There is far too much truthiness in this post.
But, the point about the Star Wars Cantina is well made. And it's funny because if you actually play Star Wars, no one plays aliens that are just humans with funny ears. No one plays a Wookie and doesn't play up that fact. Or a whatever race. Star Trek as well. You don't see Vulcan characters that are just identical to the humans. People play Vulcans because they want to play VULCANS, not just a really smart human.
As soon as the D&D books come out though, all that goes out the window and far, far too many players are playing whatever race happens to fit their power gaming needs. Like others above, I'd far rather just use Variant Humans than the constant nails on the chalkboard of having yet another human that can see in the dark with pointy ears.
I can hardly disagree more about the point regarding Star Wars.
Pretty much any Twi'lek or Rodian or Zabrak or Chiss or Cathar or Tagrata character, outside of a minor note here or there, could just be human and it wouldn't make one bit of difference.
The cultures in Star Wars are extremely poorly defined and even the personality traits expected of each species or their differing abilities aren't even particularly iconic to the franchise. I mean generally it is just "whatever character from this species first got a speaking role in a movie or novel, you are expected to emulate that character-- even though such a character was more defined by their role than their species."
Beyond that it is just skin color and some sort of head ornament.
Now, within Star Trek, it is kind of the opposite in terms of culture. Because humans have all been merged into a rather bland communist bureaucratic goody-goody culture, to have anything that has a culture anything beyond that has to be an alien. But then each alien's culture generally has precisely one trait that they do and everything about them has to somehow tie directly back into that singular trait.
Klingon do war, so everything about them has to tie back into war in some regard. And they aren't even alone in this as there are half a dozen other races within Star Trek that just "do war" and are therefore indistinguishable from the Klingon as far as culture goes.
The Ferangi to capitalism, so everything about their culture has to tie as directly back into capitalism as possible.
Maybe the Vulcan have a bit more to them, but only because one of the main characters of the original show was a Vulcan and so any random plot they wanted to do regarding his alieness became part of the Vulcan culture. And since he was a main character, perhaps the most popular character, they did a lot of plots or plot points regarding the various odd traits about being a Vulcan.
But, at the end of the day, they are just humans with some extra head ornament and some singular aspect of their culture exaggerated. For the most part-- if the setting allowed for their to be diverse human cultures-- they could all just be humans.
Anyway-- there is no inherent reason why the races in any D&D world need to be any less interesting or developed than the aliens in Star Wars or Star Trek-- neither of which are particularly well developed anyway.
But within a game that uses stats, are players likely going to choose the stats that give the best advantage? Sure! After all, it is a game that uses numbers and those with the best numbers tend to "win".
But if you removed racial stats from the game entirely and simply said that everyone plays with the Variant human stats but can say they are any race they like, do you really think no one would play anything but human? I seriously doubt that.
If anything, I think you will get more Drow and Kobold characters than you do now.
