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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Helpful trick: Halflings are the good ones.

Halflings are gnomes without spellcasting. Gnomes are halfings without good weapon proficiencies.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Halflings are gnomes without spellcasting.

Or Dragonlance 'we are a joke' baggage.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Or Dragonlance 'we are a joke' baggage.

Kender have a whole lot of baggage and were, during D&D Next, a halfling subrace.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Kender have a whole lot of baggage and were, during D&D Next, a halfling subrace.

But in DL, they're gnome-derived. Never forget.

 

[Mind of tempest]

You'd get a lot less pushback if you simply advocated for more races in the PHB rather than spending 20+ years insisting that halflings should be removed from the PHB and telling people who like halflings that they are a waste of space.

I have moved to re-moving halflings as the assumed fourth most common race as they have never been built for it but I would rather something else gets in than halflings get sent out.

Or Dragonlance 'we are a joke' baggage.

gnomes lack a core a conceptual soul a guiding idea of what they are hence why they never quite work

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But in DL, they're gnome-derived. Never forget.

In the 2024 PHB, all ancestries are gnome-derived.

 

[Lanefan]

The problem is that anecdotes cannot, even in principle, be free of several crippling biases in data collection: they're inherently unsystematic, unrepresentative, self-selected, apophenic, and prone to confirmation bias, effectively personal publication bias (failure to report—"publish"—null/uninteresting results), and the misinformation effect (reports being altered, sometimes a lot, based on how the persons are asked questions.) Hence, while it is "data" in the sense that any information whatsoever can be considered "data," it is data of such low and dubious quality that it cannot be treated as fitting or appropriate for any kind of serious analysis.

There's a reason no one would (or should) trust "anecdata" for medical treatment, for example. A friend telling you they got pain relief from some treatment is an anecdote, and useful as an anecdote. Word-of-mouth reporting has a place and purpose. But that does not mean that getting self-reports from 5000 people about what pain relief worked for them would ever fly as actual data.

Hence: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." Yes, it's a pithy phrase lacking in nuance, but it carries the essential message: anecdotes are tainted by tons of bias that cannot be filtered out without doing the hard, hard work of actual statistical analysis...at which point you may as well have just collected the data systematically to begin with and saved yourself the bother!

If we asked the DMs in this forum to, to best known numbers, each report how many characters of each species and of each class their games have seen over the years, with luck we'd end up with a pretty decent amount of numbers which in aggregate would give us a pretty good idea of what's been/being played in the wild.

Such data would be super interesting, but almost certainly doesn't exist in systematic form, so we'd be reliant on self reports...which as noted are rather low-quality data.

I don't know whether the VTTs track the number of sessions played by each game; if they do, it wouldn't be much further to track by character-session.

Further, this would struggle against the effect of campaign failure and/or premature conclusion. I've played in campaigns that would have run for years, I'm sure, if the DM had not had major life events change their plans, forcing them to end the game. (Injured family member needing care in one case, and pseudo-adopting a nephew who needed a new place to live in another case, and a third where a key player had to stop for work stuff, so we wrapped up that campaign faster than originally intended.)

Yes, there'd be things like that, but they would apply (one would think) roughly equally across the board in aggregate.

Such effects would presumably not be particularly biased toward any one option (life happens!), but they would act to fuzz out any patterns that might exist, and with them likely being relatively subtle to begin with, anything that makes the picture more blurry is liable to make it too blurry to make out.

We'd be looking for subtle differences, but I very much suspect they'd be there to find.

 

[Vaalingrade]

In the 2024 PHB, all ancestries are gnome-derived.

And I thought the warlock thing and prepped casting for all was a reason to avoid it.

 

[Hussar]

Why do you feel the need to state that you don't dislike halflings? I mean, most people dislike one thing or another, I don't see anything wrong with that.
.

Because I have repeatedly been told I hate them? And that my sole reason for wanting to make room for new races is because I hate them?

Which simply isn’t true. My argument was always that the phb should reflect what is actually being played at the table.

Half orcs are being replaced with full orcs as a full entry. Again it will be very interesting to see if people will continue to play half orcs since they very much can in the new rules. And honestly I would lose zero sleep if halflings and gnomes got pushed out in favour of new races like Genasi and others.

I have never been happy with the chokehold that Tolkien races have on the game. I wouldn’t mind seeing elves and dwarves get the boot too. Have a race section that isn’t shackled to dead authors is my goal.

As utterly unattainable as that is.

 

[bedir than]

Because I have repeatedly been told I hate them? And that my sole reason for wanting to make room for new races is because I hate them?

I have never been happy with the chokehold that Tolkien races have on the game.

It's not hate, it's an unhappiness so strong that you'll invent that halflings are the second least played PHB race