[5e] Thorough explanation of why it's terrible?

[MGuy]

If you want to play 3.5 and just show up and not dumpster dive you can just do that. I never got this argument that because there were a lot of options, especially at the tail end of 3rd, that it meant you had to use them. People were playing the game when there were only a handful of books and if that's what you want to do you can just do that.

[Emerald]

But what really matters is that since tabletop RPGs are a dying hobby, any system that makes it easier to get newbies to the table has a place. You want a ton of crunchy and complicated options with 30 base classes and 200 optional classes and 1000 spells? No matter how fun it would be, good fucking luck finding a new group of people willing to learn it. The platonic ideal of "the one half-decent TTRPG" that is frequently sought around here would be pointless even if could be found, because it is so far from what the dwindling pool of new players wants that nobody would ever play it. Meanwhile in the real world, we have things like 5e which are, if nothing else,
at a place on the continuum between "customizable" and "usable" that there are still people willing to learn it.

Since the very beginning, significant numbers of people if not the majority have gotten into D&D by being introduced to it by existing players; OD&D spread to wargamers first and the general populace second, and the majority of 5e games likely still involve at least one AD&D/3e/4e convert rather than being made up entirely of newbies, much as proponents of the "Critical Role is driving 5e by getting newbies into it" argument might want to argue otherwise.

You can get any group of newbies to play any edition of D&D if you have someone there to hold their hand, because they want to play D&D and it has "D&D" on the cover and the expert seems to know what they're doing. Every edition is similarly approachable from a "1st-level core-only" starting point, and if 7-year-olds in the 80s could figure out OD&D then the barrier to entry to any other edition can't be that high.

Speaking anecdotally, when I've introduced groups of newbies to the game, every single group but one of them has been introduced to 3e. None of them has had a problem learning it (with at least one player going from "Wait, dice can have more than 6 sides?" to "Druid summoning bears while riding a bear and turning into a bear!" in a handful of sessions). All of them have learned the mechanics needed for their class first with a little guidance from me before expanding their horizons as the game progressed, like players introduced to every edition.

The one group I started off with 5e I did so because one player in the group had gotten 5e books as a gift and insisted on using them. About half the party was frustrated by the blandness and lack of customization after 2nd or 3rd level, being used to more customizable computer RPGs, and after they liked a bunch of 3e material I ported in (this was a FR game, so lots of setting-specific material to mine) the group decided to switch to 3e for the next campaign, which we've just started.

The idea that newbies are scared of options and depth and just want to roll some d20s and not think about anything is pervasive, oft-repeated, and bullshit. That wasn't true when D&D was the new kid on the block and everyone wanted to do this cool new "roleplaying" thing no matter how baroque it was or whether they could pronounce "dweomer," and it still isn't true now when auto-calculating character sheets and diceroller macros make anything from late 2e to core-only 5e equally mathematically simple.

[OgreBattle]

Emerald, what kind of options were your players looking for with 5e?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

In my experience, the only person who ever reads the rulebook more than once is the GM and everyone else just trusts them because they're lazy. I've only had one dude quit because rules are hard, and he just went off and started running FATE and OSR games instead.
... where he still doesn't know the FUCKING RULES!

People will generally put up with plenty of rules if they result in something that isn't tedious and lets them feel cool, and some people are fucking basket weavers from birth anyway, so don't worry about them.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

If you want to just have four people get together and play a campaign and have everybody able to contribute, that's a lot easier with the lower power disparity of 5e. You can still spend a lot of time designing a character and have her be awesome and feel good about that, but it's easier for newcomers to pick something out-of-the-box and still be a useful part of the team. It's also possible to make character choices for reasons other than MMORPG-style optimization and, while they're not going to be very good, an 8th level fighter who picked feats with no combat utility can still dish out and take enough damage to make them not completely superfluous in a party with a "top tier" build melee DPS.

But what really matters is that since tabletop RPGs are a dying hobby, any system that makes it easier to get newbies to the table has a place. You want a ton of crunchy and complicated options with 30 base classes and 200 optional classes and 1000 spells? No matter how fun it would be, good fucking luck finding a new group of people willing to learn it. The platonic ideal of "the one half-decent TTRPG" that is frequently sought around here would be pointless even if could be found, because it is so far from what the dwindling pool of new players wants that nobody would ever play it. Meanwhile in the real world, we have things like 5e which are, if nothing else,
at a place on the continuum between "customizable" and "usable" that there are still people willing to learn it.

