Negative LA-Assignment : Resurrection, but no diamond here

[Beni-Kujaku]

I feel that one of the thing that makes people tick is the naming of the different species as races. No one would tick if I said that "on average, humans are more intelligent than dogs", whatever your definition of intelligence is. Most people would not react if I also said that the difference between humans and dogs is mostly one of degree, and not of fundamental nature. These two statements imply that there might exist species that are, on average, more intelligent than dogs and less intelligent than humans. Illithids have extraordinary memory and ability to understand the world around them (higher Intelligence and Wisdom in game terms), and they are described as an available "race", a monstrous race.
The second thing is the fact that, by magic, you can combine characteristics of various species. That is something upon which the D&D universe is based from the start. From owlbears to half-dragons and all the "wizard did it" in-between, changing that would require reworking the whole universe, and as Morphic Tide said, that would make a lot of players turn tail (honestly, including myself. I despised the upending of most of the lore in 4e and much prefer how 5e mostly came back to something consistent with earlier editions). It would also greatly reduce the design possibilities from WotC that would have to make a lot of monsters independant from each other and delete most templates.

"Eugenics work in D&D world" is mainly a byproduct of these two facts. It would be weird to have half-dragons be stronger than regular creatures, and not have wizards be able to breed creatures to improve their abilities. But I feel like one problem seems to be specifically increased intelligence as a result of selective breeding. The thing is, Intelligence as one of the ability scores is how the game works, and having ways to modify it by the same way you can increase other ability scores, both as a player and in the lore, is really the only way the world works consistently. The only way different races can not have different average intelligence (once again, specific half-orcs can very well be much more intelligent than most sun elves) and hence, not validate "racism beliefs" would be to completely remove Intelligence as an ability score, and by extension all mental ability scores, which would, I'm sure everyone would agree, remove a lot of the charm and complexity of the game.

Anyways, I think Morphic Tide makes some interesting points. Not sure how important its armor proficiencies are when most classes who'd use such armor are proficient with the best armor that doesn't block their class abilities, but it's certainly not nothing.

There's niche cases where you can take just one level for skills to qualify for a PRC instead of needing another for a weapon or armor proficiency.

I'm not absolutely convinced, considering the situationality of gaining racial weapon proficiencies and TWF on a Str-based monster, but I'll yield to the majority. Changed to 6 RHD, DLA-1.