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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8120363" data-attributes="member: 6779196">You know, I had a thought about this. Please don’t take this as me trying to challenge your opinion of the concept art - it’s absolutely valid and quite understandable to dislike it! But I thought this would make for an interesting thing to discuss deeper.A lot of people strongly dislike the elf because of his strange facial proportions. A lot of people dislike early 5e depictions of halflings because of their highly exaggerated body proportions. I’m a big Dragon Age fan and I remember a ton of fans flipped out over the redesign for elves in the second game, which made them inhumanly thin and altered their facial proportions, especially in the eyes.There seems to be a common trend of people not liking depictions of fantasy races that look too far off from basic human proportions. That’s understandable as our brains are wired to find the human form aesthetically pleasing, and there seems to be something of an uncanny valley effect when a form looks nearly human but differs just enough to make it clearly inhuman.But it’s interesting to me that the argument that D&D races are “just humans with rubber masks” if they aren’t different enough from humans only seems to come up in discussions about ability scores and alignment, but not in discussions about their physical appearances.The main reason I like the halfling concept art is that they look distinctly like their own race, instead of just short humans. I liked the Dragon Age 2 redesign of elves a lot for the same reason - no longer were they the human model but shorter and with pointed ears, they were a visually distinct race with their own body and facial structures. The elf under discussion in this thread I’m still not the biggest fan of. I assume his pinched face was supposed to make him look elf-y, but for whatever reason it doesn’t really do it for me. But I don’t fault the artist for trying.Again, folks are more than welcome to disagree with me about this. I just noticed this apparent incongruity between how close to human folks want other races to be statistically vs. visually.</blockquote>

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