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

[CreamCloud0]

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.

Just to be clear here, do you mean the actual 5e half-orc stat block or the new ‘actually just a human or an orc mechanically but reskinned to be a half-orc’ cross-species offspring builder?

 

[Hussar]

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.

Couple of things.

1. Pushing out halflings specifically was never a goal. It was always about pushing out dead weight.

2. Halflings have never gained any traction in the game. Not really. Every new setting completely rewrites them in a vain attempt to try and they still are not played as often as other races.

3. The two new races added to DnD have both proven fantastically popular even considering that Dragonborn are covered in 4e cooties.

I’ve seen no compelling evidence that halflings bring anything of value to the phb. Nor gnomes.

But again I repeat that it’s more to do with the stranglehold of Tolkien. Half orcs are getting the boot and there’s barely a hint of pushback. Half elves get the same treatment and it’s hundreds of pages of argument.

Even the idea of pushing out gnomes doesn’t really get much of a reaction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

The actual study of data collection suggests otherwise. Eyewitness report is some of the most trusted evidence around, but it's also some of the most flawed evidence around. The vast majority of overturned convictions on the basis of DNA evidence, for example, had the original conviction heavily based on eyewitness testimony.

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.

To the best of my knowledge, they do not. Even if they do, most sessions are simply...people being active on their account. Such data is often not carefully tracked. You could probably find it, by combing through the database, but it would take rather a while to do even if you could just sit with a static copy of said database.

It's not that it isn't computationally possible--it totally is, and depending on how you do it, perhaps even relatively easy--it's that that baseline of "code it so it collects that data" is often not done because it's not a useful end-user feature, nor a useful back-end feature for debugging or the like. It's only useful for people wanting to do the kind of analysis we're talking about here, and thus it just...doesn't get collected.

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

Which is a major assumption about the data. "I'm going to assume this has no impact on the data," without a specific reason why (other than "because it doesn't seem like it should have a bias," I mean) is exactly the kind of assumption that makes sociology and human psychology so fraught as sciences. It's not that they can't be useful, but that even when an assumption seems small and simple and unproblematic, it can very very easily be...not any of those things.

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

Okay, but the point stands. If they're subtle differences, and we're already allowing for a known and serious fuzz factor (premature campaign ending), it's quite possible for those subtle differences to disappear in the noise.

There's a quantum mechanics experiment that comes to mind which fell prey to this. TL;DR: people claimed that QM violates the "pigeonhole principle." In layman's terms, the pigeonhole principle says, "if you have N boxes to put objects in, and put at least N+1 objects in those boxes, where N is a natural number (1, 2, 3, etc.), then at least one box MUST have more than one object in it." The experimenters created a setup that they claimed violated this principle: they sent three electrons down two pathways, but the detector at the far end showed no measurable drift compared to sending each electron one at a time. Hence, somehow, three electrons were flying down two paths, but all three acted like they were alone on their path, contradicting the pigeonhole principle.

Then a second group came along and said, "Hey, wait a minute. What would it look like if the electrons DID push each other apart, exactly?" And it turns out that the amount of disturbance you would expect from these three electron beams was orders of magnitude smaller than the pixel size of the detector they were using. (Equivalently, they would have needed electrons that had orders of magnitude stronger forces pushing each other apart.) The whole experimental setup was betrayed, not by its concept, not by the physics or the way they collected the data, but by the imprecision of the data they collected. Their tools couldn't see the difference between a positive result and a negative one.

We agree that the effects of various character options (race, class, whatever) on PC-character longevity would be real subtle. We also agree that there are confounding variables that would be difficult or even impossible to control for. Those two are the one-two punch of "this question, even if it has a clear answer, may not be discoverable because of the limits of how we collect our data." Adding in the further imprecision of relying on DM self-reports and frankly all bets are off.

 

[Hussar]

Just to be clear here, do you mean the actual 5e half-orc stat block or the new ‘actually just a human or an orc mechanically but reskinned to be a half-orc’ cross-species offspring builder?

Well, the latter obviously. They aren't getting a full entry, same as all the mixed heritage races. Again, like the half-elves, I'm pretty sure they will be called out in the description, but, they aren't going to get a full write-up.

Do people play half-orcs to be "big strong guy" or do they play half orcs to explore the notion of having a mixed heritage? Same with half-elves really. Mechanically, there's almost no difference between a 2014 half-elf and the new version. So, will people stop playing them because they don't have a full entry, or will the numbers stay fairly static?

I have no idea.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Have a race section that isn’t shackled to dead authors is my goal.

This is why you get such vociferous pushback.

The game isn’t “shackled to dead authors”, people like elves and dwarves.

 

[CleverNickName]

The game isn’t “shackled to dead authors”, people like elves and dwarves.

The simplest answer is often the correct one.

 

[Umbran]

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

Mod Note:
Leave your accusations of making things up, and your presumptions of other people's emotional states out of it, please and thanks.

 

[John Lloyd1]

It seems to me that Halflings are archetypes of the common folk (usually pastoral). That is probably why Tolkien made them up. I don't see any other race/species can be used in that niche.

Certainly, I can't imagine Merry the Morris Dancer (Monk) with his in your face attitute being anything other than a Halfling.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The simplest answer is often the correct one.

Yeah. It’s understandable that folks over complicate the discussion, tho.

 

[CleverNickName]

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.

You can create your own races, and/or provide your players with a shorter list of races that are available in your particular campaign. Wouldn't that allow you to accomplish your goal?