D&D (2024) Which races would YOU put into the 50th anniversary Players Handbook?

[Cadence]

I disagree, in that you can have little to no talent (i.e. fairly average scores or even worse) and still become a successful and heroic adventurer; or you could be born blessed with 18s in everything and still never leave the safety of your home town.

As a character, the numbers reflect what you are. What you then do - and how you do it - is entirely up to you.

"Master Frodo, just think of all the great stories. And how they never gave up no matter how dark it was. But of course they had good stats. Do you still have your knife?"

 

[Bill Zebub]

And this is what I would want. The strongest Goliath, should always, outside of Magical Items (which I also do not like the handling of in 5e) be stronger than the strongest halfling.

So can't you just imagine...or even rule, if you're the DM...that somewhere in this game world is a goliath who is stronger than the strongest halfling?

Or, heck, just give a bunch of NPC goliaths a strength of 22. Solved.

 

[Yaarel]

Or, heck, just give a bunch of NPC goliaths a strength of 22. Solved.

Yeah. Part of the way to create a general impression about a race is NPCs who portray a specific character concepts.

Spelljammer did similar by giving one the astral elves a 21 Intelligence score, despite being nonepic.

 

[Scribe]

So can't you just imagine...or even rule, if you're the DM...that somewhere in this game world is a goliath who is stronger than the strongest halfling?

Or, heck, just give a bunch of NPC goliaths a strength of 22. Solved.

No, I'm talking about PCs.

 

[Bill Zebub]

No, I'm talking about PCs.

You can't restrict it to just PCs. Your argument is that it makes no sense for the strongest halfling to be stronger than the strongest goliath, since on average goliaths are so much stronger than halflings, but if you are only considering PCs then you are ignoring 99+% of the population, and so you can't really make statements about "the strongest".

In the real world the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women. And yet I can easily assemble a group of 6 people for whom that pattern does not hold, none of whom are the strongest representatives of their gender.

Maybe what you mean is that you think a player who chooses goliath should somehow have the right to be stronger than the player who chooses halfling, but if so that's just your personal preference and you can't really use statistical arguments about entire populations to try to make it objectively true.

 

[Scribe]

Your argument is that it makes no sense for the strongest halfling to be stronger than the strongest goliath, since on average goliaths are so much stronger than halflings, but if you are only considering PCs then you are ignoring 99+% of the population, and so you can't really make statements about "the strongest".

I mean...

Its fairly well established around here that PCs > NPCs > 'common' folk of any given race.

I dont believe its confusing at all. No PC Halfling focusing on Strength, should be higher at the basic Ability Score level, than...almost any other given race focusing on Strength.

"As if a human child size."

 

[Cadence]

So can't you just imagine...or even rule, if you're the DM...that somewhere in this game world is a goliath who is stronger

than the strongest halfling?

Or, heck, just give a bunch of NPC goliaths a strength of 22. Solved.

It feels odd that a goliath PC (the hero after all?) couldn't be the strongest member of his race.

("Well, in order for your Goliath fighter to be the strongest member of the strongest race in the world, that means the record is only 20. And so I'm sorry, if someone in the party wants to make a 20 Str Halfling and tie you, there's nothing I can do. If you want to not be the strongest one, I'll put a 21 Str NPC Goliath out there so you can still have that good old Goliath pride .")

* Pre-emptively insert something about the trait that lets Goliath's carry more, and a switch to half-orcs or something else that's besides the point.

 

[MoonSong]

In order:

1. Because race essentialism is a false and pernicious ideology IRL that has done much harm to a lot of people, and things which perpetuate it should be altered so they do not do so. Also, because real variability in actual living creatures is more than sufficient to make beings who fit anywhere on the "this is something a mortal being can be" spectrum, thus it is not merely laudable, but truly more realistic to embrace that variability in playable characters.* Playable characters, I would note, that are already going to be weird for their race no matter what, because most people don't have class levels.
2. I already support using this, so I have no criticism for it.
3. Same as the first answer to #1, but also because culture is an idea, an ideal, a trained or learned thing, not something baked into a person's genetics. You can take two identical twins and raise them in different cultures and, guess what, their cultures will be different! Physiology can have an influence on culture (e.g., as I've said in previous threads, dragonborn mature faster, lay eggs, and have breath weapons; this will affect them regardless of the culture they grow up in, and a majority-dragonborn culture will be affected by this.) But physiology does not, cannot, should not dictate culture.
4. Setting-specific divinities are individuals with their own preferences; if they choose to favor a specific race over other races, that's their prerogative. It has little to nothing to do with the physiology of any given race, and everything to do with that deity's preferences. You may have noticed, for example, that the Romans enforced syncretism of their deities upon every culture they encountered. Worship is a cultural thing, and thus taught; divine favor is an individual-deity-personality thing and thus completely separate from the question of physiology.

Or, in sum? Because there are both unpleasant implications of #1 and #3 when these things are treated as essentialism rather than as real and IRL measurable variability (for #1) or as the product of training/learning aka "acculturation" (for #3), and because it is more grounded, more like the way real things actually behave, to not make these things into examples of race-essentialism. Those unpleasant implications can be avoided, thus, barring some other even more pressing concern, they should be.

*See, for example, the results of Anthropometry of Flying Personnel - 1950, G.S. Daniels. TL;DR: There is no such thing as an actually average person. Just two or three requirements (if strict) or five or six (if somewhat looser) is enough to exclude the vast majority of the population, and "exactly +2 Str, +2 Con" or whatever is certainly going to be quite strict. Or, for another example, the Australian Bureau of Statistics openly stating that, in both the 2011 and 2016 censuses, the average Australian does not exist, because no individual person has all of the average (or, for non-averageable things, most common) characteristics, despite this being based on the full population data of their nation (over 23 million people.)

And this is why I think that race ought to have no mechanics attached. All of it should be lore. Everything should be culture and if you really want a superpower, buy it with a feat or two (BTW I subscribe to the idea that PCs aren't any special to begin with. The idea that someone is inherently better is abhorrent to me)

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It feels odd that a goliath PC (the hero after all?) couldn't be the strongest member of his race.

("Well, in order for your Goliath fighter to be the strongest member of the strongest race in the world, that means the record is only 20. And so I'm sorry, if someone in the party wants to make a 20 Str Halfling and tie you, there's nothing I can do. If you want to not be the strongest one, I'll put a 21 Str NPC Goliath out there so you can still have that good old Goliath pride .")

* Pre-emptively insert something about the he trait that lets Goliath's carry more, and a switch to half-orcs or something else that's besides the point.

It's a weird debate, to me. Because people are so certain that they are right.

Yeah, I don't like racial essentialism. I think everyone agrees that demanding it produces bad outcomes at worst, and questionable outcomes even at best.

On the other hand, there is something ... well, a little weird ... when you think that the player who selected "Fairy" as their PC's race and the person who selected "Goliath" as their PC's race both can have 20s in strength.

And I don't really have any good way to reconcile that.

 

[Yaarel]

In my eyes:

An ability score of 18 is the peak of human possibility.

A score of 19 or 20 is literally superhuman.

When a human achieves a score of 19 or 20, it means, some superhuman influence such as magic is in play.

I prefer human NPCs to always three +1s, rather than +2 and +1. But for player characters, there might well be a unique superhuman story in play.