I completely agree most "options" can be expressed through role-playing rather than mechanics (more explicitly features really), which is why I feel such options aren't needed in the game and Tasha's is pretty much useless IMO.
Listen, you can do what you want as a house rule, but this is literally reducing race to rubber masks if you can cherry pick any racial feat you want while having the abilities of a vhuman.
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting your viewpoints guys, but I'm generally confused which direction the criticism of custom lineages is coming from. 6ENow!, you seem to be stating that PCs can be expressed through role-playing, lineage options are unnecessary, and therefore lineage options are bad. Remathilis, you seem to be stating that PCs need to be expressed through mechanics, that lineage options undermine this (or that this specific set of lineage options do), and therefore lineage options are bad. Did you guys reach the same conclusion--lineage options are bad--but start from opposite premises? Not to be antagonistic, its just that this topic very easily turns muddled with several very different points of view ending up conflated by virtue of arguing for the same position.
I love custom lineages. They're mechanically balanced and they open up options for players both mechanically (now you can be an Elf or a Dwarf and have a feat at 1st level) and also narratively.
So, I'm arguing that having custom lineages be the default would work well. But I
do not think they are well-balanced; they are power creep. Custom lineage is the same as a variant human--which was already considered very strong--except with an option to have darkvision, and the potential to sart with an 18 primary ability score using the standard array.
But... there's a big upside to defaulting to the power-creepiest option; it makes it harder for players to create an uber character using non-standard options, i.e. as
@pming noted "when everybody is a Super no one will be."
I would use this analogy. The great chef that can create a great set menu is the one who gets the highest praise. The great chef that has a menu that looks like Cheesecake Factory has a job and the title of chef. When limitations exist, creativity is not suppressed, but rather encouraged. When no limitations exist, creativity (again) is not suppressed, but rarely encouraged.
Exactly, and that's a feature, not a bug. We just had a very long thread about people playing "wierd races" and that being kindof disconcerting (a point of view which I am not endorsing, only recognizing). I think that if you give players the freedom to play anything--and be mechanically above average doing it--they'll play bland generic humans and elves because, to most players, their PCs race doesn't really matter; they showed up to roll dice and make monty python jokes.
If they have a really cool idea for, as I said in the OP, a purple eight-eyed anthropomorphic psychic badger, awesome!, they can play it--there's no explicit barrier to creativity.
But they are less likely to play Tabaxi, Hobgoblins, and Kenku by happenstance of Ability score bonuses.
Thus, breaches of campaign setting verisimilitude are more likely to be deliberate choices, rather than mechanical accidents.
[my post is] a rebuke to those that keep using the tired old canard that somehow having more limitations is somehow superior, and the smugness that goes along with it. It's tiresome.
I'm in general agreement with your larger points in the thread but, just to clarify what seems like a misunderstanding between you and some of the other posters. Having limitations is good for creativity. Yes, as you mentioned, there is lovely poetry written in free verse. But poetry, as a medium, benefits from having lots of rules. Forcing someone to write a 5/7/5 haiku instead of any old sentence with roughly 17 syllables is going to help them produce a more beautiful work.
My suggestion to give players fewer default PC creation limitations will make them less creative on average.
I think that's a good thing.
I definitely feel that by 6E, race is going to be just like background. There's some defined archetypes, but rules-wise it's a mutable thing where you just pick several options for the mechanical benefit. Appearance and such will be up to player-DM negotiation as to what best works for the setting.
Sounds good to me. Though I think there's a place for rules that distinguish PCs with major physical differences, like having wings, or 6 arms, or being unusually large or small--to maintain verisimilitude.
