EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Sometimes it is optimization, yes. Sometimes it is a desire to not feel penalized just because your character is unusual compared to others of their class or race. Outliers exist, and in fact are much more common than most folks realize. There is no such thing as an "average person" even if you ignore the whole "the average human has 1.01 testicles and 0.99 ovaries" side of things. The US Air Force discovered this in the 50s when they realized that, even if you take an extremely broad definition of what "average" means, most people won't actually meet it if you go beyond four or five measures of averageness. E.g. if you take the middle 50% of males as average men, and just six measures of their body measurements, you're extremely unlikely to find a single man who is average on all six dimensions even if you examine thousands of men. (Information taken from analysis of Anthropometry of Flying Personnel, an excellent demonstration of how science can defy expectations and thereby improve human lives.) I mention this specifically to say: "Averages" exist in the sense that you can calculate them, but they do not translate well to what real people are or look like. Real people are much, much too variable to be usefully described by averages in most cases. (Note the word "usefully"; averages are factually correct, but need not have any relationship to what is useful or meaningful, hence the ovary/testis thing.) It is always possible to find some kind of average all people meet (e.g. all living adult humans are shorter than 20 feet tall), but in general an average (formally, a mean or "central tendency") only gives you a very loose idea of what a creature is like, and there are almost always VERY broad distributions around those centers. Your intuitions about how important central tendencies are can very easily lead you into incorrect assumptions about what populations are like.
So yes, there are central tendencies. The central tendency of male human strength is higher than the central tendency of female human strength. But the two heavily overlap, and in the upper echelons the differences are comparatively not that dramatic, particularly if you control for body mass differences; women's weightlifting records are only a very recent phenomenon and changing quickly, hitting about 70% to 80% of equivalent male strength in the same weight class twenty years ago (the most recent study I could find on the topic on short notice). So yes, men are stronger than women...but only by a relatively small amount. One small enough that we consider it appropriate to ignore these factual average differences in favor of supporting diverse characters and a broad range of options, not simply because doing so avoids the issue of sexism but because it is more interesting to do this.
The exact same logic is then applied to these fictional races, for which the only "statistics" that exist are the ones we choose to make. This is a creationist exercise, not the product of evolution. Is it more interesting to ensure that all gnomes are penalized for Strength and all elves are penalized for Constitution? Does enforcing these differences actually bring about a richer experience? Or is it like the difference between male and female strength, where yes differences do exist, but they are either not significant enough to matter, entail undesirable implications, or discourage characters or archetypes (or even players) who might otherwise see the light of play?
The answer from WotC appears to be either "no, it is not a more interesting nor richer experience" or "although these things might add interest or richness, the cost is too great for the benefit."
Again, I am making a multiple pronged argument here. Inclusivity is one prong. The fact that averages can be VERY misleading, giving an incorrect understanding of a population, is another. The fact that even when differences DO exist, it may not be useful or beneficial to account for them is a third--something we already recognize with the lack of gender differences in D&D rules. Popularity is of course a further prong, though it overlaps heavily with inclusivity (people tend to like being included!) and to some extent with the utility argument (if it adds extra limitations but provides benefits that many consider irrelevant or minimal, it will not be very popular). And, yes, optimization is another possible argument, but I am not intending to invoke it here. These other reasons all exist separate from the question of optimization.
Like I said, this is why I favor the 13A method. By having races give a limited but guaranteed selection of stat boosts, but also having classes do the same (so long as they don't overlap), you get a reasonable compromise. Every Wizard can be smart if the player chooses it, but does not need to be if the player does not wish to be (unless you're playing a race that gets exactly the same stat boosts as the Wizard offers). Every half-orc will be strong or dextrous (or both, if their class "plays to type" as it were.) There is still a loose archetype for each race (elves are clever and quick, dragonborn are persuasive and strong, etc.) but individual characters can and will express individual variation that reflects their idiosyncrasies, the ways their personal deviations have shaped them, and the path they have chosen to walk.
