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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9108472" data-attributes="member: 18">I get what you're saying but my experience is that race choices are more personal than, say, weapon choices, and further, different people have wildly different perceptions about what racial traits are actually good. Whereas with weapons it's usually simple math or logic. On top of that, generally speaking different racial traits help with different classes. Getting medium armour proficiency for free is awesome if you normally get no armour proficiencies, but completely worthless if you normally get heavy armour, for example.These two things combine to mean that even you've determined mechagodzilla is the most "optimal" race on paper, in theory, very few people will actually pick mechagodzilla, because some people will just never want to play that - most people I'd say - other people will go "Yeah but I don't think those traits are actually are good" (wrong or rightly - I've seen a lot of very failed optimization from players over the years) - and others still will, almost certainly correctly go "Yeah mechagodzilla would be optimal for a caster, but it's a terrible choice for a Fighter".Whereas if ODB Sword is the best 2h STR melee weapon, you'll see them pretty often (probably not every group, even then).You can see this in 5E. The strongest on-paper races are pretty clear - Legacy Yuan-Ti Pureblood, Legacy Satyr, V-Human, Half-Orc, various kinds of Elf, Mountain Dwarf and so on. Yet how many Legacy Yuan-Ti do you see at your table? How many Legacy Satyrs? How many V-Humans even?So I think the whole "oh there will be a best combo" thing is pretty nothing in practice. It's not going to "shape the game" in the same way as a better weapon clearly would.What I will say is the inverse is more true - the very worst races rarely get played - but even some of those do for sheer style's sake - Dragonborn, for example, prior to the dragonbook, where a frankly terrible, godawful, no-good race. But on the hand - you were big ass dragonperson, so despite sucking bad, they were quite popular.</blockquote>

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