phoenix9lives:
I have never thought that having racial (or, rather, species) modifications to Attributes was a bad idea. Gorillas are bigger and stronger than chimpanzees, but not as agile or as fast at climbing. Monkeys are far weaker, but much faster and better than either at climbing. Babboons and mandrills are more aggressive, with large canine teeth, but that does not make them evil necessarily compared to the other primates. It is just a matter of the niche each fills in nature.
That applies mostly to physical traits. Social and mental are a lot iffier. Gruff warrior types might have less charisma to some, but their own people, and those who identify with them, or even respect their abilities (as neighbors/enemies might) certainly aren't going to see them that way.
Mentally, once you're to the point of being intelligent enough to use tools, build civilizations, and have advanced languages, you're all pretty much on the same level. Everyone else builds on what came before. It's more about what resources you have and what few exceptional individuals have developed new ways of thinking, and this occurs from many different cultures and perspectives. Entire cultures and "races" in the real world aren't separated by some hard intelligence-measurement thing.
Homo sapiens in the Western hemisphere are not any more or less intelligent than those elsewhere. America might be the most advanced country in the world, or so we claim, but the average American isn't more intelligent than the average citizen in a third-world country. The average American didn't harness electricity, or figure out the physics of proper boat-making, or even necessarily has the capacity for such. Not any more than the average third world country's citizen does.
What maybe separates people in disparate cultures is simply resources. Access to knowledge, materials, etc. Everyone has that, and a
homo sapiens is a
homo sapiens. Heck, you can take one from thousands of years ago, put them next to a modern human, and barring language barriers, they are similarly equal.
Physical qualities don't really differ much between humans, either. Not like they do with other forms of distantly-related primates; another flaw in your comparison. If gorillas and chimpanzees were members of the same species but there was a lot more variance between the species, sure. You see that in the animal kingdom all the time. Humans not so much, not to that degree.
Fantasy races are all pretty generic "humanoids" who, while their individual traits may differ some, typically are a lot more similar to each other than, say, a gorilla is to a human. So the comparison doesn't work well even for physical characteristics, really, but it works better for that than social or mental ones.