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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9286072" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I definitely question how forcing players towards particular heritages or species if they want to play a particular class leads to "better, more differentiated storytelling." In fact, the plethora of mountain dwarf fighters and barbarians, especially in early 5e, suggests the latter: when you build in a mechanical advantage for playing one particular combination, players soon see that and gravitate towards it. Which is presumably the design intent, no? To create more homogeneity, not less.So it's actually doing the opposite of creating more differentiated storytelling. Oh look, another burly dwarf fighter who is good at mining and blacksmithing. Never seen that before!"Better" is, of course, subjective. For me, what you describe would be worse because it leads to less variety, but YVMV.Also, I find it odd that you, and others, cite LotR as the impetus for using broad stereotypes to justify forcing specific stat bonuses and thus character archetypes onto player characters, who are supposed to be unique outliers. Bilbo Baggins gets our attention not because he is like all the other hobbits, but because he turns out to be different. I mean, the text emphasizes that really heavily. Legolas and Gimli defy all of the typical cultural animosity between dwarves and elves to become BFFs, and so on. Great characters are typically outliers, not standard.So what if most elves tend to be one way, or most "men of Bree," or whatever? Why should that prevent a player from having a great idea for a dwarf who, for example, never really fit in because they were drawn to arcane lore and the city, or whatever. Maybe my "man of Bree" is actually a woman, or non-binary, and decided they would fit in better in Minas Tirith where they could learn history and magic. Isn't great fiction full of characters who felt constrained by their circumstances and wanted something different? "I must be this way because I am a Man of Bree" seems like about the laziest, lamest character concept imaginable. I think one of the great problems of early D&D was that it tried to prescribe how players should think about their characters.And that's setting aside the IRL issues with racial essentialism, because we know how that conversation always goes. From a narrative perspective, I think tying stat bonuses to species or culture is super lame.How does telling a player, "no, your character can't do that because she's an orc," lead to more differentiation?</blockquote>

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