I contend that no 5e characters are valuable members of a team. Each character is a chucklefuck who sucks at everything, because 5e DCs are high when compared to skills, and also you get very few skills, and you can still be outfought by a town handing out bows to a dozen combat-capable people unless you have access to fireball (and then they just need to space out their archers more). 5e characters, aside from casters, are not very useful.

[Emerald]

Emerald, what kind of options were your players looking for with 5e?

In general, the whole party were looking for more options at level-up (as opposed to just getting whatever the subclass they picked 10 levels ago was giving them) and more round-by-round options beyond spamming cantrips and melee attacks.

In specific, the party rogue (Thief subclass) was annoyed that basically all the rogue features were passive or reactive and the feats he got didn't really change that, and that he couldn't change up his abilities like the caster PCs could. I offered to let him respec as an Arcane Trickster and he gave that a shot for a few sessions, but between being pigeonholed into Enchantment and Illusion (when he was really looking for something more "skirmishing ninja"-y with lots of walking on air and shadow teleportation and such) and having so few spells (so he was quickly reduced to spamming cantrips and not feeling particularly ninja-y) that didn't really cut it.

The party bard (Lore subclass) felt far too similar to the party wizard and party cleric. All three of them were full casters, the bard and cleric both support types while the wizard was a 50/50 blasting/utility split (on my recommendation, granted), and Bardic Inspiration was fairly limited and felt like just another buffing spell to him. He absolutely loved using Cutting Words, but with that being a 3-4/day thing he was basically a particularly insulting wizard and that's it.

The party druid, meanwhile, wanted to play a "pet class" (her words), but summoning and companions in 5e are underwhelming at best and useless at worst. I suggested playing a necromancer wizard 'cause that's the one minionmancer that's halfway decent, but she specifically picked druid to be able to turn into animals and didn't like the necromancer flavor in any case.

I addressed the former issue by making various class-agnostic setting elements (spellfire, Harper affiliation, being Chosen, etc.) available to the PCs and then handing out minor selectable goodies every few levels so they could make more progression choices past the subclass pick.

I addressed the latter issue by porting over 3e material as homebrew subclasses for them, "Shadow Ninja" for the rogue (basically a Swordsage/Incarnate/Shadow Sun Ninja/Umbral Disciple build), "Virtuoso" for the bard (replaces Bardic Inspiration with 3e Bardic Music at the cost of reducing the bard's spell progression to the slower 3e one), and "Beast Caller" for the druid (basically the astral construct power as a class feature, reflavored as summoning various animals and magical critters).

The group really liking all of those options (even the PCs who stuck with standard subclasses) and my subsequently telling them everything was a 3e port job is what got them looking at 3e in the first place and eventually agreeing to switch over. They're finding 3e to be more complex than 5e, of course, but the snags they've hit appear to be mostly due to re-learning a bunch of mechanics in a new edition rather than any intrinsic issues, and so far all but one player agrees it's a marked improvement (with the odd woman out being the player basically dragged there by her sister and feeling even 5e was too complex, so there's not much I can do on that front).

[RobbyPants]

Most of my D&D friends are starting to move to 5e or already have. It's looking increasingly likely I may be running a 5e game at some point. I've never read it other than bits and pieces on the SRD or reviews of it over here. I was curious if any of you had any house rules for making it run better. A few I have questions about:

Is there any benefit to tracking multiple advantages/disadvantages? I mean this in two ways:

• Tracking that if you have two disadvantages and one advantage, that it nets you to disadvantage (I'm not sure how the system currently does this).
• Allowing the system to also have double advantage/disadvantage (as in, roll three, take the best/worst respectively).

I'm not sure if having double A/D breaks anything, but it seems like it'd give you a bit of incentive to care about further buffing/debuffing beyond the first effect. Maybe A/D is too prolific for this to matter?


I think I've seen people suggest halving monster HP to keep fights from dragging on. I know I've seen various builds that drastically outperform expectations, but is this a decent way to go.


Do people just look up 3e skills and modify DCs to plug into 5e's lack of a skill system?


I think I've seen recommendations to use both ability improvements and feats, both to stay on the tight bonus accumulation treadmill and to give some customization.


