It's no secret WotC has been kicking around the corpse of D&D for over two decades and every once in a while, to better or worse success, getting an audience for it's necromancy. The game is a pale shade of it's former self. I say that, I think context is in order. Most gamers don't even know what D&D used to be like and think that either 3E or 5E is the baseline of play. It's not, or, well it's perhaps been normalized but in the same way dating apps have "evolved" how relationships work (by destroying the entire exercise) D&D has evolved how RPGs work into some hideous misshapen mutant that's unrecognizable to a person who plays the game in the traditional sense, whether it be using AD&D1 or BECMI, the only two editions of D&D.
Many things that have been ruined over time. The first I outline is the catalyst for this post (which may eventually be a multi-parter):
Races: I'm sure they're going to start calling them "species" or "ancestries" soon, but they are races and always will be races to true fantasy adventure gamers. Because the word race isn't racist (as I've said before). That aside, races have been diluted over time. In the two true editions of D&D, races are treated as such:
AD&D1E
- There are restrictions to which races can be which classes
- There are restrictions to what ability scores ratings a race has (minimum and maximum)
- There were completely different multiclass rules for each race, further typifying and diversifying them.
- There are racial modifiers to ability scores (plus and minus), further defining racial differences
- Each race has unique or semi-unique abilities and/or flaws they do not share with other races
BECMI
- Races are full-bore separate classes from the standard occupation-centric classes.
- Later on in the Known World Gazeteers, other racial classes were built widening this but not dropping it. For the entirety of Basic-Master, you can be an Elf or Halfling without a subsequent occupational class.
Let's skip ahead to WotC's D&D 3E (which is an intentional but unstated "AD&D3E"), the first thing WotC did was remove the first three bullet points under AD&D1E. Fourth edition rolled around and they took away racial ability penalties or really all the detriments for playing a given race (Except Drow in 5E, but that since has been "fixed"). This homogeny has progressed to where 6E, if the playtests can be trusted, basically have eliminated race entirely. Now it's just another Feat choice from another flavor of Feats. So while TSR built two unique tracts for how Races work, it only took 4-ish editions for WotC to dissolve the element into effectively nothing.
That's one of the many reasons WotC draws the ire of the OSR community, and a pebble in the avalanche that caused them to lose current D&D's canonical status.
On the other hand, Chris Perkin's AD&D3E keeps the correct idea - All the flavor of AD&D1E remains in AD&D3E.
