Editing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (section)

===Race Design===
Ironically, one element of 4th edition that people are missing is race design. Whatever its other faults, 4e did have a strong universal approach to making races: +2 to two ability scores (which was tweaked so that you had a choice as to which your second bonus was, so each race had greater flexibility), +2 to two skills, and a 1/encounter racial power, with any extra racial traits being gravy. In comparison, 5e's race design is... well, not so strong.

One complaint is about the switchover from a +2/+2 ability bonus, one of them "fixed" and one offering two distinct options, to a mostly-fixed +2/+1 ability bonus; this ensures races and subraces have a lot less character and mechanical versatility overall, and narrows and flattens a lot of their options.

Another complaint is about two racial traits that WoTC seems to overvalue: Powerful Build and Natural Weapons.

Powerful Build in particular gets peoples' goats because... well, counting as one size larger for the purpose of carrying weights and pushing objects just isn't something that comes up a lot in most campaigns, outside of a few small scenes or situations. But considering where and how Wizards tends to gravely weight it, often giving negative traits just to offset it, they clearly disagree.  This is perhaps an artifact of previous editions, where it allowed characters to use oversized weapons... but, not only does it no longer do so, there are no longer ''rules'' for oversized weapons in the game!

Natural Weapons earn flak because they're a hidden trap; whilst that inability to ever lose a weapon is nice, and it's a really fluffy trait, the problem is that as soon as your campaign starts climbing up past first level, your natural weapons become increasingly useless. Firstly, there're few feats and no class powers that increase the versatility of your natural weapon attacks.  (And the best feat to do so, Tavern Brawler, literally gives you most of the benefit of natural weapons in the process!) Secondly, unless you're playing a [[Monk]], you lose all incentive to rely on your natural weapons once you hit that point where creatures that are [[Damage Reduction|resistant or even immune to mundane weapons]] become increasingly common, by which point you have long since lost all benefits from your natural weapons by virtue of being a high-level monk short of ''maybe'' being able to do slashing damage or something with them.  And while ''in theory'' the game is designed around magic weapons being rare and unreliable to obtain, in practice virtually no DM holds to that rule, and neither do most published adventures.  

Plus, it is often ''very'' obvious when the creators built a race with care, creativity, and genuine passion to make something fun and memorable, and when they were just lazily splurting out something with zero effort because the fans kept asking them about a race they couldn't give less of a shit about.  

Within the core rulebooks, the most obvious example is the utter travesty that is the dragonborn, who has ''two'' whole racial traits to its name (two and a half if you want to be generous and call having an exotic language a "trait"), and both combat focused to boot when ''every other race in the game'' has at least  ''one'' other trait to support either the exploration or the social pillars of the game. But the most infamous (and obvious) example came in the [https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-Eladrin-Gith.pdf Eladrin and Gith UA], which is perhaps best described with a brief summary of the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr8tC1Zl_1g accompanying video], in which [[Mike Mearls]] begrudingly lays out the basic facts of the [[githzerai]] and [[githyanki]] (the ''entire'' gith race) like he's reading notes off a post card as fast as he can, including a brief sidebar about how people kept asking about them, before spending ''two thirds'' of the video gushing about the [[eladrin]] subrace like he's in love with it, going on and on about how much he loves that race and how much he hopes you love it too so he can play it.

The fact that one of these things was an overwrought labor of love, and one was a dashed-off product of a begrudging duty is eminently obvious in both the overall design and the overall power level of both races, with the eladrin (which is already the subrace of a race with some nice features) getting the equivalent of a free 2nd level spell on a short rest and a lot of other nice benefits they can adjust each short rest (and that's ''after'' the UA version Mearls was talking about in that video got nerfed pretty hard in the transition to the book), and the gith getting basically nothing from their "chassis" race, githyanki getting a pretty good spread of utility spells, plus a free skill and light/medium armor, while the poor, theoretically-more-PC-friendly githzerai get a terrible ability spread, advantage on a couple of saves (which the eladrin also gets as part of its racial package), and some admittedly-nice-except-for-''shield'' utility spells.