They didn’t exist when i was running that game.
I’d be interested in joining a 5e game, but the opportunity hasn’t arisen. I was working towards that with a group of people i know on another chat site when that site imploded, in fact. 
Even rolled up a character and was debating which deity to worship.
And I’d been thinking i might ask in this thread if anyone was looking for a new player. I’m not 100% sure i have time to commit to it, though. I’m sure i don’t have time to DM right now.
We did. We rolled in front of each other. But then picked which roll went to each stat. So… It wasn’t that hard to get a potential paladin. You’re rolling 4 dice and taking the top three numbers six times. It’s common to get one 17. But to play the paladin you had to “waste” that 17 on charisma, so the other stats were lower than typical.
The funny thing is, Charisma is probably the most important ability in 5E. It has some of the most useful skills, and it has the most character classes that use it as their primary ability score.
Sure, some did. The potential for “Cheating”–and the easy rationale for doing so (“I’m just going to keep rolling until I get a character I like”)–is way higher when a very small set of dice rolls determines so much about your character.
The move away from this, toward point-buy systems and standardized hit points, is IMO a huge step forward in later editions.
I know? I talked about the difference between always evil, Always Evil as defined by MM, and Usually Evil which is what most of the humanoid races are, a few posts ago. I’m using Always Evil as a shorthand for the concept.
The point isn’t whether that matches up to humans or not; the point is that being able to decide if you should slay a given dragon based on whether its scales are all shiny or not, rather then whether it is burning burninating the countryside, is pretty dumb and makes the game more shallow.
Sure. But Drow are especially problematic because their story is literally “They used to be fair-skinned happy top elves but the evil spider lady twisted them into dark-skinned evil Nega-elves” with the same implications as the misread Biblical story of Noah’s son being cursed with black skin and justification it’s okay to enslave Black people.
There’s also a bit to be said about there being some lip service to a skin tone spectrum for demihumans but the artwork in the PHB and across D&D in general has always been a bunch of white dudes, whether the dudes are elves or dwarves or halflings. You might get your token African-looking human smith but the other “good” races are a bunch of white dudes from all the evidence. So, when that’s your baseline and then they give you a canonically dark-skinned race or two, it’s not exactly inclusive to have them be the stereotypical bad guys. While I have no issue with the concept of an “Always Evil” bunch of elves, I do think that how those Always Evil Eves are represented makes its own problem.
I do think that one simple fix any DM can do is say that High Elves have Black skin because they live in the sunshine for 1000+ years, and Drow Elves have White skin because they live underground. In fact, when Lolth cursed the Drow and removed their melanin, they were pretty much forced to move underground because of sunburn and skin cancers.
Deciding to just go slay a dragon just because it’s not shiny is dumb regardless of alignment. Dragons are a pretty big deal-- If you’re fighting one, you should be prepared in detail for that fight, because if you don’t, then you’re likely to get your butts handed to you. And in the course of that preparation, you’re almost certainly going to learn about that individual dragon’s proclivities.