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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9224047" data-attributes="member: 6690965">You're giving me flashbacks to the whole discussion around "racial rarity" that we spent so much time on during the 5e playtest. Updating to modern parlance, that was the idea of tagging ancestries with "Common, Uncommon or Rare" in the PHB. This would have no mechanical impact, but there'd be a sidebar explaining this was an unusual choice for a PC, might not be present in all game worlds, talk to your DM, etc.This caused no small amount of controversy, because it was obviously a sop to a particular kind of OSR fan that hated the expansion of PC characters beyond Human, Elf, Dwarf and Halfling, especially once you started getting to Dragonborn and your less "human, but stretched into a slightly different shape and present in Lord of the Rings" options. On one side you had people decrying this as making the rare ancestries out to be alien, other and discouraging DMs from allowing them into their games...and on the other side you had people saying exactly the same thing, but nodding enthusiastically and encouragingly about it. The whole point of the tag was the get those two groups to a point that was close enough together to both by 5e, and that principle continued to be the guiding light inside all of 5e's design, and while that particular example didn't come through, the underlying principle worked perfectly! The thing is, the group complaining about dragonborn is pretty marginalized now. No significant amount of voices are seriously arguing they should be removed from the PHB, and we're getting more ancestries, not less in the 2024 version.Alignment is back because it's an established cultural touchstone and it was one of those things that upset people about 4e, and it's all but removed from mechanical impact, because that was the driving force behind the change in 4e in the first place. You could probably get away with removing it today, or marginalizing it down further to a footnote on inspiring NPC/monster personalities. I don't particularly think 4e's take was good (we can live with out CG, but LE is iconic), but its real mistake was moving too quickly. You'd have a much easier time selling the alignment change (and presumably many of the other "watered down 4e" elements you're talking about) if 5e had somehow come first.</blockquote>

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