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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8875076" data-attributes="member: 18">Players have always picked races because of the theme rather than mechanical advantages.That's the reason half the races in the game even exist, in any edition. Because an awful lot have always been underpowered or actively bad, but people want to play them regardless.The change now is that D&amp;D has decided to get out of the way on stat modifiers specifically. Back in 1E/2E they weren't generally seen as a huge deal as stats were often capped at 18 even where there was a modifier, and +1/-1 often wasn't a huge deal. But as soon as 3E kicked it up +2/-2 and regularized stats so that each +2 stat was a +1 mod on all rolls involving it, they mattered more. Then 5E kicked it up a notch again with Bounded Accuracy, which means that +1 means more than it ever did before, and additionally made it +2/+1 in fixed combos, when most classes have a primary, secondary and tertiary stat (de facto at least). 5E also made it more of an issue by limiting Standard Array and Point Buy to 15, meaning you needed at least a +1 from your race to make it to 16 for that obviously beneficial +3 modifier (something even non-optimizers can see is &quot;a good idea&quot;).At least in my experience, this caused people to actually rather narrow their race selections in 5E as compared to previous editions, especially anyone who optimized at all (not merely &quot;powergamers&quot; or the like), and the narrowing was almost entirely down to stat mods. I think the increasing existence of online guides also contributed, but Bounded Accuracy was the main factor, followed by the prevalence of Standard Array and Point Buy.Now that we're going with stat mods as being whatever you want, it's easy to see how people are picking more on theme.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8875076, member: 18"] Players have always picked races because of the theme rather than mechanical advantages. That's the reason half the races in the game even exist, in any edition. Because an awful lot have always been underpowered or actively bad, but people want to play them regardless. The change now is that D&D has decided to get out of the way on stat modifiers specifically. Back in 1E/2E they weren't generally seen as a huge deal as stats were often capped at 18 even where there was a modifier, and +1/-1 often wasn't a huge deal. But as soon as 3E kicked it up +2/-2 and regularized stats so that each +2 stat was a +1 mod on all rolls involving it, they mattered more. Then 5E kicked it up a notch again with Bounded Accuracy, which means that +1 means more than it ever did before, and additionally made it +2/+1 in fixed combos, when most classes have a primary, secondary and tertiary stat (de facto at least). 5E also made it more of an issue by limiting Standard Array and Point Buy to 15, meaning you [I]needed[/I] at least a +1 from your race to make it to 16 for that obviously beneficial +3 modifier (something even non-optimizers can see is "a good idea"). At least in my experience, this caused people to actually rather narrow their race selections in 5E as compared to previous editions, especially anyone who optimized at all (not merely "powergamers" or the like), and the narrowing was almost entirely down to stat mods. I think the increasing existence of online guides also contributed, but Bounded Accuracy was the main factor, followed by the prevalence of Standard Array and Point Buy. Now that we're going with stat mods as being whatever you want, it's easy to see how people are picking more on theme. [/QUOTE]

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