So, I love 5E and I honestly think it offers a lot more freedom in character creation than it gets given credit for by some people who prefer systems with more granular choices. And, with the right GM, you can expand on that with homebrews and the like. That said, there are a couple of things that have traditionally bothered me a bit about how characters are created and advanced, specifically around ASIs (or lack thereof) in the core rules.
My Issues with 5E ASIs
The first thing that has bothered me is that if you're doing point buy/standard array with a class/race combination where the racial bonuses don't match, you are mechanically inferior to someone who chose matching race/class. For instance, say I want to play a Dragonborn monk because I have a cool concept for a drunken master monk who sets alcohol on fire with his red dragon breath. They've got a max starting dexterity/wisdom of at most 15, putting them +1 bonus behind halflings, elves, etc. Now, you can argue the impact on effectiveness isn't huge, but it is present and while that might not be meaningful at all tables, there are ones where it is. And there's an argument that the against-racial-benefit is an RP element, but to me racial flavour comes more from RP, culture, and active mechanics like stonecunning/dragon breath than from ASIs. Finally, there are definitely ways to homebrew your way around the mechanical issue (subraces or allow point buy up to 16 with a cap at 17 after racial bonuses), but the core rules don't address this.
The second thing that has bothered me is that as characters advance from 1 to 20, the only ability they're likely to advance is their core ability (and maybe one secondary for MAD classes like Monk/Barbarian). There's no real room for doing something like making your fighter more intelligent to represent that they're a scholar of martial theory as well as a beat stick (short of mechanically detrimental choices). There's no obvious homebrew way around this without impacting the game balance (more ASIs means higher save bonuses, etc.) and I'm mostly talking about the core rules here anyway.
And, if you're saying "wait, in your first point you say ASIs aren't really RP-y and your second point is basically making a point for RP-y ASIs" then you're not wrong. That said, I would argue that a choice of ASI has more meaning for your specific character than a fixed racial bonus. And regardless, this is the internet so internal logical consistency isn't strictly required. Plus, I'm trying to have a discussion not conclusively win my point.
How ASIs work is that every character starts with 10 in all attributes and then gets to boost attributes in 4 stages. At each stage, each attribute can only be boosted once. The stages are:
Ancestry (Race): +2 to two attributes, -2 to one attribute, +2 to a freely chosen attribute (which can be the one that got the -2 if you want) [Humans just get 2 free choices and no penalty/fixed amount because humans]
Background: +2 to one of two attributes and +2 to a free attribute (which can include the attribute you didn't choose in the first case)
Class: +2 to your class's main attribute (choice for some classes like fighter)
4 free attribute choices
Then at 5, 10, 15, and 20 you get another 4 free attribute (with each boost giving you +2 up to 18 and +1 thereafter).
The Reason I Like This
So, I like this because it reduces the issues with my first point and fixes my issues on the second point.
Because every race has a free choice then can boost their class's primary stat bringing them up to par with other characters. The only time they can't be on par is when the racial negative is against them (You can see the racial benefits and the class key scores here: https://cdn.paizo.com/image/content/Blog/20190702-crb22-23.jpg). But because there's only one negative the number of mechanically disadvantaged choices is reduced considerably. And if you decide to play that strongly against race/class benefit, you just end up +2 attribute point (+1 bonus) behind the other characters, exactly like in 5E.
As for my second point, you get 4 boosts a level. While some of those are going to be controlled by key/secondary attributes/save bonuses, there's still a little freedom to boost a stat of your choice that matches your vision of the character.
Thoughts
So, that's my spiel. How do folks feel about this?
5e was designed to be simplified though. Races only get a small bonus to represent flexible joints, high muscle mass, brain development, etc inherent in their genetics and culture.
ASI are designed so it would be hard to increase multiple abilities on purpose to make choices (especially against feats) more important.
If you want a character to become more experienced in a skill over time, consider a feat instead. Otherwise, the class features and proficiency bonus are meant to reflect your character's growth.
But you can also always homebrew and house rule any of this. I wouldn't mind if my DM wanted to give us more customization.
In a campaign that resembles a video game more than a role playing game you’re completely correct. In a campaign that has a mixture of roll playing and role playing you’re completely incorrect. Sure that Dragonborn monk that you described has a 5% penalty in combat, but he has a 5% bonus at strength checks, plus his breath weapon, plus he probably also has a 5% bonus at charisma checks. That’s one combat advantage and two out of combat advantages to counteract the two in combat disadvantages. That’s only a problem in campaigns that are almost exclusively focused on combat to the exclusion of other aspects of D&D. In most campaigns that’s pretty well balanced, and at 4th level you can bump both your dexterity and wisdom up to 16 for two 5% bonuses in combat too.
A bit of an aside: From reading the playtest material and your link, I'm not really sure why in PF2 ability scores exist (except to be not too different from the original). Most of the important functions seems to be keyed off of the modifiers, and all boosts are a +2 to the score (which translates to a +1 to the modifier). It seemed like a convoluted system where instead of just counting the boosts to get the modifier (which is really the important number), you had to start from 10, add 2 for every boost, then use the table (that you might have memorized long long ago) to figure out your modifier. If the modifier is the only important part, just use it.
