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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9848904" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Or at the absolute least, you'd want to design it so that the top, say, six or eight most-played races are clearly given space for if players would want to pick them. Right? Like why would you intentionally design a setting knowing that you're excluding stuff folks are very likely to ask for?As of the last time we got any data (collected in 2023, so the last hurrah of 5.0), that would look like this: Human, Elf, Dragonborn, Tiefling, Half-Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Half-Orc. And this ain't no random showing either. Per the numbers (or rather best guesstimate because they used a crappy, inconsistent scale for a bar graph!!! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" />), humans were somewhere north of 700k, elves somewhere north of 500k, and dragonborn about midway between 500k and 200k--call it 350k. My very rough estimate is that the bar chart contains around 2.8-2.9 million characters, so this indicates dragonborn are shockingly close to 1/8th of all characters, or at least they were in 2023.Is it really all that wise, if one is drafting a brand-new setting for strangers you've never met, to make no room for an option used by an eighth of all players? Seems like a pretty unwise choice to me.And if you went just the tiniest bit further, and made room for genasi and gnome (the 9th and 10th most popular options), you'd have covered about 90% of all characters anyone has created on DDB. Only ten species, not the "Mos Eisley Cantina" that so many love to mock diverse settings with. None with any particularly egregious features, no always-on flight, none of the things typically banned. Out of the list, only dragonborn came out after the new millennium. (Genasi, as "planetouched", were late-2e, specifically 1996's Planeswalker's Handbook, and all the rest are much earlier, if not original options.) If anything, the OP options are elf, half-elf, and certain dwarves!So...it's not an infinite laundry list of every possible thing imaginable. It's almost entirely well-precedented options, with the sole exception being the extremely popular "newcomer", if "existed for three editions running (aka over two decades)" somehow manages to still qualify as "newcomer". It's not wild ridiculous crap--it's a long-term, durable trend, over nearly a decade of data collection.If one is going to draft a brand-new setting for unknown players, excluding dragonborn is almost as likely to cause problems as excluding elves!</blockquote>

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