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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 9724215" data-attributes="member: 57112">The problem of stats and especially stat penalties is a game design one. Saying that Halflings get +2 Dex means you are encouraging players to make specific choices (ie, Halflings makes great Rogues!); while saying that Halflings get -2 Str means you are actively discouraging players from making specific choices (ie, Halflings make terrible Barbarians or Fighters). Stat penalties penalize players for making interesting choices, including choices that might be perfectly sensible in the setting (Halfling Barbarians would or should not be an unlikely site in settings like Eberron or Dark Sun).Stat penalties by species is bad design because of the way that it discourages player creativity. Stat bonuses by species? Those honestly were never actually the problem; the problem was that it paved the way for species monocultures and didn't account for "fish of out water" backstories, which are deeply uninteresting. Ideally, IMO, you would get part of your stat bonus from your species and another part from your background, but I can understand that that adds unnecessary complexity so I get moving the whole thing to background.Racist-coded language to describe entire species of "bad" sapient creatures is pretty inexorably linked to the foundations of the game of D&D (and thus the hobby as a whole), whether the racist origins of such language was intended or, much more likely, used out of ignorance ("nits beget lice" being something of a big glaring example of it). You can choose to ignore it if you like, or even deny it, but it's a pretty well established objective fact at this point. The issue is that the presence or lack of intent doesn't really matter in this instance; the impact is going to be the same regardless. And the impact is what we (we would hope) would most want to avoid. This is why sensitivity consultants (a) exist and (b) are great. You're not actually expected to know all of this intuitively, but there are people out there that can help you catch anything you might be not intending before you go to print <glares at the first print run of Spelljammer: Adventures in Space></blockquote>

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