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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 7726374" data-attributes="member: 6790260">They're my favorite race bar none. Being happy they're doing well is "self-serving" in the sense that "ooh, my biases have been confirmed!" My apologies for the confusing phrasing.You'd be surprised how many people won't even give them that, but point taken I suppose.Fair enough I guess!Being tall has too much cultural cachet. It hurts literally all races that tend to be (noticeably*) shorter than average human height--dwarves, gnomes, hobbits, kobolds, etc. People feel self-conscious about their height, and are thus more likely to play taller characters. You see a similar effect in the height distribution of characters in MMOs that allow height variation: most players play the tallest characters they're allowed to play, a handful play the shortest they're allowed to play, and the veeeery tiny remainder is spread out in some way or other through the middle. Or how those races which conform to Western standards of beauty best will tend to attract the most attention, e.g. the population of the Horde ballooned after Blood Elves became an option, because you could finally be pretty as a female Horde character, or svelte as a male Horde character. Nothing to do with design quality or success of implementation, everything to do with player psychology. It actually takes some fairly significant divergence in power, favoring races that diverge from Western beliefs about height, weight, facial features, musculature, etc. to get things to shift even to being more-or-less equal in an MMO context. D&D players are remarkably more adventurous than MMO players are, based on this data set, when it comes to what races they'll play.*I say "noticeably" because, IIRC, D&D elves are traditionally a little bit shorter than humans. But they're of pretty "normal" height, in that their average height is close to average *female* height for real humans, and tall elves are still taller than the average human. A tall dwarf is still shorter than the average human--indeed, probably shorter than most very short humans. That hurts the bottom line.This was part of my intended point, just stated rather than hinted at with pseudo-Socratic questions. That is, I'm asserting that these things would absolutely be popular regardless of implementation...because they've been popular across a huge range of implementations. I therefore meet with a very skeptical eye those saying that, because it is popular, it must have been done well. That doesn't follow. It could be that it was done excellently, or merely adequately, or decently-but-could-be-better, or even a bit poorly but not so bad that it drives people away (because, as noted, things typically need to be quite worse-off to overcome many of our inherent attractions to that which is both "relatable" and "meriting social approval," e.g. in a range overlapping with human height but capable of being taller than an average human because height is culturally linked to social worth in the West). We cannot actually separate out these confounding variables to be able to draw such conclusions, but people freely do so all the time.Also, to the inevitable replies I expect (likely from others): None of the above should be taken as excluding that part of the Fighter playerbase which does directly value the characteristics of the 5e Fighter class. It's merely noting that, despite the 4e Fighter being very different in several ways--ways which pro-"simplicity" Fighter fans disliked, but pro-"depth" Fighter fans liked--both versions consistently rank as the most popular class of their edition in literally every poll I've ever seen, official or not, formal or not. This would seem to pretty clearly indicate that Fighter fans just like Fighters, and will put up with implementations whether or not they conform to their preferences because they're Fighters--and that using play-frequency statistics (or, well, a loose approximation thereof) gives you little to no information about whether a particular Fighter implementation is succeeding at the mathematically-testable design goals set for it.No race, in my experience, has received more vitriol and gleeful exclusion than Dragonborn have. I have literally been told, to my face (well, via forum post), that I should be happy that Dragonborn got included at all because they don't truly belong in D&D. I have heard numerous posters openly brag about how they shut down players who like Dragonborn, how they would never allow such inappropriate races in their home campaigns. I have never seen any other race referenced so often by official designers, not simply everyday folks, as being weird, out there, or a thing said designer would exclude if it weren't for their pesky players liking such a ridiculous option, even if it's said with tongue in cheek.Disliking Dragonborn is practically a fad at this point.Can't really comment, tbh. Never played in Eberron and frankly just don't hear that much discussion of Warforged, Shifters, Changelings, or the like. Dragonborn are the hot topic, and it seems like their detractors literally can't stop talking, not just about how much they dislike them, but how justified they are FOR disliking them.</blockquote>

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