I was thinking to make races less class specific to change how ability bonuses work. Perhaps just +2 X and +1 Y, you choose which abilities? So if you want +2 Str, +1 Con on a gnome, go for it.


Anything else?

[Avoraciopoctules]

The Elven Accuracy feat provides at least one way in 5E to upgrade Advantage to Best of 3. There's likely one or two others.

[pragma]

Most of my D&D friends are starting to move to 5e or already have. It's looking increasingly likely I may be running a 5e game at some point.

I'm running a heavily houseruled version right now, my comments below are based on that game.

Is there any benefit to tracking multiple advantages/disadvantages? I mean this in two ways:

• Tracking that if you have two disadvantages and one advantage, that it nets you to disadvantage (I'm not sure how the system currently does this).
• Allowing the system to also have double advantage/disadvantage (as in, roll three, take the best/worst respectively).

I'm not sure if having double A/D breaks anything, but it seems like it'd give you a bit of incentive to care about further buffing/debuffing beyond the first effect. Maybe A/D is too prolific for this to matter?

Single advantage / disadvantage has worked pretty well for me; my players haven't missed buff stacking as a mechanic. The biggest issue I've found with single advantage/disadvantage is nonsensical results with vision and concealment. e.g.: it's better to cast Fog Cloud on yourself than on enemy archers because they'll have disadvantage (blind fire) while you have cancelling advantage & disadvantage (blind fire + unseen attacker). Best of 3 dice/worst of 3 dice isn't a bonus so big that it's game breaking, though I think best/worst of 4 is (I can dig into anydice / troll if you need). That said, whatever you pick has to interact with Elven Accuracy.

I think I've seen people suggest halving monster HP to keep fights from dragging on. I know I've seen various builds that drastically outperform expectations, but is this a decent way to go.

Not a big deal at levels 1-5 in my experience. But I've mostly had players fight lots of mooks and not single big bruisers. Single bruisers are very susceptible to crowd control because bounded accuracy means even crappy spell save DCs are a tossup.

Do people just look up 3e skills and modify DCs to plug into 5e's lack of a skill system?

I just wing it. 5 is easy, 10 is normal-ish, 15 is hard. I pick whether something is easy, medium or hard based on some vague sense of verisimilitude, how good/bad it would be for the players, and what side of the bed I got up on. There was a nascent project on GITP to port 3e DCs over to 5e, but it got shouted down by grognards who think that player's knowing outputs of skill systems makes them entitled and uppity.

I think I've seen recommendations to use both ability improvements and feats, both to stay on the tight bonus accumulation treadmill and to give some customization.

Feats help a lot with customization. Otherwise you're just stuck with spell choices. However, it's easy to fly off of 5e's already forgiving difficulty curve with even a modicum of optimization or extra goodies. Be prepared to crank CR accordingly.

I was thinking to make races less class specific to change how ability bonuses work. Perhaps just +2 X and +1 Y, you choose which abilities? So if you want +2 Str, +1 Con on a gnome, go for it.

I'm doing just that. Everyone is happy and the racial abilities serve to make everyone feel like a special snowflake. I also reduced the amount of darkvision in the game using the heuristic "you only get darkvision if you also have sunlight sensitivity," which I think has worked great for making people care about counting torches, lines of sight and access to the darkvision spell.

Anything else?

The timing of rests matters a lot because (strategic use of) long rest resources blow combats out of the water. As a result short rest resource classes feel small in the pants unless you really force the long rest folks to spread out their spellcasting. I'm using the gritty rest variant with mixed success, but the long rest folks are complaining that using their abilities is the fun part and conserving them stinks. (The short rest guy is doing great though!)

[Emerald]

I've also houseruled 5e to Baator and back to make it palatable, and largely second pragma's suggestions, but I do have a few more anecdotes/suggestions:

Is there any benefit to tracking multiple advantages/disadvantages? I mean this in two ways:

• Tracking that if you have two disadvantages and one advantage, that it nets you to disadvantage (I'm not sure how the system currently does this).
• Allowing the system to also have double advantage/disadvantage (as in, roll three, take the best/worst respectively).

I'm not sure if having double A/D breaks anything, but it seems like it'd give you a bit of incentive to care about further buffing/debuffing beyond the first effect. Maybe A/D is too prolific for this to matter?

