Editing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (section)

====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.]]