D&D (2024) No Dwarf, Halfling, and Orc suborgins, lineages, and legacies

UngeheuerLich · Mar 15, 2024

About +'s and -'s to stats. They were neat when rolling and were often the deciding factor why I chose them. To squeeze the most of my random attributes. And even when point puning, getting that 16 at all or cheaper 14's is what made play a race or not. Having no stat increases is bettee, because it stops making me think about optimizing jist for a few free points.

In the end, not everyone thinks that way, but I like not doing that anymore.

The Sigil · Mar 15, 2024

I would just assume that Dwarves have fallen in popularity while gnomes, tieflings, and goliaths have surged in popularity since 2017 and Is Your D&D Character Rare? and WotC is focusing its resources on the current most popular races.

No, Scanlan, Jester, and Grog, I have no idea at all what might have produced such a popularity surge in that time.

SkidAce · Mar 15, 2024

I havent read the thread, but my campaign has never had halflings or orcs.

Hussar · Mar 15, 2024

The Sigil said:
I would just assume that Dwarves have fallen in popularity while gnomes, tieflings, and goliaths have surged in popularity since 2017 and Is Your D&D Character Rare? and WotC is focusing its resources on the current most popular races.

No, Scanlan, Jester, and Grog, I have no idea at all what might have produced such a popularity surge in that time.

But that actually hasn’t translated.

Halflings and certainly gnomes are still scraping the bottom of the barrel of the phb races.

Scott Christian · Mar 16, 2024

Hussar said:
But that actually hasn’t translated.

Halflings and certainly gnomes are still scraping the bottom of the barrel of the phb races.

I do have a thought on this. Many of the new players are young, and if memory serves correctly, we didn't really gravitate towards those species until we were a bit older. The rationale for this is people want to play something striking, beautiful, grand, and not cute or esoteric. So maybe just like the demographic of D&D has changed, perhaps that has been the cause for those two species to have lower usage? (This is just a guess, including the demographic part.)

LuisCarlos17f · Mar 16, 2024

In the past I warned halflings and gnomes were too typecasted into stealth classes, and I suspect WotC designers changed the rules to stop this. My suggestion is some catrip style "jump" to allow small PC to attack bigger enemies like in wuxia.

Other suggestion is to recover the spell "blood wind" from Savage Species to help natural weapons as racial traits to be more useful, for example the thorns by minotaurs.

If Hasbro wants to bet for the family-friendly market, then halflings and gnomes are options to take into account.

bedir than · Mar 16, 2024

Hussar said:
But that actually hasn’t translated.

Halflings and certainly gnomes are still scraping the bottom of the barrel of the phb races.

Yes, the player's handbook will always have a least and second least popular species. That's what ranking does.

The Sigil · Mar 16, 2024

Hussar said:
But that actually hasn’t translated.

Halflings and certainly gnomes are still scraping the bottom of the barrel of the phb races.

Do you have a source to cite here?

Not being snarky, I tried to find something more current than 2017 but my google fu failed. I am genuinely curious.

Neonchameleon · Mar 16, 2024

Minigiant said:
So the 2024 versions of origins or species are likely close to locked.
However I am both shocked and not shocked that Elf, Gnome, Goliath, and Tielfing have lineages that split them up into popular archetypes for the origins but Dwarf, Halfling, and Orc have no internal major cultural or biological diversity within their mechanics.

Although it was UA, the structure is likely to remain.

This is odd. Dwarf and Halfling originally had subraces in 5e. Some say the subraces were veryuninspired or boring in lore or mechanics. However that could be fixed. Others liked them. They were classic or traditional. And poor Orcs were elevated to core PHB PC status and the attempt wasn't even made.

And before one can say there was no experimenting, these origins were revealed with an all new origin option and new sub option for Tieflings.

It's simple. The popular races get a lot more diversity, the less popular ones get less. The only piece of weirdness is that gnomes (the least popular PHB race) gets something. As for the ones getting folded, with Medium Armour + Shields becoming a first level feat there's no point to one of the dwarf subraces, and almost no one ever went for poison-resistant halflings, and there's no archetype they actually enable.

Meanwhile the goliaths aren't goliaths but hybrid goliath-genasi, tying in to the D&D elemental giants. The two races persistently just less popular than the PHB races despite not being in the PHB (and they were hardly unknown in 4e either). And gnomes (the least popular 5e race, and dropped from the 4e PHB for a reason) keep their subraces because they cover very different archetypes. I don't see the point in subraces for the sake of it.

CreamCloud0 · Mar 16, 2024

To loop around a little to the original premise of this thread, if you were to add a subclass for the three species mentioned in the title what new theme would you add for each of them?

Dwarf id go for a full on earthbender theme with mold earth/earth tremor/maximillian’s earthen grasp in the style of tiefling’s innate casting

Halfling id return to some inspiration from previous editions design and lean into thrown weapons, giving them proficiency with all simple thrown weapons and the sling, double the non-disadvantaged range on any thrown weapon or sling they use and make drawing/loading the weapons part of the attack.
Personally id also give them 18-20 crit expansion when using those weapons too (not even specifically as thrown either) seeing as they’re weaker than others of their kind and it plays into their lucky themes but people have complained that would be stealing from the champion and encourage crit fishing builds when ive mentioned this before like those were the most terrible things ever.

I don’t know what id give the orc/h-orc but id kinda wanna branch them out away from the strong angry brute pigeonhole they’re in right now, giving them a choice of fighter fighting style would be cool if not very inventive.

D&D (2024) No Dwarf, Halfling, and Orc suborgins, lineages, and legacies

UngeheuerLich

Legend

The Sigil

Mr. 3000 (Words per post)

SkidAce

Legend

Hussar

Legend

Scott Christian

Hero

LuisCarlos17f

Legend

bedir than

Full Moon Storyteller

The Sigil

Mr. 3000 (Words per post)

Neonchameleon

Legend

CreamCloud0

One day, I hope to actually play DnD.

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