As soon as my party realized that A/D doesn't stack, some of my players built toward ways of getting advantage for their PCs as reliably as possible, while the rest figured it's pointless to build toward something you can easily get and did the opposite. It resulted in a weird dichotomy where some PCs completely ignored high ground/flanking/attacking from stealth/etc. because they couldn't benefit at all, while others went all-in on situational advantage and played Mother May I all the time to try to eke advantage out of every situation, and teamwork and tactics correspondingly suffered.

I ended up houseruling along the lines of your first bullet point, and that mostly resolved the issue, but the wonky vision thing required separate houserules to make that make sense.

Do people just look up 3e skills and modify DCs to plug into 5e's lack of a skill system?

Yep. I dropped all DCs by 5 points, added the explicit ability to take 10 on all skill checks (on top of the handful of "passive X DC" rules), and boosted that to "take 15" if you have advantage on the check.

Also, when introducing custom items and perks, I included lots of abilities of the format "You gain proficiency with X. If you have or later gain proficiency with X, you gain expertise with X. If you have or later gain expertise with X, you gain constant advantage with X checks" to raise specialist competence across the board without changing the whole skill system.

I think I've seen recommendations to use both ability improvements and feats, both to stay on the tight bonus accumulation treadmill and to give some customization.

Yep, I did this, on top of handing out a free feat at 1st. It definitely helped with providing more choice (though as I mentioned before even getting 3-4 feats wasn't enough in some cases given the short and very restricted list available).

I was thinking to make races less class specific to change how ability bonuses work. Perhaps just +2 X and +1 Y, you choose which abilities? So if you want +2 Str, +1 Con on a gnome, go for it.

Several players in my group didn't like the idea of decoupling specific stat boosts from race because they found beefy elves and seductive dwarves a bridge too far, so I just let them mix and match stat boosts within races while having subrace determine the racial trait package as normal.

For instance, an elf would have +2 Dex and could choose +1 Con, Int, Wis, or Cha regardless of whether they're a high elf, wood elf, sea elf, or drow, but they couldn't pick +2 Dex/+1 Str or +2 Int/+1 Dex or similar. It was a good compromise between players who felt restricted by the subrace packages and players who liked to lean into stereotypes.

If your players are fine with totally free stat boosts, though, you won't run into any issues if you go with the +2 X/+1 Y approach.

Anything else?

Mook casters with access to counterspell are a huge issue, above and beyond the normal issue of mook stacking. Once you hit mid levels, a basic "mid level boss cultist with 3-5 cultist minions" encounter can utterly shut down PC casters because having counterspell prepared is a no-brainer, they can counterspell as a reaction without impacting their normal spell output, and each counterspell attempt is around a 50/50 shot regardless of how much higher level the PCs are than the minions.

Likewise, unless your entire party is a bunch of antisocial murderhobos it's not difficult for them to hire/attract/ally with/etc. other low-level casters and shut down boss casters the same way. So I'd highly recommend banning that or houseruling it somehow.

It's hard to say what else I'd change, since I've been playing with my homebrew version for so long it's hard to remember how core handles a bunch of things.

[deaddmwalking]

For extra credit,

"Disadvantage-of-Advantage" has the highest chance out of the three proposals of reaching any specific target number of 13 or below. If you need to roll 14 or above, then 1d20 has the highest probability to do so.

Nailed it.

Either way, disadvantage of advantage was the best strategy when 2 ? N ? 13, but rolling a single die was best when 14 ? N ? 20.

This link has this weeks puzzle and an explanation last weeks puzzle. It also includes a discussion of 'n-sided dice'.

[deaddmwalking]

Duplicate Post

[deaddmwalking]

Duplicate Post.

[OgreBattle]

Something that bugs me when I dwell on it, is achieving a character concept is often tied to having more hitpoints than a brown bear, or even an orca.

Does that ever bug new players?

A lot of it is denying multiclass dips, issues of certain abilities just being an X level spell or feat, legacy stuff that a completely new player wouldn't be aware of.

[pragma]

Mook casters with access to counterspell are a huge issue, above and beyond the normal issue of mook stacking. Once you hit mid levels, a basic "mid level boss cultist with 3-5 cultist minions" encounter can utterly shut down PC casters because having counterspell prepared is a no-brainer, they can counterspell as a reaction without impacting their normal spell output, and each counterspell attempt is around a 50/50 shot regardless of how much higher level the PCs are than the minions.

