Right way to do racial stat modifiers?

[Talakeal]

First things first, I want to point something out. Nobody in this thread so far is making a good case, or really any case, that racial mods are intrinsically offensive. Combined with the fact that none of the flex stats fans were saying that in 2019, I think it's safe to say that claims of offensiveness were just emotions riding high and both sides being politically primed. Both by WotC's press release at the time, and the culture in general.

On to a game design and theme perspective, a lot goes into the question of how far a character can rise from the accident of their birth. Like I mentioned before, a 5e character spends over half their career in theory and often all of it in practice being 5% behind if they don't have an appropriate racial stat boost. I'm not a fan of freeform racial ASIs, and I can appreciate that's a fair argument. In an alternate D&D where everybody got enough level based ASIs to cap out their primary stat in early T2, I'd say that the problem self-corrects early enough to not be worth any fuss. If the problem persisted over a character's whole career but were a percentile system where racial mods only accounted for 1-2% of the character's total, I'd be more inclined to say it was a nonissue.

Edit to add: Looking at your system and spelling it out for everyone else here, it looks like it's 1d20 + stat (on a 1-10 scale) + usually 5 for a skill that's in your character's wheelhouse. With advancement being point based. A racial +1 to an attribute that still respects the 10 cap is essentially just a few free character points that have to be spent a specific way. Ditto for baked in traits, and point based games will often treat races as package deals that come with a slight discount over what all the bundled traits would cost individually. (Which makes sense. A package deal usually isn't as synergistic as what could be bought for the points spent freely, so it's okay to give a bit of a discount for that.) Having racial mods break the 10 cap for PC races might make people feel like some races are more or less mandatory because that would be a 5% difference that never really goes away.

So you have a couple of options. You could not bother with race rules at all, and ask people who do want to play an oddball race to approximate it buying existing traits and refluffing. (Alternately, you could create a few special monster traits for things like being exceptionally large/small and add those to the expected bundle for people who want to approximate a monster.) Or if you really want to make multiple PC races an active thing, you could have them bundle a few traits and stat boosts together and cost character points. The devil will be in the details and it will require playtesting, but in principle I don't see anybody calling it either unplayable or offensive.

Nobody in this thread is really pointing it out, which is annoying, as I still people claiming pretty regularly on current threads on this and other boards, they just, for whatever reason, are declining to articulate here.

Also, that is more or less how I do it in my system currently.

What does a professional editor cost for a project of that size?

Somewhere in the four figures range, the exact amount depends on how good an editor and how thorough a job you want.

I dont really see why a DM would have to react to a player that wants to play a "weak" combination of race and class.

Thats a very powergamer kind of view on players. Not all players are powergamers.

Heck I consider myself a powergamer and even I dont always choose the best combo of race and class.

For example, one of my favorite characters is my paladin, who I recreated over multiple games. She's highelven. Is that a powergamer choice ? Not at all. Its super stylish though.

I do make her Aasimar or the like whenever I get the chance, though. She's a total goody two shoes, after all.

Its really only an issue for the DM if someone is unhappy because they feel they are being punished for playing a race they love or aren't able to play the character they wanted to play because they didn't want to fall behind mechanically.

OK, from what I gathered, the original version strained belief as to how it got the OK, and it's good that they changed it. That's not really a race, however, as much as a variant within the human race and in a specific setting, something I had not considered while writing my post. My main curiosity is how the very generic races in e.g. the 3.5 player's handbook can be traced to specific cultures.

Well, Forgotten Realms has a lot of human cultures imported from the real world and then not even really trying to file the serial numbers off.

Other settings, like Warcraft and Warhammer, tend to have non human cultures that are ported very heavily from real life ones, but its not as apparent in D&D.

In D&D (and most fantasy) its mostly just stereotypes of real races that can also be applied to fantasy races, for example dwarves and goblins are often seen as adhering to Jewish stereotypes and orcs often have stereotypes from Africans, mongols, or native Americans. I have seen elves and even Yuan-ti accused of stereotyping Asians, and so on.