That's why I occasionally kill player characters at points in the campaign. No saves or anything. IRL, you have no control about whether you have cancer, a heart-attack, or some other medical condition. And sometimes a tree falls on you and you die. Realism.
Well, that isn't like real life though, is it?
Such things are random, and in many cases there are lots of things you can do to reduce those chances of occuring (such as regular exercise and a proper diet to help against the chances of a heart-attack). The odds are also so incredibly small for most such things, many people live their entire lives without dying due to such causes.
So, if you are choosing such things, it isn't the same thing at all.
AD&D actually had rules for some sorts of random events like becoming diseased.
All of which can be mixed by picking race/background 2nd and 3rd.
Sure. But my point was the randomness of ability scores and race in the sense of
organic growth for the character concept. You are born a certain race (human, dwarf, tiefling, whatever), you grow up (developing your ability scores), and your background (life before adventuring) develops. Since all of these things occur before you become an adventurer, that is my preference for the order. My PC (as a "living entity") goes through this process.
But really, race and background are ultimately narrative gloss, unless the race or background is really out there. Class is where the bulk of the mechanical experience comes from.
Again, agreed. Race has some traits, and backgrounds a bit of features (mostly proficiencies), but you could remove all of those and just have class as the "defining" source.
As you like to point out, you don't need mechanics to differentiate your characters. You can play human fighter A completely differently from human fighter B simply by engaging the narrative layer. But you can't have a different mechanical experience without actually varying the mechanics, which means picking different classes.
I agree with the first part (as you say, I've said it before), but not with the second.
You can have a
mechanically different experience by playing the same class. Of course, most mechanics are universal (all PCs have hit points, roll hit dice, roll for attacks, checks, and saves, etc.) regardless of class, so I'm talking about the mechanics which stem from class-related features, which depending on your class selection, mostly come from either class or from subclass, but some are also fairly balanced even in that respect.
We played a group of all monks in one game. Each played fairly differently from the others.
Class isn't the only place where mechanical differentiation occurs, and maybe those other areas ought to be emphasized more.
Agreed. Nearly all the house-rules and homebrew I've worked on or in collaboration with others has made one of two things happen:
1. Race and Background are emphazised more, to the point of Background becoming Level 0.
2. Class is de-emphasized to be closer to the baseline of race and background (for a simpler-style of game).