I have 2 questions.
1. Are there any ways you see racial mechanics actually matter?
Because if all mechanics are boiled down to +x or Advantage then that is a very redundant way to look at things.
For instance, I may as DM offer a PC elf
Advantage when attempting to persuade a fellow elf in the elven tongue
Advantage in history when attempting to recall an elvish poem to solve a riddle
Advantage in religion when attempting to perform the traditional elvish funeral rites
...etc
2. If personality was mechanised and certain racial traits affected the personality somewhat, would you see that as mattering or would you still maintain it can be broken down to +x or Advantage/Disadvantage?
Good questions.
To me, for 1... personally, no. I am of the belief that mechanics are in fact a worse way to denote something important or special about your species. Why? Because game mechanics still can
easily fail.
An elf character gets a bonus to Persuasion checks with other elves? All that means is that IF that elf character was to make 20 or more Persuasion checks against other elves...
on average they might succeed a few more times. That's it. But even those few successes would not be physically noticeable by the
player to know that having that bonus actually did something. One player succeeds on 13 Persuasion checks out of 20, the other player succeeds on 11. But have either of them been keeping track of these successes as they been "roleplaying"-- making points and asking questions of this other elf character in-game-- and the DM keeps having them roll Persuasion checks? Not a chance. Especially when some of those rolls end up being for rather unimportant things in the story. And now you spread those elven Persuasion checks over many, many, many game sessions? None of us would
ever be able to notice just how many times our checks succeeded more often because of that species ability to get a bonus. +2 to Persuasion against other elves? Completely unnoticeable bonus throughout the course of the campaign. You might as well not even have it.
But you know what we
would notice? If it just worked. If there wasn't a roll, no chance of failure, being an elf just meant almost all of the time they interacted with other elves, they got what they were looking for. THAT would mean something. If you as an elf character had an ability that said you just always succeeded in almost all reasonable actions and information gathering when dealing with other elves. Skip the mechanics altogether-- you just
did stuff. No questions or failures asked.
And it's not like the game didn't use to have that. The 5E14 Background Features just gave away stuff
for free that the PCs could do. Acolytes could get free room and board at the temples of their god no questions asked. Soldiers could just requisition equipment or horses by pulling rank absolutely freely, no game mechanic necessary. Rangers were so good at finding their way through the wilderness they would never get lost in regular terrain, again, no questions asked. Clerics could ask their god through divine intervention for virtually anything and very rarely their god would just give it to them.
Just the ability to do stuff when the player thinks of it has so much
more meaning than just being slightly better at doing it than someone else does-- especially when that thing is something that supposedly is super-important... like who you are as a member of a
completely different species. How can anyone say that being a member of a species is super-important to the character when that species gives out four dinky game mechanics... most of which are gained by all other PCs as well, just through other means?
For 2... again, why use game mechanics when the DM can just say "it works", when it involves something supposedly integral and important and ingrained in a character? If you are a goody-two-shoes personality Paladin and have done stuff in the campaign whenever possible that has bettered society in whatever city that paladin has resided in... when the DM sees that Paladin interact with other NPCs... that Paladin should just be getting things done, no dice rolls needed. Their reputation precedes them. That's the reward for the paladin player playing as a goody-two-shoes personality.
And that doesn't mean we need a new "Reputation mechanic" inserted into the game that the Paladin can score points in to then roll on to get bonuses on skill checks later... no... because that just means that Paladin can still fail for absolutely no reason except complete and utter luck (poor). Which is dumb quite frankly in my opinion. At some point, even character classes should just be able to do stuff-- same way we don't ask players to roll to see if they succeed in going to the bathroom. Why waste time? If that Paladin PC has a great rep... then let that player ENJOY having created and roleplayed their character to such a point that they've ACQUIRED that rep and it gives them something worthwhile in the story.
I honestly believe this. I believe that way too many people want nothing more than to turn everything in this game of D&D into merely statistics, like they're playing fantasy football or something. All that matters is the numbers. Numbers have to be balanced, numbers have to be gained, numbers have to tell us what has happened. And pure narration and imagination is something to be shunned.
To me, that is such a waste of what D&D (and all RPGs) can be.
