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<blockquote data-quote="NaturalZero" data-source="post: 8456491" data-attributes="member: 55705">When I played with groups in the 4e days, pretty much everyone, down the the individual, always picked a race that gave them the best ability score bonus for the class they wanted to play. The numbers were baked into the racial choice and that's the most obvious way to optimize your initial choices. The system used math to encourage min-max and optimization at character optimization.At some point, one of the DMs decided that everyone could just pick whatever +2/+2 ability score modifier they wanted at level 1 and guess what? Suddenly the doors swung open and we had people showing up with tiefling clerics, half-orc warlocks, dragonborn wizards, et al. Why? Because when you remove the hard-coded racial ability mods, your choice is no longer about optimizing your math and is instead mostly about what you think would be cool to play.Fast forward to 5e and what did I see again? People always wanted to pick the race with the math that helped their class the most. Racial ASIs encouraged you to pick the &quot;right&quot; choice so that your math problem is more likely to beat the DM's math problem. Min-max-optimization was baked into the literal math of racial choice. Tasha's came out, every group I ran with switched to floating ASIs, and what did I see yet again? People were free from optimization based on which race gave their equation the best math to out-math the other guy's number and instead we got elf barbarians, goliath rogues, tiefling artificers, et al. It's more fun to sit at a table with build variety where the system doesn't nickle and dime you with penalties for not going with the math that the developers decided is supposed to encourage you to optimize.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="NaturalZero, post: 8456491, member: 55705"] When I played with groups in the 4e days, pretty much everyone, down the the individual, always picked a race that gave them the best ability score bonus for the class they wanted to play. The numbers were baked into the racial choice and that's the most obvious way to optimize your initial choices. The system used math to encourage min-max and optimization at character optimization. At some point, one of the DMs decided that everyone could just pick whatever +2/+2 ability score modifier they wanted at level 1 and guess what? Suddenly the doors swung open and we had people showing up with tiefling clerics, half-orc warlocks, dragonborn wizards, et al. Why? Because when you remove the hard-coded racial ability mods, your choice is no longer about optimizing your math and is instead mostly about what you think would be cool to play. Fast forward to 5e and what did I see again? People always wanted to pick the race with the math that helped their class the most. Racial ASIs encouraged you to pick the "right" choice so that your math problem is more likely to beat the DM's math problem. Min-max-optimization was baked into the literal math of racial choice. Tasha's came out, every group I ran with switched to floating ASIs, and what did I see yet again? People were free from optimization based on which race gave their equation the best math to out-math the other guy's number and instead we got elf barbarians, goliath rogues, tiefling artificers, et al. It's more fun to sit at a table with build variety where the system doesn't nickle and dime you with penalties for not going with the math that the developers decided is supposed to encourage you to optimize. [/QUOTE]

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