Racial skill proficiencies have also changed quite a lot over the course of 5e’s history. I think it’s safe to say that this point that’s how things will work for every new race option we see. The new lineages in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft are presented this way, and new race options in current Unearthed Arcana articles are being given the same treatment. These days, the expectation is that every character gets either +2/+1 increase or three +1 increases. Mountain Dwarves suddenly got really good at being durable wizards, and aarakocra got good at being literally anything that isn’t locked into melee. It also allowed a ton of additional optimization. I like flexibility in build decisions because it allows for more creativity. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
The thinking behind this is sound: adventurers are naturally atypical, so why should they need to perfectly adhere to our preconceived notions of what a race is and does? But mechanically, this took a sledgehammer to how we’ve thought about races in DnD for decades.
Now everyone gets to reassign their ability scores as they see fit. Humans (and a few other races like half-elves and warforged) had the ability to assign their ability score increases as they chose, which provided a huge benefit to playing those races even though the increases were no larger than what other races got. That concept of racial ability score adjustments dates back to early editions of Dungeons and Dragons, and has remained unchanged for the games entire history until Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything came along and shook things up. Half-Orcs for +2 Strength and +1 Constitution, and that was that. Ability ScoresĪbility Score Increases were, for the most part, static for a long time. Mostly, we got more choices beyond just choosing our character’s race. Some changes were applied retroactively using the Customizing Your Origin optional rules presented in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, but aside from more flexibility in ability score increases and skill proficiencies, a lot of the new race design ideas haven’t affected the core races, leaving many of them as somewhat novel relics in the face of a growing library of races that are often more interesting both mechanically and conceptually. Since that day, the Dungeons and Dragons design team has iterated on race design in nearly every new supplement which has included new races. We’re approaching 7 years since the DnD 5th edition Player’s Handbook hit store shelves for the first time.
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