Likewise, unless your entire party is a bunch of antisocial murderhobos it's not difficult for them to hire/attract/ally with/etc. other low-level casters and shut down boss casters the same way. So I'd highly recommend banning that or houseruling it somehow.

My group is just reaching counterspell level, consists almost entirely of full casters including one abjurer, so I've been fretting about house rules for this problem. I'd be eager to hear fixes you came up with.

One option I may implement is a gentlemen's agreement (which you described above) where the number of counterspellers doesn't ever get much bigger than 2.

Another is a rewrite of Counterspell that rebalances the action economy. Make Counterspell a class ability for wizards and sorcerers that allows them to spend their reaction to make an arcana check vs. spell level to cancel a spell's effects only on them once per turn. Make dispel magic into a bonus action. The design intent of this change is to force casters to spend their in-turn actions to dispel magic, which makes it less of a no-brainer, and also to ensure that spells get cast and have some effect before a caster decides to cancel them. Also it sets up a fun paper-rock-scissors dynamic where spellcasters are resilient to spells but vulnerable to punching. It has the side effect that instantaneous effects always get cast ... I think I'm OK with parties having to eat fireballs. Maybe bards can also get the much more limited countercharm that only works on enchantments to reflect their ability to pick up counterspell with magical secrets.

The final one is a callback to 3e in which you cast a spell to cancel out an enemy's caster's spell. I'd like to build in a bit of flexibility so that you don't need the exact right spell to be prepared, but I haven't hammered it out yet. In this version Counterspell doesn't exist.

In all versions, I think what spell is being cast should just be public knowledge. 3e's arcana rolls seemed like a lot of work for a forgone conclusion and I don't think magical bluffing games added much to the counterspell game experience. In the current version of 5e counterspelling the bluffing game is the only nuance, but it's also disruptive to game flow and only matters in corner cases.

[Emerald]

Something that bugs me when I dwell on it, is achieving a character concept is often tied to having more hitpoints than a brown bear, or even an orca.

Does that ever bug new players?

A lot of it is denying multiclass dips, issues of certain abilities just being an X level spell or feat, legacy stuff that a completely new player wouldn't be aware of.

Not sure what you're getting at here. Are you referring to the fact that many characters don't "come online" until high levels when they have a bunch of HD because some central part of the concept is level-gated?

My group is just reaching counterspell level, consists almost entirely of full casters including one abjurer, so I've been fretting about house rules for this problem. I'd be eager to hear fixes you came up with.

Basically, I did what 5e is terrified of doing: make things scale by level. I changed the check for dispelling and counterspelling spells above the slot level from 1d20+[stat bonus] vs. DC 10+[spell level] to 1d20+[proficiency bonus]+[stat bonus] vs. DC 10+[proficiency bonus]+[stat bonus]+[spell level], and required the normal 1d20+[stat bonus] vs. DC 10+[spell level] check when it would otherwise be automatic.

That makes it harder to counter roughly-even-level opponents and much harder to counter higher-level ones even at low levels, and essentially removes the "throw a bunch of 3rd-level wizards at a 15th-level enemy wizard" problem at mid- to high levels.

Another is a rewrite of Counterspell that rebalances the action economy. Make Counterspell a class ability for wizards and sorcerers that allows them to spend their reaction to make an arcana check vs. spell level to cancel a spell's effects only on them once per turn. Make dispel magic into a bonus action. The design intent of this change is to force casters to spend their in-turn actions to dispel magic, which makes it less of a no-brainer, and also to ensure that spells get cast and have some effect before a caster decides to cancel them. Also it sets up a fun paper-rock-scissors dynamic where spellcasters are resilient to spells but vulnerable to punching. It has the side effect that instantaneous effects always get cast ... I think I'm OK with parties having to eat fireballs. Maybe bards can also get the much more limited countercharm that only works on enchantments to reflect their ability to pick up counterspell with magical secrets.

The final one is a callback to 3e in which you cast a spell to cancel out an enemy's caster's spell. I'd like to build in a bit of flexibility so that you don't need the exact right spell to be prepared, but I haven't hammered it out yet. In this version Counterspell doesn't exist.

