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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9351688" data-attributes="member: 58172">The Aarakocra has been available free for years. The Fairy has flight, but still has difficulty approaching the top dozen. The advantage goes to the incumbants. (I suspect the Fairy would be more popular if it could alternate its sizes at-will: Medium, Small, or Tiny whenever the player wants. I doubt this would matter for balance, since the stats would remain the same.)Surprisingly, the character optimizers are important for establishing balance, but have less impact on overall popularity. For example, the Default 2014 Human remains more popular than the Variant, even tho the Variant is better.Generally for popularity ranks, the financial cost is the most important factor, then the amount of reallife popculture support for the concept.I expect the 2024 Players Handbook will soon shift the order of the popular species, but overall actually not by much. I listed the species in the clusters that rank near each other. Any shifts are likely to remain within the cluster.The list in the above post is as of 2023, from an unofficial scrape of the DnDBeyond raw stats. So the rankings are moreorless the reality now.</blockquote>