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Jeremy Crawford Discusses Details on Custom Origins
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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8110498" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>I think you're the one who missed the point. It's been a truism for decades that race doesn't have very much weight (for lack of a better term) with regards to what makes a character notable, at least insofar as what's on their character sheet goes. (I know this isn't a very concrete example, but I have a vague memory of an NPC book - 3E's <em>Enemies and Allies</em> maybe? - which said something to the effect of "if you want to change the races of any of these characters, it's pretty easy; just modify the ability scores and one or two other, altogether minor things.") Aspects such as class, level, and gear are far more salient; sure, you can play up your character's race, but the importance of that in system-immanent terms is modest at best.</p><p></p><p>The idea that D&D would have to "adapt or die" if it hadn't had Tolkien-style demihuman PCs similarly strikes me as unlikely. The game established its brand identity early on, attaining a death grip on its market niche that it's never really lost (though there have certainly been periods where it waxed and waned). By contrast, Middle-Earth-based RPGs have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle-earth_role-playing_games" target="_blank">come and gone</a>. D&D wouldn't have died for want of halflings.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 8110498, member: 8461"] I think you're the one who missed the point. It's been a truism for decades that race doesn't have very much weight (for lack of a better term) with regards to what makes a character notable, at least insofar as what's on their character sheet goes. (I know this isn't a very concrete example, but I have a vague memory of an NPC book - 3E's [I]Enemies and Allies[/I] maybe? - which said something to the effect of "if you want to change the races of any of these characters, it's pretty easy; just modify the ability scores and one or two other, altogether minor things.") Aspects such as class, level, and gear are far more salient; sure, you can play up your character's race, but the importance of that in system-immanent terms is modest at best. The idea that D&D would have to "adapt or die" if it hadn't had Tolkien-style demihuman PCs similarly strikes me as unlikely. The game established its brand identity early on, attaining a death grip on its market niche that it's never really lost (though there have certainly been periods where it waxed and waned). By contrast, Middle-Earth-based RPGs have [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle-earth_role-playing_games]come and gone[/url]. D&D wouldn't have died for want of halflings. [/QUOTE]
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