D&D 5E Halflings are the 7th most popular 5e race

[Lanefan]

Hang on, aren't there 9 races in the PHB? So, if gnome is 9th, and halfling is 7th, which one is in 8th place? Or am I miscounting? 'Cos, that's always been my thing - the bottom two races should get shunted into another book to make room for two new races that have a chance of gaining better traction than gnomes and whoever is in 8th place.

Promotion and relegation, just like in football*.

Play lots of Hobbits, everyone, and help them stay up!

* - except in USA-Canada...sigh...

 

[Lanefan]

I have a great deal of interest in making D&D easier to learn and teach, because that helps grow the hobby, and the rules we have (even in 5e!) are all too often byzantine and excessive or totally absent and unhelpful, especially for DMs. I have a great deal of interest in producing a D&D where casters do not rule the roost, where it is a teamwork experience and every player, no matter what aesthetic preferences they may bring or interests they may have, can find a character concept that actually equips them with fun, exciting, potent, personal tools to contribute to the group's success, whatever form those tools may take. I have a great deal of interest in giving diverse, flavorful options, such as races/ancestries and feats and weapons and spells, that are sufficiently close quantitatively that the players must instead make qualitative decisions about what they wish to do, because that actually makes for interesting choices, not dull calculations.

Your end goals (italicized above) are laudable. How do we get there?

In my view, your suggested means in fact work directly against the very goals you seek to achieve. Why is that? Several reasons:

--- by far the best way of designing teamwork into the game is for classes (and-or species?) to have hard-drawn niches - things that only they can do the least bit well (though anyone else can always try, their odds of success would be very low). This by definition somewhat limits the number of classes and-or species, as there's only so many viable niches* to go around: healer, front-liner, archer, scout (outdoors), scout (indoors), blaster, burglar, charmer, diplomat, investigator (a.k.a info-gatherer), supporter (a.k.a. buff-provider), and maybe tactician. Front-liner can be subdivided into defensive front-liner, attacking front-liner, swachbuclker, and a few others maybe; and sub-niches e.g. undead specialist or artificer might also have a place. And I probably missed a few other obvious ones.

Then, give each class free rein over one of those niches and extremely limited access to the rest. Nearly all abilities come baked-in with the class as it advances in level - which also neatly makes the game much easier to learn as there's fewer choice points and options. Fact of life: the more choice points there are and the more options there are to choose from at each one, the harder the game is to learn. The intent here is that every character is or becomes a specialist at what it is good at (i.e. its class), and making that believable in the fiction is trivially easy.

Oh, and make multiclassing possible but intentionally noticeably sub-optimal, to encourage playing single-class characters.

And yes, this very intentionally leads to "If you're a Rogue it means you can do this this and this but can't do that that and that", because that's the whole point. That's where the teamwork piece comes from: no character can do everything on its own, you need support from others to cover your weaknesses.

Along with this, a return to clear and obvious mechanical differences (both beneficial and penalizing) between the species, including baked-in stat bonuses and penalties (except Humans, who are the baseline) would also help; both to de-blandify the game and to make species a more meaningful choice. So, in the end, choosing species and class would be the biggest choices a player ever has to make, after which everything else falls into place; and a DM can always step a new player through that choosing process during roll-up.

* - you might notice "controller" isn't listed as one of the niches, and that's very intentional: controllers tend to instantly become the most powerful class(es) and thus ideally that niche would somehow be either downplayed or spread out between as many classes as possible.

And the fact that even a single request for "hey, maybe usability, excitement, or balance could be a consideration that sometimes is just a little bit more important than absolute and unyielding fealty to 'verisimilitude' über alles" gets met with "oh, so you want the gamw to be bland, generic, flavorless mush that means nothing, has no story, and turns everything into samey garbage, well not on MY watch buddy!" is EXACTLY why I find this so infuriating.

You literally cannot even criticize excessive commitment to "verisimilitude" in the smallest degree without being accused of wanting to destroy the game.

You can have verisilitude and-or believability at the same time you can have usability and balance (excitement had to come from the player, not the design); though I'd put usability ahead of balance were I forced to choose.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You certain of that? I ask, because they’ve been in threads in these forums within the last few years.

They don’t use those terms, but the specific phrases aren’t the point. Plenty of folks think that D&D should be more user-friendly and have mechanics that are open to interpretation, even if that makes them more “gamist” or whatever.

