If Powerful Build also applied to Grappling and maybe also Strength (Athletics) checks in some way it would go further to promoting the idea. 

Moving a grappled creature involves carrying it or dragging it, so yes, Powerful Build already does. But I'm not saying that Powerful Build (and similar new abilities like Dextrous Build, Tough Build, etc) couldn't be designed in ways which more concretely impact skills, just that they shouldn't have direct class-specific applications. 

Quote from Chicken_Champ >>

Moving a grappled creature involves carrying it or dragging it, so yes, Powerful Build already does. But I'm not saying that Powerful Build (and similar new abilities like Dextrous Build, Tough Build, etc) couldn't be designed in ways which more concretely impact skills, just that they shouldn't have direct class-specific applications. 

 Yeah, but it doesn’t help with the actual Athletics checks involved.

I’m pickin’ up what you’re puttin’ down though, and I dig it.

Quote from IamSposta >>

I’m pickin’ up what you’re puttin’ down though, and I dig it.

 Crap I’m old. Who the heck says stuff like that anymore?

Elven Culture - Whatever, Grampa: Elves are remarkably long lived, and as a people, conservative and slow to change. Individuals raised in elven societies or by elven families learn vocabulary that has changed little in the last thousand years, and their vernacular and slang are thus often out of place. Elven Culture characters have advantage on checks to understand or interpret older writings and language, or to interact with individuals from bygone eras, but may sometimes suffer disadvantage when dealing with teens or other social innovators. 

Right now attribute bonuses are supposedly somewhat balanced with the skill proficiencies, combat abilities and non-combat abilities of maybe half the playable "races".  (Honestly, if they just stopped using that word and used "ancestry" instead, this issue would be simpler to think about and deal with.)  I don't know that this is actually the case, however.  

Bringing up Powerful Build and Relentless Endurance actually brings up another interesting side effect of eliminating racial stat modifiers completely:  the theme of the race's abilities would also be de-coupled from their stats.  Goliaths, for instance, have Powerful Build, but they also get a STR bonus from the get go.  Half-Orcs have Relentless Endurance and have a boost CON.  So would a variant Goliath player who wants to Sorcerer Goliath be allowed to use STR as a dump stat while still keeping Powerful Build?  Would a Half-Orc with average CON still get Relentless Endurance?  Etc.   

I bring this up because the DM has a heavy hand in deciding what will and will not Pass Go and Collect $200 in their campaign world.  I could definitely see potential conflict between DMs and players who want to dump stat what are currently lore-justified benefits of particular races.  As a DM, I would probably not allow a negative DEX modifier Wood Elf to get that extra 5 feet of movement, for example, because the player clearly wants that character to be a klutz.  If that's the case, that PC has no logical attachment to that mobility boost.  

If you can’t imagine a fast but clumsy freight train of a person, you clearly have never met a Brown Bear on a forest trail :)

Dont be that DM, that punishes players for not building their characters that you would in their shoes, or having a different scope of imagination.

I would totally make Str my dump stay for a Goliath spellcaster or Rogue so I can be guaranteed to not have anything below a 10, and don’t need the Str so much anyway.

The DM's job is also to provide consequences for the player's actions.  If the player wants to scrap a feature of their sub-race (is that the word?), that's their own choice, not mine.  There should be some kind of consistency in the game world or else why bother enforcing other rules of consistency?  We might as well have Druids accessing the Wizard spell list then and Rangers getting Paladin spells.   I'm all for imagination - so long as it can also be backed up with explanations for why the given situation exists.  I am not for min-maxing, which the proposal to completely get rid of any connection between PC race and attributes inevitably leads to in a game like D&D where there are plenty of rules for combat and very few for exploration, social interaction, or character background.  

If folks really want completely swappable templates, that's certainly doable.  Other RPGs have them and I'm not opposed to playing or running those kinds of games.  However, that IS a completely different game system than what already exists for D&D and it would be a more complicated one.  And the more variables get introduced to character creation, the higher the threshold for entry into the game system.  

Quote from Chicken_Champ >>

But a Tabaxi will be as strong as the strongest minotaur under the current rule system, because everyone is capped at 20. These supposedly inviolate rules about strength or dexterity or whatever being tied to racial identity are actually BS, because by level 8 or 12, anybody that wants a 20 Str has it (unless they're a kobold, in which case it took them to level 16), and nobody has 21. Has the Minotaur really lost his racial identity, just because the human fighter was able to hit 20 Str at level 8 at the exact same time he was, and the halfling Paladin was able to hit it at level 12?

    The difference between a Tabaxi Fighter starting with a STR of 15 and a Minotaur Paladin starting with a STR of 17 even though both are trying to reach a STR of 20 is the Tabaxi character needs to put more work into getting to a STR of 20, which is reflected in a heavier investment in ASIs if the player wants to max out that stat.  Is that unfair?   Yes and no.  It might take a heavier investment for Tabaxi become a polearm wielding juggernaut, but the Tabaxi still gets to climb faster than the Minotaur and has an emergency super speed ability.  

