Huh, right, the items do account for a lot of that. Which makes me all the more curious. What happens if I start with, say, 7 (or lower) Dex because my group uses die rolls for stats and I didn't have a good stat to spare? The original ITCOD ran it as a penalty, which can't reduce a stat to 0, which was simple enough to deal with (in a bit of a wonky fashion); Expanded has it- from my skim over what's changed- as a hard Dex reduction, unless I missed something. Does that mean I'm obligated to chunk in at least an 11 or so into Dex pre-modifiers if I want to run a Draconic Exemplar? Or, if, say, my DM ran what was to be a SHORT campaign, so I dumped Dex, and then they decided to lengthen it, would I then have to talk to my DM about reworking the stats?
