When Tasha's Cauldron of Everything was introduced, beyond the cool spells and awesome subclasses, I think no single feature got me more excited than the option to replace your Race's ability score bonuses.
The philosophical reason for this was understandable - if we're treating "Race" (now renamed as Species) in the same manner as we might treat people of different ethnicities in the real world, it starts to become really uncomfortable codifying in the game mechanics that, for example, Gnomes are just straight-up smarter than Dragonborn. Every reputable study on human intelligence has refuted racist claims that any one ethnic group has a higher capacity for intelligence than another. Humans are, ultimately, very similar to one another on a physiological, genetic level, and something as complex as intelligence - something that is the product of countless different factors - can't be directly linked to one's superficial appearance. Admittedly, the Species of a fantasy world aren't quite as closely linked as different types of human, the latter of whom all share a common ancestor. But as long as that's kind of the metaphor we're working with, it feels a lot better to say that there's no reason you can't have a brilliant Orc Wizard or a ripped Halfling Barbarian.
But honestly, the bigger reason I got excited for that was that final point: Racial ability score bonuses strongly incentivized you to pick certain races for certain classes - a Dragonborn, with bonuses to Strength and Charisma, by far mad the most sense as a Paladin. Tieflings, with bonuses to Charisma and Intelligence, were pushed strongly into playing Bards, Warlocks, and Sorcerers (and possibly Wizards with some extraneous decent charisma).
By making the choice free, a world of possibilities opened up. Generally speaking, I never want a character I build to have their primary ability modifier to be less than a +3. But using the Standard Array or Point Buy, the only way you can ever achieve that is if you get one of these bonuses to push a 14 or a 15 up to a 16. Tasha's allowed everyone to be able to achieve that.
2024's PHB is going to be altering where you get your ability score bonuses. If that were it, it would sort of be a meaningless change. The current way that you choose your bonuses is arguably not really even linked to your Race/Species anymore - it's just a choice you make at character creation (you could easily make a system where you simply get more points with point buy and can spend to get a score up to 16).
However, the change here is that your Background, not your species, will determine which ability scores you can boost.
On a thematic level, there's a certain logic to this: if you have the Entertainer background, you can see how that might require you to have developed your Charisma or your Dexterity (I can't recall what the third one it can boost is). Here, rather than implying that an average Orc is just inherently stronger than an average Elf, there's a reasonable assertion that someone who has spent their days as a Laborer hauling lumber and stones to construct buildings will have built up some muscle.
I've seen some critiques that this sort of replaces the racist bio-essentialism from the 2014 and earlier systems with classist social prejudices - "oh, you were a Farmer? Well you're not as smart as a Noble then." I think this one has more wiggle room - I think you could easily create a character who might have grown up on a farm, but in their pre-adventuring days studied at some institute of arcane learning to truly have a Sage background.
But the bigger issue is that it's the same problem we had before: We're going to have Fighters and Barbarians strongly incentivized to pick Soldier as a background, while a Sorcerer (even if they were some kind of magical artillery asset) might be pushed away from choosing that as their backstory.
And while it might be simple enough to just take that background for mechanical reasons and just flavor your character differently, the backgrounds will also come with your origin feat, so there will be some tension if none of the backgrounds that have the ability score boosts you want have the feat you want.
This is certainly a more flexible and forgiving system than the 2014 one, and I'll also remind readers here that you have lots of options with the background ability score bonuses - each has three affiliated abilities, and you can choose either to boost one by two and another by one, or to simply get a +1 to all three of them. Thus, given any three combination of abilities, there's a 50% chance that your primary ability score choice is among the options listed.
Still, I usually want to boost one of my other scores by a bit as well - if I'm playing a Rogue, I'll certainly want to start off with a Dexterity of 16 or higher, but I'd probably also want to have good Constitution (this goes for every class). If the background that makes the most sense boosts Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, I might feel somewhat unenthused about boosting either of those mental stats when I could have been making myself tougher to take down.
The big caveat to this entire post, though, is that I believe there will be guidance in the Dungeon Master's Guide to create custom backgrounds. I hope that in digital character sheets like D&D Beyond, we'll get the option to check a box or something that lets us swap out the ability bonuses for our backgrounds.
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