Better alternative than stat-less races

[Rukelnikov]

LOL. You are currently arguing that you NEED the system to FORCE your orc to deal LESS DAMAGE and be LESS RESILIENT for the sake of FLAVOR.

How does that work out? Someone help me here.

If I'm creating a Half Orc Necro and intentionally don't make him as good at casting as I could, then as I understand/perceive/play that character, then he didn't put his all in that, there were choices when he went for something else. Then while he could tell others he did his best to be the greatest necro he could, he'd feel that's not true, he could've been a better Necro had he put himself to it, its not the same character.

Optimization and roleplaying are not opposites.

You can have a useless PC played with all the personality of a carrot; and you can have a powered to the nines PC who’s the most memorable character due to their personality and actions.

And that's exactly why not having a +2 in your main stat is unimportant at the end of the day.

Btw, I mostly agree with your second sentence, optimization and good character do not necessarily go hand in hand, but I'd say the process of optimization can often help with the conceptualization of the character

Spoiler: Example

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I'm gonna be a shuriken throwing ninja that's secretly a noble, how could I go about this?

I'm gonna have to somehow eventually get magic weaponry, I could go Artificer or Art2/Fighter... Batman? Maybe Shadow Monk/Artificer, BATMAN!

Or maybe go for Kensei's magic weaponry instead of having gadgets? Maybe even cause he rejected gadgets? Or look for something else?

Well, now I'm making important decisions about my character that help refine the original idea.

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 two or three 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.

The thing is, I completely reject the notion that a character is anything less than capable because they don't have a +2 in their main stat*. Of course my experience playing is very limited compared to the totality of the playerbase, but with some 15-20 different DMs almost all of them adjust the encounters after the first couple adventures to be challenging to the party whatever the power of the party is, if they find the party is bodying everything in its path in the first couple adventures, they will start crankin up the difficulty, and if the party is getting bodied regularly, either the DM is going for that for some reason, or they will tone down encounters a bit.

You could say that they'll be weaker than the other members of the party, and that may very well be the case, but I think that depends much more on the respective builds, is the pre Tasha Half Orc Gloomstalker "weaker" than the Lightfoot Halfling Thief whose racials are tailor made for the class? Well, that will depend on the situation, in most combats I'd expect the Gloomstalker to deliver more damage.

*Maybe in a niche build where the character has a lot of requirements and none align with their racials, like a point buy Rock Gnome Paladin/Ranger (13/15/11+1/8+2/13/13), this would likely be less powerful than the average party members, but its mostly because of the rest of the build, a Half-Elf looks better but it has likely the best statline for something like this (13/15+1/12/8/13+1/12+2), the +1 in Wis could go someplace else for a half feat later on like Res(Con) or something.

20 at any level puts you above the curve, it's NEVER expected by the system, but it's not gamebreaking.

What does "expected by the system" even mean? That the character can go thru the daily combat budget 95% of the time?