Mind of tempest
(he/him)advocate for 5e psionics
I read it but somehow I still do not see it, I got the Underdark evil dwarves are super different but not hill dwarves, what is the difference in your opinion?I'm honestly glad they didn't set out to "fill the boxes" for this. I am fine with fantasy races having different distributions of ability scores compared to a baseline 3-18 bell curve, but I'm not keen on designing racial options just so there's a races with a natural advantage for each class.
But if you're curious about the hill dwarf/mountain dwarf divide, check out Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. They cover it there.
you have a point but it is why is there no popular wisdom race?Number 1 was that wisdom as a casting stat for Clerics and Druids was not that important, because a lot of what they use spellcasting for doesn't have saving throws. I feel like you didn't actually read what I said if you immediately point out it's a casting stat and therefore important...
Tieflings and dragonborn aren't "Standard Fantasy", it's true! Dragonborn and Tieflings exist in the PHB because 4e did it's absolute best to break the mold and do something different for differentness's sake. Dragonborn in order to slake people's thirst to play Dragons ('Cause there's always someone who wants to) and Tieflings because holy crap they were a huge hit with the LGBTQIAP+ community!
So many people slapped the roof of a Tiefling and said "You can fit so many traumatic allegories into this bad boy" and ran with it. It's also why they come in a rainbow of colors in artwork while the book says they run the gamut from normal human skin tones to red.
This look red to you?! (I love tieflings, obviously, 'cause I'm B and T, myself, but, y'know >.>)
That said, demons and dragons and half-demons and half-dragons appear in so much fantasy stuff in the past 30 years that I think they've kind of -become- standard fantasy, at this point, even if they're not Tolkienesque fantasy, per se? Stuff like Healing Potions are Standard Fantasy, these days, but were never part of Tolkienesque High Fantasy, y'know?
Gith, on the other hand, are very much D&D Niche. Like. Straight up protected IP. Not out in the greater consciousness.
shifters look to human for that market as diet furry is not desirable for whatever reason, I hear more people wanting to play gnolls than shifters.I don't think the races missing from the PHB are a standard fantasy issue - I think it's more that the 5e PHB tried to put in every race and almost every class that had ever been in a PHB before. Firbolg, githzerai, shifters and kalashtar were never in a roll-out PHB before, while tieflings and dragonborn had. I don't think there was ever any thought of including them (if they were going to include a race that hadn't appeared in a PHB before I suspect they would have included the warforged).
As for why they haven't caught on - I suspect that it's mostly lack of exposure. I think shifters could be really popular given more exposure, for example - they're animal/human hybrids and it's not like that isn't something people are into. But even in Eberron IME shifters tend to take a back seat to more visibly cool races like changelings and warforged.
on this, we have an absolute agreement the lack of a tail is just disturbing.It's weird how the uniform teifling design hit it so far out of the park that it broke a window in the neighboring hotel, but then the dragonborn somehow missed every feature people wanted in dragon folk, including the tail they just gave the teifling.