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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 3728766" data-attributes="member: 5100">I voted "yes", but with conditions.Humans, elves, dwarves are pretty much archetypal fantasy races.  They must be in there.  Even if you play a Talaslanta type game filled with freaks, those archetypes are core to the larger fantasy genre.Get rid of the half-elf and half-orc.  They may be in Tolkien.  They may not even be unusual (well, half-elves, at least) in the genre.  They just don't have any racial identity or culture.  They are really just dead weight in the PHB.Add one interesting small race.  Gnomes are probably more interesting than halflings -- at least there is some possibility to gnomes beyond "little Gypsies" or "pint-sized homebodies".  Of course, halflings do have potential, look at Athas or Eberron, but the baseline we've seen the last 30+ years is pretty boring.Add in something a bit different, even "savage".  Half-orc has that annoying half-breed without culture problem.  My vote would be hobgoblins or goblins.  Both are of human intelligence.  The former are very militaristic and both are sneaky.  Heck, even stupid orcs would have a niche without being too inhuman (at least as D&D writes them).If you want something less human, throw in a furry.  Catfolk seem to be pretty popular and would be my top pick.  I'm not really cheering for them to be added in, but it wouldn't bother me, either.  Changelings or shifters could be good, too.  My preferrence would be changelings because I don't want the implications of lycanthrope spawn being neither human nor lycanthrope being a core issue.  Plus you have to wonder why all shifters look human, rather than elven, dwarven, or even koboldish.  Changelings have the built in disclaimer that that the doppelganger blood sanitizes any other race to a neutral that's hard to nail down.Tieflings, though, are a complete WTF?  Sure, they're interesting, but they should be rare enough that they don't warrant space in the PHB.  Yes, I know that we don't know what 4E does to the tiefling, but I don't think assuming the basic definition -- a mortal with some distant fiendish ancestry -- has remained is really too off base.   My fervent hope with the tiefling is that they won't have their own full race write-up, but will be an example of a way to add a thimblefull of some other race to a character.  That is a major enough convension to warrant an entry, and tiefling are as good of an example as anything else.</blockquote>

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