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Compare Owlcat’s implementation of Pathfinder. The rules customization for that game is incredible. Tooltips are pretty damn good, too, as far as I recall.
I can defend a few of the changes. Streamlining is a dangerous line to walk. Cutting material components, probably good, definitely in line with the house rules for most tables. Verbal and somatic, eh, were they going to have any mechanical impact outside of Silence? On the other hand, spell swapping is a pretty silly way to fight the fifteen-minute adventuring day.
Others make more sense as part of an ongoing debate within D&D. Racial bonuses, for example, work like this in the next playtest. They’re not just a nod to blank-slatism, but a point of conflict between the Gamists and the Narrativists. Between the kind of people who pick Dwarf to optimize their saves and those who pick it because they read The Hobbit too recently. It’s a conflict as old as roleplaying, and flattening it out is yet another attempt at synchronizing the experience between players. Even though it means a bit of dumbing down.
They actually work like this currently in 5E, at least for any playable races published in or after The Wild Beyond The Witchlight; Monsters Of The Multiverse reprinted (and rebalanced) a bunch of racial options as well, and all of them use the floating modifiers method rather than set race-specific ASI bonuses. Your larger point stands, I just wanted to point out that on this particular point, BG3 is actually in-line with the state of the current edition.
If every race gives the same stat modifiers, why not just give everyone more points for ability scores during character creation? Apart from killing another sacred cow, except that at this point all the sacred cows are animated undead skeletons with skin draped over them.
For all intents and purposes, that is what has been done. The “racial stat bonus” has been replaced entirely by a pool of a +2 and a +1 which can be freely assigned to any two stats after the initial array of ability scores has been determined by rolling or by using the point buy or standard array method. You end up with numerically the same total available scores as before, you just have more flexibility in how you distribute them.
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