Hriston
Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)
A recent thread about racial weapon proficiencies got me to thinking about the tension between world consistency, especially with reference to racial concepts, vs character generation. I believe this comes from the fact that PCs are usually built by assigning ability scores, creating an opportunity for optimization based on racial stat bonuses, whereas the game's assumption about NPC abilities across any given race is that they are distributed randomly. It seems that there is a tendency to prioritize the character generation side of this equation, to the possible detriment of the original concept behind the race itself. To what extent do you advocate modifying the existing races to further facilitate character optimization, or, on the other hand, do you feel that character racial features are there to give a character a particular flavor as a member of its race in maintaining that race's identity as part of the larger game-world?