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So, I love 5E and I honestly think it offers a lot more freedom in character creation than it gets given credit for by some people who prefer systems with more granular choices. And, with the right GM, you can expand on that with homebrews and the like. That said, there are a couple of things that have traditionally bothered me a bit about how characters are created and advanced, specifically around ASIs (or lack thereof) in the core rules.
My Issues with 5E ASIs
The first thing that has bothered me is that if you're doing point buy/standard array with a class/race combination where the racial bonuses don't match, you are mechanically inferior to someone who chose matching race/class. For instance, say I want to play a Dragonborn monk because I have a cool concept for a drunken master monk who sets alcohol on fire with his red dragon breath. They've got a max starting dexterity/wisdom of at most 15, putting them +1 bonus behind halflings, elves, etc. Now, you can argue the impact on effectiveness isn't huge, but it is present and while that might not be meaningful at all tables, there are ones where it is. And there's an argument that the against-racial-benefit is an RP element, but to me racial flavour comes more from RP, culture, and active mechanics like stonecunning/dragon breath than from ASIs. Finally, there are definitely ways to homebrew your way around the mechanical issue (subraces or allow point buy up to 16 with a cap at 17 after racial bonuses), but the core rules don't address this.
The second thing that has bothered me is that as characters advance from 1 to 20, the only ability they're likely to advance is their core ability (and maybe one secondary for MAD classes like Monk/Barbarian). There's no real room for doing something like making your fighter more intelligent to represent that they're a scholar of martial theory as well as a beat stick (short of mechanically detrimental choices). There's no obvious homebrew way around this without impacting the game balance (more ASIs means higher save bonuses, etc.) and I'm mostly talking about the core rules here anyway.
And, if you're saying "wait, in your first point you say ASIs aren't really RP-y and your second point is basically making a point for RP-y ASIs" then you're not wrong. That said, I would argue that a choice of ASI has more meaning for your specific character than a fixed racial bonus. And regardless, this is the internet so internal logical consistency isn't strictly required. Plus, I'm trying to have a discussion not conclusively win my point.
Pathfinder 2E
Now this brings me to how Pathfinder 2E has decided to go about ASIs. I'll cover the important bit below, but if you want a blog post about character creation generally you can find one here: https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sgrg?Experience-Builds-Character.
How ASIs work is that every character starts with 10 in all attributes and then gets to boost attributes in 4 stages. At each stage, each attribute can only be boosted once. The stages are:
Then at 5, 10, 15, and 20 you get another 4 free attribute (with each boost giving you +2 up to 18 and +1 thereafter).
The Reason I Like This
So, I like this because it reduces the issues with my first point and fixes my issues on the second point.
Because every race has a free choice then can boost their class's primary stat bringing them up to par with other characters. The only time they can't be on par is when the racial negative is against them (You can see the racial benefits and the class key scores here: https://cdn.paizo.com/image/content/Blog/20190702-crb22-23.jpg). But because there's only one negative the number of mechanically disadvantaged choices is reduced considerably. And if you decide to play that strongly against race/class benefit, you just end up +2 attribute point (+1 bonus) behind the other characters, exactly like in 5E.
As for my second point, you get 4 boosts a level. While some of those are going to be controlled by key/secondary attributes/save bonuses, there's still a little freedom to boost a stat of your choice that matches your vision of the character.
Thoughts
So, that's my spiel. How do folks feel about this?
5e was designed to be simplified though. Races only get a small bonus to represent flexible joints, high muscle mass, brain development, etc inherent in their genetics and culture.
ASI are designed so it would be hard to increase multiple abilities on purpose to make choices (especially against feats) more important.
If you want a character to become more experienced in a skill over time, consider a feat instead. Otherwise, the class features and proficiency bonus are meant to reflect your character's growth.
But you can also always homebrew and house rule any of this. I wouldn't mind if my DM wanted to give us more customization.
In a campaign that resembles a video game more than a role playing game you’re completely correct. In a campaign that has a mixture of roll playing and role playing you’re completely incorrect. Sure that Dragonborn monk that you described has a 5% penalty in combat, but he has a 5% bonus at strength checks, plus his breath weapon, plus he probably also has a 5% bonus at charisma checks. That’s one combat advantage and two out of combat advantages to counteract the two in combat disadvantages. That’s only a problem in campaigns that are almost exclusively focused on combat to the exclusion of other aspects of D&D. In most campaigns that’s pretty well balanced, and at 4th level you can bump both your dexterity and wisdom up to 16 for two 5% bonuses in combat too.
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A bit of an aside: From reading the playtest material and your link, I'm not really sure why in PF2 ability scores exist (except to be not too different from the original). Most of the important functions seems to be keyed off of the modifiers, and all boosts are a +2 to the score (which translates to a +1 to the modifier). It seemed like a convoluted system where instead of just counting the boosts to get the modifier (which is really the important number), you had to start from 10, add 2 for every boost, then use the table (that you might have memorized long long ago) to figure out your modifier. If the modifier is the only important part, just use it.