My own 3e counterspell houserules let you make Spellcraft checks to counterspell with spells of the same or thematically opposed schools, subschools, and descriptors with varying DCs (e.g. countering an Evocation [Fire] with a Conjuration [Cold] is possible, but harder than countering with an Evocation [Fire], Evocation [Cold], or Conjuration [Fire] spell, and easier than countering with Transmutation [Fire] or Transmutation [Cold]). It's admittedly kind of a complex setup, but the rules were originally written as mage duel rules for an all-arcane-casters game so my group liked the depth and it stuck around.

5e's relative lack of spell keywords to use in a counterspelling houserule is annoying, but you could use similar matching-and-opposed principles there. Let wizards counterspell effects of the school matching their specialty plus one "opposition" school, let sorcerers counterspell effects of the same and opposed theme as their bloodline (which would be obvious for Dragonic, Storm, etc. sorcerers, but you'd need to set some parameters for Giant, Wild Magic. etc. bloodlines), let bards counterspell Enchantment/Illusion/sonic effects, and so on, and otherwise they have to use the self-only-dispel rule you described.

In all versions, I think what spell is being cast should just be public knowledge. 3e's arcana rolls seemed like a lot of work for a forgone conclusion and I don't think magical bluffing games added much to the counterspell game experience. In the current version of 5e counterspelling the bluffing game is the only nuance, but it's also disruptive to game flow and only matters in corner cases.

With 3e Spellcraft checks to ID spells, you had better than a 50/50 shot to identify your top-level spells even at 1st level and it hit automatic success somewhere in the mid levels, so it was always more of an "apprentice wizards and partial casters don't recognize every spell" mechanic than a real constraint on counterspelling. For 5e, something simple like "You have to be trained in Arcana to attempt to counterspell a spell with a lower-level slot" would probably suffice.

[Cervantes]

Fun counterspell idea: Make casters spend all of their turns canceling each other out, so martials can run up to them and punch them in the face.

[deaddmwalking]

Fun counterspell idea: Make casters spend all of their turns canceling each other out, so martials can run up to them and punch them in the face.

For a fair bit of fantasy literary emulation, that's exactly what you want.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

So this is interesting.

Recently WotC announced they were going to try to deal with some of the racial determinism by introducing an upcoming product that would let people swap out stat arrays. The community is in an uproar. Now, you or I would do this by releasing a PHB errata document that let all the core races just...pick their stats but apparently they want that sweet, sweet book money.

It's kind of hilarious, because everyone is just now realizing that having an extra +1 is really good and that the feat or ASI system is trash, and of course you have the last stand of the grognards who are insisting that the black elves MUST be dumber than the white elves for realism or whatever.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Wouldn't grognard realism make the black elves better than the white elves? Because of underground radiation?

[MGuy]

Tradition for tradition's sake. No matter what noticeable change to a thing you make there're always going to be some faction of fans that get really upset about it. That's all background static to me. I've seen all kinds of wild arguments against being more inclusive within gaming so I take it as a given that not only is there going to be pushback but it's going to be the worst kind.

I am more concerned with how the selling of this material sounds. I had heard they were releasing a supplement that was supposed to introduce this but the fact that they are issuing it in a product they want people to dole out more cash for sounds pretty disgusting. Maybe they intend on having future reprints and materials all reflect this change going forward and it coming in their very next product is just a formality and the actual official stance of the company will be to default to the new change.

[Dogbert]

Recently WotC announced they were going to try to deal with some of the racial determinism by introducing an upcoming product that would let people swap out stat arrays.

Ruse
/ro?oz,ro?os/
noun
an action intended to deceive someone; a trick.

Funny how far they'll go to make people look the other way and not fire Mearls like plenty of the twittersphere is demanding right now because of his complicity with shitmuffin.

[Thaluikhain]

Recently WotC announced they were going to try to deal with some of the racial determinism by introducing an upcoming product that would let people swap out stat arrays.

So...there's no point having different races and you may as well just be differently dressed humans?

[Ignimortis]

Recently WotC announced they were going to try to deal with some of the racial determinism by introducing an upcoming product that would let people swap out stat arrays.

So...there's no point having different races and you may as well just be differently dressed humans?

I mean, there are also racial abilities that aren't +1 to a stat. Except most racial bonuses aren't as good as getting a feat without spending an ASI, so variant human it (still) is.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I can't wait to play as an Orc with an Int bonus. Why yes, I am as frail and book-smart as your average elven wizard, got a problem with it?
What's that? No, I will not adjust my backstory to reflect the stat change. My orc just happened to be born with the opposite stat array, it happens, man!