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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JEB" data-source="post: 8203736" data-attributes="member: 10148">Sure, it's optional. If you want to reflect the character's race. By default, you are not. Without racial traits applied, the NPCs are just completely generic statblocks. They can represent anyone because they represent no one.A change in how they viewed those particular character races? Sure, that's obvious. A change in how they viewed ASIs for PCs vs. NPCs, in general? Not necessarily. It could as likely be them reexamining those races for balance and flavor purposes, now that they were becoming PC options. You'd have to ask the designers to be sure. (Though I suspect they would be rather coy with the answer at this point, knowing the scrutiny they're under.)NPCs are treated differently in general, but in the core rules, PCs and NPCs have the same, or at least extremely similar, ASIs.Of course, because you can customize statblocks however you want. But they only offered one approach to having a NPC reflect racial traits in the Monster Manual and DMG, and that was applying racial traits - either as they appeared in the PHB (with ASIs) or as they appeared in the DMG (also with ASIs).Actually, dragonborn do in fact have subraces, if you count each dragon color. They just all share the same base ASIs. And half-elf subraces were included in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (though most folks seem to forget about that book).In any case, I meant that it would be disingenuous for Wizards to claim that they didn't provide default ASIs for a race on the premise that they had subraces. They were perfectly capable of doing so before. Also, that excuse wouldn't give them cover to avoid providing a default suggested ASI for the base race.</blockquote>

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