Races and Ability Score Modifiers in 5e Dungeons and Dragons

Not all elves skip ab day.

One thing I maintain for my game group is a chart of all the official race options in 5e D&D. The document is here. It might be of use to you too!

I mention it because I recently added the ability score modifiers that each race grants. It's helpful to have those all in one place and it helps finding which races might be the best fit for a given class.

Ay, there's the rub! I wish picking a race to go along with a class's ability score needs wasn't actually a consideration.

I think that eventually Dungeons & Dragons will free itself from linking races with ability score modifiers. Yes, there is some degree of flavor attached to them; we generally envision elves and lithe and graceful, so of course they get a bonus to Dexterity to model that. Unfortunately, the linkage between ability score modifiers and race carries some obvious baggage. So much so that many modern games occupying a similar fantasy adventure design space have opted to ditch the word "race" entirely. (Shadow of the Demon Lord uses "ancestry," Forbidden Lands uses "kin," and the fourth edition of Warhammer is going with "species.")

Until the day this officially changes in D&D, here's a quick and easy house rule I use for ditching the racial ability score modifiers altogether:

RACIAL ABILITY SCORE INCREASES
You may assign your racial ability score increases to different ability scores than the ones indicated for your race.

* * *

What this means is that your wood elf cleric might slap their +2 ability score increase on Wisdom and their +1 ability score increase on Constitution. 

But what about racial abilities that have a DC calculated off an ability score that they're designed to get a bonus to? Keep it the same or calculate the DC based off of one the ability scores that the player assigned an ability score increase to, whichever you find works best for your group.