Quote Originally Posted by qube View Post
I know, and yet
  • You previously lauded the fact that golaiths get an ability that increases their carrying capacity.
  • You're against elves having the get +2 DEX - even if pointed out that this would have different game mechanical effects then the current rules.

That does not make sense to me. Carrying capacity is ALSO a number you know. Why do think one is bad and the other isn't?
I think that this may be better pointed at me. I would actually fit that more as I like powerful build and wouldn't mind seeing more of it, but am pretty fine with +2 strength not being a race thing.
For me it mostly comes to interest.
Ability scores carry some, but not alot of, flavor, and class specific mechanical implications. This means they need to be contained to conform to bounded accuracy. This tends to make ASIs not particularly interesting, and has the tendency of making them unnecessarily restrictive.

Powerful Build is the portion of strength to have the least impact on archetype, but that allows it to be much greater scope (what would your opinion of a race with +15 strength be?). As mentioned it is an area of the game that most hand wave, but as one whose table does not, it has made for some cool moments, (being able to dead lift ~1,200 pounds can dramatically effect approaches to problems).
I generally prefer features to form to the dramatic and alien. Does anyone actually remember that time they didn't miss an attack roll by 1? How about that time you cleared a room of goblins with your dragonborn fire breath?

At least for me, the thing that makes a dragonborn interesting is the dragonbreath, the str and cha bonuses are just fiddling numbers. Now if this was 3.5 where having a +8 strength bonus was just on the table, sure. But 5e isn't equipped to handle that. Given that, I would prefer that races prioritize the features that make them feel unusual, alien, and that change outlooks on problems fundamentally rather than the fiddly numbers.

Kobolds losing sunlight sensitivity and pack tactics, would be an example of a loss of identity for me (culture vs nature is a thing, I personally saw pack tactics as nature in the same way it is for wolves but that is a separate argument), Kobolds loosing the strength penalty barely registester as a change to that identity.