about medium armor comes to mind. The assumption of many of the participants in that thread that the game is balanced around optimal race/class combinations made the conversation nearly impossible for me to have with them, and I didn't have the time or energy to hash it out with them, so I gave up. I found Jeremy Crawford's recent comment that the game is not balanced around racial ASI's vindicating to some extent, and it resonates with what has always been an obvious (to me) feature of 5E's design: every race goes with every class.</blockquote>

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