D&D General What it means for a race to end up in the PHB, its has huge significance

[Parmandur]

At the cost of disincentivizing mixed ancestry characters for everyone who cares about their mechanics, whether they're hardcore optimizers or not.

Hybrid characters should be interesting for their story, not their mechanics. I think some "Hybrid Feats" would be a potentially good idea, but making those orthonigical and optional to Hybrid status is better: you can have an Elf with no Feat who is of Orcih extraction, an elf with some "Orc Heritage" Feat, an Orc with no Feat, and an Orc with "Fey Ancestry" fest, an Elf with "Fey Ancestry" Feat or an Orc with "Orc Ancestry" Feat...and all 6 be siblings expressing differently.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

Hybrid characters should be interesting for their story, not their mechanics.

And I want to be able to express my characters through both.

That option, as it applies to mixed ancestry characters, is seemingly being taken away from me - or at the very least, moved squarely into the realm of third party and homebrew.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Hybrid characters should be interesting for their story, not their mechanics.

all characters should be interesting for their story not their mechanics, but you don't see us advocating for the removal of all mechanics and turning the game into a pure RP system.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

I mean, it is what it is: "Background" allows a lot more customization as a concept over the old "Race" idea ever could.

I mean, that's because every feature has been stripped out of species bit by bit. Individual species could be massively more varied given the chance.

Your background and your species should remain completely different parts of character creation. A bird doesn't turn into a fish if you bring it up around the ocean.

 

[Parmandur]

And I want to be able to express my characters through both.

That option, as it applies to mixed ancestry characters, is seemingly being taken away from me - or at the very least, moved squarely into the realm of third party and homebrew.

And there are reasons behind that.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

And there are reasons behind that.

There are always reasons.

I am saying that however compelling those reasons may be, I find the end result to be shallow and counterproductive to its stated purpose, which is purportedly to encourage a broader array of mixed ancestry characters within the game. It does nothing for "pure roleplayers", does nothing to "pure optimizers", and forces everyone in the middle to accept the disconnect between the game's narrative saying "all lineages are welcome" and its mechanics saying "only single ancestries need apply".

Meanwhile, they quietly retconned two mixed characters out of Phandelver and Planescape, and so far as I can tell haven't actually noted a character as being of mixed lineage within a published book in more than a year.

So forgive me for feeling that their words and their actions are not exactly matching up on this particular topic...

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Meanwhile, they quietly retconned two mixed characters out of Phandelver and Planescape, and so far as I can tell haven't actually noted a character as being of mixed lineage within a published book in more than a year.

Yeah their actions on this are making it look like they believe the very existence of mixed species character to be problematic in of itself, even without mechanical representation for them.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

And dragonborns in phb are garbagio, ones from fitzbans are slightly less (floating asi). I mean seriously, no darkvision? 3.5 had template half dragon which was damn good with all the goodies it gave you on top of base race. Dragonborns are Hlaf Dragons from Wish.

Have you checked out the new dragonborn from the UA playtest? They got darkvision.

 

[Kobold Stew]

Have you checked out the new dragonborn from the UA playtest? They got darkvision.

I am hoping that was just a test balloon, to see if and how people respond.
Too many races have darkvision; it would be bettr, in my view, to find ways of removing it form others (elves -- lookin' at you!) than add it to all.

 

[Undrave]

I want a range of options, spanning from fully parent A to fully parent B (i.e. "pick-a-parent") to differing packages of traits drawn from each (i.e. "mix-and-match").

I want a system that's even more flexible than both the one we currently have and the one being proposed.

The way I would do it is split species traits in 'major' and 'minor' traits. To make a mixed race character you pick a base race and you get the major trait and then you can trade any of your minor traits for the ones from the other parents. Some major traits would be powerful and wouldn't leave a lot of room for minor traits but others would have a lot of them.

So if half-elves exists, they'll look to play the strangest multiracial combo that the dm doesn't shut down immediately. Dragonborn/aarakokra is a good example, or goliath/gnome, but they probably not orc/kenku because only one of those lays eggs.

Again: Egg Groups. There's 16 of them in Pokémon and over 1000 Pokémon and they all fit in one or two of them and they just add the new ones.