The thing a lot of people forget is that the races don't just get stat bonuses in a vacuum.  The stat bonuses are meant to differentiate the "average" of that given race from the imaginary baseline of a flat stat block of all 10's.  Compared to this imaginary all 10 race, Kobolds are not as strong (hence the -2 STR), but they are more more agile (+2 Dex) by comparison.  And it makes sense when you examine the actual presentation of their race as a whole -- they are more or less diminutive creatures, and solve their problems by being clever rather than being strong.

 Going out of our way to rebalance the entire game to do away with this because some person said it maybe reminds them of IRL racism is kinda silly.

Agreed

IRL racism views one race as inferior to another.  While there is little difference in the ability levels of most human races, in D&D there is which is why I would prefer the term species, but I will try and take an RL example.

Consider a pygmy ethnic group where being 5ft is exceptionally tall. I 5ft pygmy is likely to be very good at basket ball amongst other pygmies but would have a distinct disadvantage in the NBA where nearly everyone else is over 6'6". He might eventually make it (Muggsy Bogues was 5'3") but it will be much harder for him. The fact that it is harder for them to be among the very best basketball players in the world in no way de-values the pygmy race as being of equal value to taller races and there will be areas where they can excel and be among the best in all humanity.

Be very careful with that sort of argument, Jeg.  Plenty of folks have used very similar 'biological reality' stances to argue "Racism isn't bad, it's just a logical extension of science!"  Clearly, nobody wants anything to do with that sort of stance in this day and age.  Now given, that stance is obvious moose piss when it comes to racial variation within a single given species, a'la modern humanity...but that's still a slope ain't nobody wants to start slipping down, ne?

This idea that it's perfectly fine for [X] race to be absolutely miserable at everything but the one single class it's designed to work well with because You Can Do It, It Just Takes More Effort(!) is bizarre to me, especially when people are so ferociously attached to variant human.  Everybody knows ASIs are worth their weight in platinum and that expending them on stat boosts is their worst possible use, only done when you HAVE to because it's always more fun to pick a cool new power for your character...but somehow it's okay to demand that 'off' species for a class expend twice as many ASIs on just obtaining basic competence in their field before they can actually have fun with ASIs?

Somehow it's perfectly okay for this one species in the game to be flexible and able to adapt to a wide range of skillsets and talents, but GODS FREAKING HELP YOU if you want a buff tabaxi, a scrawny dragonborn, a bookish dwarf, or the rest.  The game somehow absolutely cannot tolerate an elf that's stronger than it is dexterous, a half-orc who's good at literally freaking anything but being a barbarian, a halfling who is not a natural sneak thief, or anything else?

How does that shit work?

Humanity is allowed to be flexible, diverse, and open to a wide range of ideas, but all these other species better stay in their lanes, color inside the lines, and stick to their 'proper' species/class combination because an elf who isn't a ranger just isn't an elf, a dwarf who isn't a fighter just isn't a dwarf, a dragonborn who isn't a miserable waste of time at whatever class the poor girl's trying to get a grip on just isn't a dragonborn, so on and so forth.  Is that really the message we're shooting for here?

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

This idea that it's perfectly fine for [X] race to be absolutely miserable at everything but the one single class it's designed to work well with because You Can Do It, It Just Takes More Effort(!) is bizarre to me, especially when people are so ferociously attached to variant human.  Everybody knows ASIs are worth their weight in platinum and that expending them on stat boosts is their worst possible use, only done when you HAVE to because it's always more fun to pick a cool new power for your character...but somehow it's okay to demand that 'off' species for a class expend twice as many ASIs on just obtaining basic competence in their field before they can actually have fun with ASIs?
 

    Yes, and in real life, a statistically average human who is just average at everything is also uncommon, but the game world treats NPC adult human commoner as having 10s in their stats regardless of their age or experience.  That is a consequence of simplification for game-fication.  A significant part of the problem you are talking about is the in-game assumption in D&D that average-y average humans are the baseline for everything.  The variant human question (why do variant humans get a free feat when no other races do?) has no logically satisfactory answer as far as I have seen, except that the game designers knew that if humans did not get some kind of big bump, very few people would ever play as race Human and since most notable towns and cities in game lore are largely dominated by humans (with a few exceptions for Elves and Dwarves interestingly enough), the game designers knew they needed to justify why Humans have such a prominent place on the Prime Material Plane when so many races have better survivability (poison resistance and dark vision, for example) or live much much longer.  If anything, this is D&D's true "original sin":  inconsistent world-building based on an assumption that human beings would be the de facto most widespread species because reasons.    

     Ultimately, an honest discussion about in-game race default stat variation and associated features and benefits will need to touch on the taboo subject of why human beings need to be at the center of the game world in the first place when, per game world rules, they have no particular survival traits or particular aptitude at magic relative to other races.   

The short answer is that they shouldn't be, and if they are it's usually because of something ugly, not something inherently Noble And Amazing about humanity bolted onto it simply because the players are human.

