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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9246601" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure, but we can still get something out of the popularity angle.PHB dragonborn are--objectively--one of the weakest races in 5e. They get fewer features, their ribbons are incredibly specific in application (a bonus to dealing with dragons of the right kind?) and yet incredibly vague in benefit, and literally the only mechanics they have are resistance to one element and (for the PHB version, at least) a mediocre breath weapon. Compared to the laundry list of powerful features on elves and dwarves, or the clear ability score superiority of half-elves, or the flexibility and power of variant humans, dragonborn should be ignored--no optimizer would willingly choose them, except maybe for Paladin characters, but even then a half-elf would probably be better.Yet they have done nothing but grow in popularity in these stats things--IIRC, they have never lost place in any of the official ones released by DDB. (Part of why I was so skeptical about the unofficial one we saw a while back was that it did deviate so wildly from all the official ones.) They have, in fact, grown so much as to eclipse half-elf, which is objectively one of the strongest races in 5e, and certainly one of the strongest in the PHB.So, what can we conclude from that?One option is that power is totally irrelevant to players. I think this conclusion is well-meaning but mistaken. That is, I don't believe players don't care about power and balance etc. Instead, I think it's that they make their choices based around other things, and then become frustrated if those choices end up being inferior for no reason other than because they're just inherently weaker than other, seemingly-equivalent options. Moving away from fixed ability score bonuses is one part of reducing that issue. As the Fizban's options show, there's also appetite for improving the base dragonborn package so it frankly sucks less. We'll see how the 5.5e version shakes out; as of the last public playtest, I'm frankly not particularly enthusiastic.Another conclusion we can draw, however, is that popularity is not a good indicator of how players like design. It is, instead, an indicator of how much players like the concept or theme of an option. Which, if true, poses a pretty significant problem for any design that predicates "this must be good" on "people are playing this a lot." I'm not well-convinced that WotC is correctly differentiating "X is picked by a lot of people" from "people actually do enjoy using X at the table." A community that makes choices primarily based on theme, but which still cares about design, is one that can give very confusing signals if one conflates pick-rate with player contentment.</blockquote>

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