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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8297096" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Me too. The thing is, there's a reason someone made these restrictions or ability score bonus arrays or favoured classes. They wanted to help point players and DMs in a default narrative direction so as not to suffer options-paralysis. But as the game developed, you had different writers emphasising different stories to be told, and that influenced the idea of what measure a Drow is, or what measure an Orc is, etc. One solution has been to cut the pie into ever more tiny slices, so that "these wild elves are more strong while those wood elves are more wise and those high elves are more smart but those super-high elves are more charismatic." This just pushes the ball down the hill for later creators to deal with the same problem. Prominent Eladrin characters had high charisma, but in 4e, Eladrin had Int/Dex modifiers because that's what High Elves had. Oh, and now Sun Elves and Moon Elves had to have Eladrin eyes because otherwise they'd have Int/Wis modifiers like [Wood] Elves have. But then we have the solution of flexible ability scores, where you get one and choose another from two. This again is to provide some narrative constraint, so that Eladrin could be Intelligence or Charismatic, Drow could be Charismatic (like Jarlaxle) or Wise (like Drizzt), and dwarves can be strong (fighters) or wise (clerics). But then 5e runs with this forked secondary score and turns it back into subraces, so that the Mountain Dwarves are the strong ones and the Hill Dwarves are the wise ones. This has the weirdening effect of suggesting that few Mountain Dwarves are clerics, and few Hill Dwarves are fighters. It pushes narrative by virtue of power-gaming. That's why Tasha's custom lineages are so important. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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