If you had to cut two core races from your game....

[Aeolius]

humans and dwarves... in my undersea game

Mind you, I do have deep sea dwarves as an NPC race, but they could easily be gnomes.

 

[the shmoopie]

In my humble opinion,

Half Elves have to go. Then Half-Orcs. I hadn't even thought of a heritage feat, but that serves to show, just how little these races would be missed.
I cannot see a D&D world with out the small races. To be troubled by "small" weapons seems odd, but hey, everyone gets to run their game their way. As an aside though, some of the best times our parties have ever had is with a halfling in the mix. My fiance had a halfling fighter that would rip the face off of you faster than any normal "Meat Shield"

 

[Nifft]

I'd kick everyone except Humans and Gnomes -- since the Gnome can fill all the other demi-human archtypes nicely (Illusionist, slow-moving high-Con fighter, small sneaky Rogue, all-terrain mounted outrider). They're better Wizards than the Elf, and better mounted outriders than the Halfling.

For everything else, there's Humans.

Cheers, -- N

PS: But I picked Half-Elf and Half-Orc. Who needs 'em?

 

[jmucchiello]

I picked Elf and half-orc. Yes, Elf, not half-elf. I think the half-elf stats are better than the elf ones. No one takes a CON hit willingly and at the cost of random weapon proficiencies, +1 Listen, +1 Search and +1 Spot and autosearch, you gain +2 Diplomacy, +2 Gather Info and all bonus languages. Not to mention the stupid Wizard favored class going away.

About the only really useful thing lost is the autosearch and that is something the DM has to remember you have or it isn't used.

 

[Deadguy]

I would cut halflings and half-elves.

Woohoo! I agree with The Man.

Halflings because their wandering archetype causes problems, and because players want Hobbits and I don't.

Half-Elves because they are indeed essentially mechanically redundant. And it's not worth the effort to retool them.

 

[Blackrat]

What do you get when a half-orc meets a halfling?
-About two quarterlings-

That sums my choices.

 

[HugeOgre]

From a story perspective it seems like it might be dependent on the world. Im not at ALL surprised by the results, though personally I voted to nix the half orc instead of the half elf, just because half orcs have a tendency to get abused by certain kinds of players. Half elves, as many pointed out, just dont have anything interesting to offer, so if this poll continues in the vein of similar ones of late theyll be my next choice.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Easiest, fastest ENworld poll I've ever responded to. Half elf, gnome, submit. #3 choice would have been half orc, just as the poll suggests might be the case.

 

[Droogie]

Voted Half-orc. Rather just see orc as a race, as mentioned previous.

Voted Halfling, only because I find two small human-like races redundant. I'd actually just like to blend them together and stick with the gnome name, to take one more step back from Tolkien.

If players really need a second small race, I'd make Kobolds official.

 

[Corsair]

Half-Elf, Half-Orc.

Both are mechanically pretty poopy, and you could easily just have "orc" instead of half-orc as a player option. If you want to keep cross breeding, I'd say the child of one of the standard half-breed unions would be a human with noticeable physical features of the other parent.