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.

====The Tasha Controversy====
In November 2020, WotC released a [[splatbook]] called Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, which contained a new official "optional" rule for character creation, where players could take the ability score bonuses they had started with and instead shuffle them into any other abilities they liked, so long as they maintained the original bonus format (ie "+2/+1 ''has'' to translate to a different +2/+1 bonus, you can't just take a +3). There was also a slightly more complex system to swap out skill, weapon and tool proficiencies for brand new ones.

The idea behind this change was to give players more flexibility, allowing them to better customize their character by giving them unusual backstories that translated into mechanical effect - for example, [[rape|your half-orc may be half-elven]] and so have superior dexterity and/or brainpower to go with the rugged orcish constitution. It's not even entirely unprecedented; 4th edition ultimately changed its formula to "races give a +2 bonus to one fixed stat, with a second +2 bonus chosen from a list of two alternative stats" with its 3rd PHB. And homebrew and "alternate race traits" have been trying to divorce the cultural and biological components of a given race design for years to represent, say [[Sandwich Stoutaxe| a drow being raised by dwarfs]].

Why was this controversial? Well, probably not helping was its coming on the heels of some rather prominent and vocal media articles lambasting D&D's use of the racial ability scores modifier mechanic as "racist", which added the "[[SJW]] appeasement!" fire to the mix (trying to make up for [[Wut|being racist against orcs and elves]]), but the core of the complaint is that this new mechanic robs races of a lot of their archetypal flavor, [https://www.nerfnow.com/comic/2852 rendering them blander]. After all, even in 4th edition, the revised racial ability score modifier was intended to stick to archetypal themes - an [[elf]] always got +2 Dexterity, because elves are "the agile/graceful race", but could choose either +2 Wisdom (reflecting their strong spiritual nature and close ties to the [[Primal Spirits]]) or +2 Intelligence because, well, high elves were a thing for most of D&D's history.

Also probably not helping was that 5e's subrace mechanic was intended in large part to be a callback to the old days of monolithic racial cultures and the use of subspecies to present alternatives; want an [[elf]] with a Strength bonus? Take a wild elf! Want a [[gnome]] with a Dexterity bonus? Take a forest gnome! This new mechanic is more of a throwback to 4e's controversial "generical" core races, and so it's no wonder many people don't like it "out of the box." If nothing else, though, it represents a coherent set of tools for homebrewing new races or for rejiggering them with some measure of official support.

Furthermore, most of the reason different races got different traits wasn't due to racism, it was inherent biology: elves having higher dexterity wasn't any more racist than Halflings being Small sized was, it was due to them being ''a completely different species'' from humans. Humans are weaker and more agile than Orangutans, for example, so a fictional orangutan race smart enough to be a PC is going to have higher strength. What sense would it make for them to get to choose to be more charismatic instead? So letting an elf choose to have high con instead of high dex makes about as much sense as letting a warforged choose to be a fey instead of a construct. The reason it's racist if you try to apply this to real life human ethnicities is that unlike in D&D, everyone in real life ''is'' the same species and thus trying to assign them all different stats would be ''factually inaccurate''.

It's also worth noting that getting to slap their +1 wherever they liked was one of the main shticks of the Final version of the [[Warforged]], and so now that WotC has taken that away form them, they suck again. Furthermore, there was a very obvious reason they even got to do this in the first place: ''because they were robots literally built for the job''.

One could also argue that it defeats the mechanical purpose of getting to pick from different races in the first place, like if they introduced a rule letting classes swap out their abilities for those of other classes, such as letting sorcerers swap their spellcasting for the fighter's armor and weapon proficiency.

Lastly, the Mountain dwarf is now just as OP as the variant Human. They were already bad for getting automatic armor proficiency ''and'' getting a +2 to both strength and constitution, but now that they can reallocate those plus 2s anywhere they like, there's little reason to pick any other race. All in all this was indeed a very boneheaded decision, but not for the reason the misogynist incels and misandrist tumblrinas are making it out to be (probably).

Now, if it were a completely different RPG, then this concept could work. Each race would get different modifying values assigned to them: One would get a +1 and a -1 the player could stick anywhere, another would get a +2 and a -2, another would get two +1s and two -1s, one race would get no modifiers, etc. It would be pretty hard to explain fluff-wise, but in theory it could work. Alas, nearly everyone in D&D just gets a +2 and a +1, so this is not the game for that.

And for the absolute ''icing'' on the cake, WotC decided that '''every''' splatbook they produced afterwards would use these new rules as a starting point, resulting in subsequent races like the [[Dhampir]], [[Fairy]] and [[Harengon]] having an official statblock of "you choose whatever you want".

[[File:WizoPoz.png|center|thumb|1050px|By the way, this was plagiarized from the disclaimers at the front of Looney Tunes DVDs.  Also, there were never elves or orcs in America.]]