Gez
First Post
D&D is completely unnecessary. Get over with it.orsal said:Gnomes are completely unnecessary.
So, "stout" or "small" are features, heh? Tell me, which other race has the distinctive niche of being skilled alchemists and potent wizards, with large erudition (favored class: bardic knowledge) and a great empathy with nature (speaks with animals)?orsal said:They combine features of dwarves, elves, and halflings, without a distinctive niche of their own.
I don't see one. Definitely not dwarves or half-orcs, not halflings, not humans... Elves? If that's the elves' niche, why don't you say it's elves who do not have a distinctive niche of their own? Because they're really bad at filling this one. If anything, the elven niche is more about archery and multiclassing between fighter-class and wizard than about being the setting's strong magical race.
orsal said:When they're gone I'm going to vote out the half-breed races, for similar reasons. The four core races without which D&D just wouldn't have the D&D flavour will then go to the wire. Maybe I'm biased for having gotten my start with Basic. Or maybe I'm biased from loving Tolkien too much when I was a kid. Or maybe it's just that Tolkien was smart enough to realize that if you want to represent the unification of all the good races in the face of a big enough evil, you put elves, dwarves, humans and halflings together in common cause. The rest are just for people who get bored without endless variations.
Tolkien contributed the halflings, orcs, and ents to D&D. (D&D elves are not from Tolkien, but from older sources.) Anderson, though, contributed paladins, gnomes, swanmays, trolls, nixies, the Law vs. Chaos alignments, and more. Sure, he's a less popular author, but he's still recommanded reading for all D&D gamers.