Being precocious is a flavor, too.

With setup those nice combat feats could be flavorful if, for instance, acquiring those require training in particular fighting schools, which might be in human lands.

I’mma go out on a limb and say that no one who picks Variant Human does it so they can take a flavorful culture-defining feat. They do it because a feat like Sentinel, Shield Master, Great Weapon Master, or Sharpshooter makes those first few levels a whole lot easier. You may have had a different experience of players-in-general than I’ve had, of course.

In my campaign, humans are hot-tempered (advantage on Initiative), difficult to control (reroll failed Wis save, 1/short rest), and depending on culture, either obsessed with guns and trigger-happy (proficiency in all firearms, bonus damage vs enemies that have not yet acted) or dedicated to craftsmanship (various benefits to crafting downtimes).

Human as written certainly doesn’t do much to provide a theme, but if the DM or the player makes the bonus feat and skill be linked to origin that makes things more like AIME’s human culture.

I really still think that having human characters have full access to Action Points and then other races have other benefits worked well. They were “gestalt class” characters, with the “gestalt” class being from a certain list really had a good feel. The action economy takes care of a lot of the fact that an elf (gestalt bard) nominally had more things they could do, they still needed to choose what to do and when. The fact that humans had a nice pool of Action Points meant that, while their on paper abilities were weaker, they had a lot of control over their destiny because they could choose when to boost. Was it bulletproof or did it just work for the group I had at the time? I’m not sure. But it worked well and we tried a lot of different characters.

Barbarians: Yeah I could see the Bear Totem being easier to run. The Exhaustion thing seems to be something the Berzerker’s player in our game here avoids so I haven’t seen it show up. The Bear Totem becomes pretty tanky at high levels, which can be kind of challenging for a newer player, though one might question running very high level characters for a noob.

Rogues: Rogues pretty much play the same at low and high levels, so what you’ve seen is what they stay like.

Warlocks: Yeah I’ve read your description and I’ve played one to high level (with some rogue MC levels). The warlock needs some work on WotC’s point so that it’s not just EB spam. I don’t mind that there is a magic class that’s like that, just that the warlock is pretty hard to turn from being anything but that. The way it is now warlock is one of the classes you mostly want to leave, unless you want to be an EB spammer.

Definitely take a look at B9S in your review. It was a highly influential book and clearly a testbed for 4E, but I think they made some decisions that stripped out a lot of what was cool about B9S that made it lose its flavor.

It’s definitely true that the Champion is the stripped-down experience that they promised would be mechanically equal to the more involved experience, back during the earliest D&D Next promotion.

The Berserker makes fewer choices during advancement than a Totem Warrior, but the Totem Warrior doesn’t have some additional class currency to manage, and the trap of the Exhaustion condition makes me think that the Totem Warrior is simpler gameplay than the Berserker. The Berserker has to choose the right fight to go all-in, and if they choose wrong, they might have a bad problem for the rest of the day.

What I’ve seen of a Thief and an Assassin played in parallel (no Arcane Tricksters in my group, though) is that neither is appreciably more complicated to play than the other in the 1-5 level band. The Thief needs to squeeze everything they can out of their bonus action (Cunning Action, Fast Hands, two-weapon fighting, whatever), while the Assassin just needs to make something SUPER DEAD in their first action, because once they lose that edge, they’re plain ol’ rogues. My PCs haven’t gotten anywhere near 9th level yet, to see how the more advanced features work.

My issues with the warlock are a matter of record; the short version is that I think there’s a tension between having a class be about EB spam and a class that someone who doesn’t like EB spam would take for its interesting core story.

I really wish Bo9S had come out about a year earlier in the 3.5 dev cycle than it did – it released just as I was ramping down my interest and willingness to purchase 3.5 material, and focusing on building a heavily homebrewed campaign. I like treating fighters as being as distinct, unique, and trained as spellcasters. I’ll have to look into getting a copy of Bo9S when I do my full History of the Fighter series.

“At their best when the chips are down” is a pretty solid element of a racial description. I like it. =)

I would argue that the base and variant humans are both equally awful for making humans anything other than The Generic Ones. An extra feat doesn’t tell me anything about humans except that they are good at being good at things. I agree that they’re mechanically badass! I just think they’re presented as a tabula rasa.

I am a huge fan of AIME’s human cultures, and the way the humans are as different from one another as they are from the elves is exactly what I want out of racial features.

“…all the power of an elf and all the power of a paladin.” LOL.

Yeah, I don’t think either were really knocking down houses. I don’t much care for class and level limits.

In my old 3.X campaign I did a lot of customizing and made humans distinct by them being able to use Action Points much better than other races, which had different benefits. Humans were good at being able to come through in the clutch. It worked very well.

5E doesnt’ really have a mechanism per se but the Variant Human (aka the one everyone takes) having an extra feat and skill can be, if the DM sets things up right, pretty good and backgrounds also help. Cubicle 7’s Adventures in Middle Earth (AIME) has several different human cultures with mechanically distinct abilities.

Yeah, I remember the passage in the 2e DMG explaining why it would ruin game balance to allow elf paladins (“because then you’d have all the power of an elf and all the power of a paladin”), but for some reason they never considered giving humans any kind of mechanical features. Whatever its flaws, 3.0 exploded so much cruft that it is easily the most important new edition release in D&D’s history.

Strong and interesting cultures are great! I am in favor of them. Strong and interesting cultures that have the same mechanical impact on a human as being an elf has on an elf… now we’re talking. 3e FR at least seemed to recognize the problem and tried to do something about it with its cultural feats (since of course humans had an extra feat to throw around). I’m sorry to see that there’s nothing like that in 5e (to my knowledge).

Well the class limits did enforce that to a substantial degree: They got to play paladins and monks, for instance, which nobody else could do.

But IMO the way to make humans not be RP tofu is to give them strong and interesting cultures. In many respects that’s what fantasy races are, so it makes sense to have humans work the same way.

All I want out of the human race in D&D is for it to not be The Generic One or the Most Adaptable One. It drives me nuts that human is treated as tofu – nothing more than absorbing the flavor of whatever class and background it’s paired with.