I can say that in my own personal setting, humanity is A.) not at all 'dominant' amongst the various races of the world, and B.) not known for their flexibility and adaptiveness.  Those are traits humanity does tend to possess in greater abundance than other species, but it's certainly not somehow unique to them.  What humanity is known for in my setting is Ambition.  Humanity survives in a deadly world other species are better equipped to cope with through sheer, bloody-minded ruthless drive to *force* the world to heed them.  Humanity as an aggregate whole is willing to sacrifice more than other species, and is driven to progress and grow with a fervor other species often find frightening.  I believe the line I had written down was "humanity is responsible for the greatest number of paradigm-shifting leaps in scientific thought and arcane know-how...and also the largest number of city-erasing magical explosions.  They survive and thrive only because they breed nearly as fast as goblins, and because their short lives and shorter memories quickly erase the lingering pain of their mistakes.  The next generation of bright, ambitious young human power-seekers is never more than a decade off - for better or worse."

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

I can say that in my own personal setting, humanity is A.) not at all 'dominant' amongst the various races of the world, and B.) not known for their flexibility and adaptiveness.  Those are traits humanity does tend to possess in greater abundance than other species, but it's certainly not somehow unique to them.  What humanity is known for in my setting is Ambition.  Humanity survives in a deadly world other species are better equipped to cope with through sheer, bloody-minded ruthless drive to *force* the world to heed them.  Humanity as an aggregate whole is willing to sacrifice more than other species, and is driven to progress and grow with a fervor other species often find frightening.  I believe the line I had written down was "humanity is responsible for the greatest number of paradigm-shifting leaps in scientific thought and arcane know-how...and also the largest number of city-erasing magical explosions.  They survive and thrive only because they breed nearly as fast as goblins, and because their short lives and shorter memories quickly erase the lingering pain of their mistakes.  The next generation of bright, ambitious young human power-seekers is never more than a decade off - for better or worse."

       I was going to suggest perhaps, maybe it's just b/c humans *boink* more than other humanoids.  Mice and rats are, after all, quite successful in the global context.  

The shorter the lifespan compared to the lifespans of those in competition for resources, the more boinking a species typically does to offset that disparity. Gotta love evolution’s simplistic answers to problems. That’s why Goblins would boink even more than humans.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

This idea that it's perfectly fine for [X] race to be absolutely miserable at everything but the one single class it's designed to work well with because You Can Do It, It Just Takes More Effort(!) is bizarre to me, especially when people are so ferociously attached to variant human.  Everybody knows ASIs are worth their weight in platinum and that expending them on stat boosts is their worst possible use, only done when you HAVE to because it's always more fun to pick a cool new power for your character...but somehow it's okay to demand that 'off' species for a class expend twice as many ASIs on just obtaining basic competence in their field before they can actually have fun with ASIs?

     I don't think Variant Human actually makes any sense, which is why I disallow it in my own games.  

     That said, I think you're overstating your case that races that don't start with a stat boost to their desired class are miserable or automatically bad at what they do.  To continue with the above example, if a player wants their Tabaxi fighter to fight with a polearm, there's nothing preventing that.  Statistically, the Tabaxi won't be hitting quite as often if they are reliant on the polearm, but that is a slight disadvantage can be played around.  By a RAW and using point buy, a Tabaxi fighter can still start off with a respectable 15 to STR.  If we allow for the +2 to DEX to be adjusted so that it's just a +1, then the extra +1 can easily go to STR for nice +3 bonus from level one without completely doing away with the characteristic DEX of a feline race.  

I don’t want to get sucked into debating whether it’s “racist” for D&D races to be limiting, especially if that involves making analogies to real life. It’s a sensitive topic, isn’t particularly relevant, and it’s too easy to say something RL hurtful while making ones point about a game. Instead, I’ll just say that the design sensibility of fifth edition is very clearly centered around the philosophy that the diverse fantasy races are not just good at their specialties and pigeonholed into that niche in the fantasy economy, but instead are each comprised of the full spectrum of human(oid) experience. It’s been a long time since only humans could be Paladins, and a Dwarf could be a level X cleric but only a level Y rogue, and each race is presumed to have its own scholars, and criminals, and stalwart warriors, etc. “The average dwarf fighter is just better at his job than the average tiefling fighter” just isn’t true in-game, and a system that makes it true for players works at cross purposes to the game’s world building, and is a hold over from old thought that isn’t part of the modern edition’s game design.

I kind of like Pathfinder 2's approach:

You start with all stats being equal. Each race (species, whatever), except humans gets +1 to one stat, -1 to one stat and +1 to any stat of choice. Humans just get +1 to any two stats of choice but cannot be the same one. You then get +1 stat determined by background and +1 that is determined by class.

This promotes the diversity of racial choice but allows you greater freedom of customisation without losing out on optimisation. Their modifier and level progression works differently so how well this would translate to D&D 5E is difficult for me to predict, but it's worth considering if you're unhappy with how D&D 5E does stats.