Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
If we assume that half orcs are larger and have heartier builds than other races, I think it's fair to look askance at the half orc wizard who decides that strength is a safe dump stat. Ditto with the gnome fighter who thinks that it's safe to dump intelligence, or the elven paladin who decides to go heavy armor and dump dexterity. That does feel like just digging for the most useful racials. Forcing any of the above to sacrifice prime stat as opposed to "highest stat after the important ones" (keeping in mind that most very few characters leverage more than three or four stats) is a much bigger ask and makes them much less likely to be seen.

Spitballing an idea that just hit me while I was writing this, I wonder how bad an optional rule giving certain races stat minimums might be. The low end and implied medium are kept, while the top end doesn't feel as limited to only the right races.
I mean, even if you want to do things via stats, there are a lot of other ways to implement stat affinity than modifiers that you couldn't just buy your way out of. For example, automatic advantage on skill checks involving the favored stat and automatic disadvantage on skill checks involving the disfavored stat, but things like attack rolls are left alone. If you've got automatic disadvantage, then even if you raise that stat to a 20 you're going to be a different 20 than someone without that; if you've got automatic advantage, even if you dumpstat to an 8, you're still going to be more consistent than someone without it. Or as a less potent effect, rolls with favored stats have a higher minimum value on the d20 and rolls with disfavored stats have a higher critical failure range. Or getting more interesting, change what stats mean - ability to treat the results of Strength checks to jump as double, ability to make a free Dexterity check each round in order to move an extra 10ft in a given round, ability to gain extra uses of per-long-rest/per-day abilities from Constitution modifier if positive, etc.