NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8110525" data-attributes="member: 8461">Which is correct in terms of how big of an impact they have in terms of what your character can do under the game engine.Right, which are issues of mechanics, and don't have nearly as much impact as five or six levels of, well...any particular class.Whichever one says "Dungeons & Dragons" on the header.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />All joking aside, the issue of "the game would die if it didn't allow for more races" is a very odd position to take. We've seen D&D jettison core races before, such as the half-orc in AD&D 2E and the gnome in 4E, and while there was some grumbling, no one was suggesting that either were some sort of mortal blow. At worst, people didn't like how the half-orc disappeared as a presumed part of the "appease angry mothers" strategy (in a late response to the Satanic Panic), but overall it wasn't anything that made waves outside of the hardcore crowd.Pictures snipped for space. That said, it's not hard at all to find an all-human party. Heck, that second picture could easily be taken as one! For another instance, check out the party in "The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising," (which wasn't a D&D product per se, but openly used the D&D rules in the film, even showing a 3.5 PHB) which made some jokes about how one guy wanted to play an elf and the DM shut him down in favor of an all-human party. And that's quite possibly one of the best "D&D game" films!I have no doubt that was a part of it, but it wasn't a particularly major part of it. D&D was so successful because it was the first one out of the gate, and in so doing set the standard. What it laid down became the baseline everyone else used, and in that regard it had far more options available to it than you're giving it credit for.No, not so much. In fact, a lot of the second-stringers that came out after D&D did so with the explicit goal of trying to do D&D better, and failed to displace it. Ken St. Andre made Tunnels & Trolls specifically to be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_%26_Trolls" target="_blank">more accessible</a> than D&D one year after D&D came out (and it had more PC races than D&D did at the time). It was never a serious contender. If D&D hadn't picked up halflings, nothing would have changed.</blockquote>

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