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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grydan" data-source="post: 5829184" data-attributes="member: 79401">One can have flaws and weaknesses without having penalties.Yes, race should influence your character concept. I agree. However, in 4E, with no racial ability score penalties:Halflings do make better rogues than barbarians.Dwarves do make better fighters than sorcerers.Gnomes do make better illusionists than monks. At the same time, in part due to not having ability score penalties, the against-type options remain viable. Halflings might be far better rogues than barbarians, but they make competent barbarians (which works nicely for Eberron and Dark Sun). Dwarves are far better fighters than they are sorcerers, but they can be pretty decent sorcerers. Gnomes are better illusionists than monks, but... uh, they actually make pretty decent monks in 4E. Quirk of the system, but then, is "not being good at being monks" part of some gnome archetype I'm unaware of?I said strength doesn't correspond directly with size. On average, are bigger things stronger than smaller things? Certainly.Chimpanzees are, on average, smaller than humans. The most conservative scientific estimates of their strength say that pound for pound, chimps are twice as strong as humans. Less conservative estimates go up to eight times as strong. A chimpanzee can, quite literally, rip you apart.Most 400 lb men probably couldn't do a single chin-up using both arms. A 400 lb gorilla in a zoo was once observed hanging from a ceiling by one arm while ripping out screwed-in ceiling panels with the other arm. In a fight between a 400 lb man and a 400 lb gorilla, I'm betting on the gorilla. Make it an 800 lb man and the gorilla doesn't even have to show up, because the 800 lb man can't get out of bed without mechanical assistance. But hey, he's twice as big, so he must be stronger, right?Even without crossing species borders, and sticking within my own gaming group: I could not bench much more than half my own body-weight if my life depended on it. A woman in my group who is physically smaller than me can bench over her own body-weight. I'm fairly certain she can bench more than MY body-weight.D&D elves haven't always been more frail than humans. 4E is D&D too, and elves have no Con penalty there. It's entirely possible for all extant orcs to be fools without mechanically requiring that all future orcs be fools as well. Just because Karl Pilkington exists, doesn't mean humanity can't have Albert Einstein. Races can be different without racial ability score penalties. 4E did it. A human plays differently than a halfling which plays differently than an elf which plays differently than a dwarf. All without a single -2 to Str/Con/Dex/Int/Wis/Cha appearing anywhere in the game.Races can even be different without ability score modifiers at all.The more I think about, the more I see the arguments for it, the more opposed I become to racial ability score penalties.If you think that halflings should generally be physically weaker than humans, it's trivially easy for the rulebooks to contain a line saying "it is very rare for halflings to have more than 8 strength" without having to include a line that says -2 to Strength. PCs are supposed to be exceptional, after all.</blockquote>

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