But regardless, the point the user was making is that it’s an odd thing to be infuriated by. We all have things we really don’t want the game to do, mostly without getting infuriated by people who want those things just as strongly as we want them to not be present.

Like…your whole rant about being infuriated by it comes across like you believe that your preferences are objectively better than those of the verisimilitude crowd.

No. I think that they are objectively worth factoring in, as in, they should never be casually dismissed. There is a huge difference between "this is important, it shouldn't be ignored" and "this is the ONLY important thing, everything ELSE should be ignored."

But on the internet, advocacy always becomes condemnation of everything else, doesn't it?

Edit: I'll reply to your message later @Lanefan, I have not slept well and I'm not processing what you've said very well right now.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nobody's going to say they're going to bat for bland generic abilities, but when you lobby to get rid of species modified ability scores that's exactly what you're doing. It means there is less to differentiate between an elf, human, goliath, and halfing which means species are more generic.

Did I ever do that?

Have I ever, even once, "lobbied" for that, on this forum, to say nothing of in this thread?

I've said I can see the value in it. I don't personally prefer it, and I have said as much many times. My preferred solution is the 13A method, where you get one stat bonus from class, and the other from race/ancestry/whatever. That way, no Wizard ever has to just suck at being a Wizard (edit: unless that's what the player really wants, I guess?), but every Orc Wizard is going to be stout or strong (+Con/+Str) in addition to the book-smarts that learning to be a successful Wizard earned them. Verisimilitude gets reasonable deference--every Orc will be stout or strong (inclusive or), every Elf will be clever or agile--but ease-of-use also gets its due.

@Mistwell Do you see, now, why I "resort" to such "hyperbole"? Because I literally didn't even specify a single thing--I didn't argue for any specific features whatsoever--but I was immediately pinned with supporting something I don't actually like, and accused of thus supporting a bland, dull gameplay experience. Is it really hyperbole when it's literally happened in this very thread?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Did I ever do that?

They didn’t say that you did.

The exchange noting that it’s odd to be infuriated by people advocating for greater verisimilitude, and that they don’t care that “some folks” advocate for bland XYZ etc

Then you claimed that no one ever does that, and then they replied “when you do XYZ, you are doing that”.

That last part uses phrasing that doesn’t normally mean that you specifically are doing that, it refers back to the start of the tangent, ie to the idea of being infuriated (or not) by people advocating for things you don’t want in the game.

 

[MGibster]

Have I ever, even once, "lobbied" for that, on this forum, to say nothing of in this thread?

My apologies, I was using a generic you rather than specifically saying EzekielRaiden is going to bat for bland and generic species.

 

[Hussar]

But his point isn’t all that hyperbole. Anyone calling for a change is characterized as “hating” halflings and not relying on facts but “emotional “ arguments.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But his point isn’t all that hyperbole. Anyone calling for a change is characterized as “hating” halflings and not relying on facts but “emotional “ arguments.

Well no, some posters' posts are sometimes characterized that way. Sometimes unfairly, sometimes not.

Constantly reminding everyone that you think halflings should be in the MM or DMG or whatever gets old. It's never going to happen, and that's a good thing.

 

[Argyle King]

This data reads as pretty suspect for a variety of reasons, beyond the ones mentioned. E.g. dwarf is 4th most popular on this list, immediately after elf and half-elf, but literally at no point prior to this has dwarf been that high in any of the D&D Beyond official data.

My suspicion is, a lot of people create dwarves without playing them, which is something this data set can't meaningfully engage with.

anecdotally, dwarves are one of the most popular choices in face-to-face groups I'm in (as are half-elves).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well no, some posters' posts are sometimes characterized that way. Sometimes unfairly, sometimes not.

Constantly reminding everyone that you think halflings should be in the MM or DMG or whatever gets old. It's never going to happen, and that's a good thing.

I mean, I don't want that either. And I certainly hope I'm not "constantly reminding everyone" about the actual thing I said, because I talk about it a heck of a lot less than other things I talk about!

Besides, it's not like my actual idea has no precedent, even with D&D stuff. You have plenty of folks stridently saying how they'd remove (at least) half the classes in 5e and just make them subclasses of something or other. Likewise, I've seen plenty of calls for things like getting rid of half-orcs long before "One D&D" proposed it (half-elves are a different story), and some folks have found the aasimar/tiefling divide silly for decades at this point (they're all planetouched, just with different planes.) Or the proposals I've seen, some on this very forum, to fold dragonborn into lizardfolk because they're both scaly humanoids, even though that's basically the only thing they have in common.