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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8111276" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I don't know if this is shifting goal posts or if you were just exaggerating and that was not clear. But since my entire point was "yes, race makes a difference, even if it isn't as big as class" and you agree with that, I'm going to drop the point.And I disagree. Even when we talk about the game derisively between ourselves we define it as "our pretend elf game". The ability to be a different race is baked too deep into the game to say with confidence that it would have grabbed the same cultural zeitgeist without that aspect.  Maybe. But, being the first doesn't always mean you are going to be the one that lasts. Xerox was the first company to make a photo-copier. They took the world by storm to the point that using a photocopier is still referred to as "xeroxing" them. Xerox nearly went out of business and sold of that property, and as far as I can tell, they no longer make or sell those machines. DnD may have taken the scene by storm by having a cohesive framework of play, but if an equally good product had come along, with more options to fill in the "clear gaps" left by this hypothetical version of humans only, I think it would have been very easy for DnD to get dethroned.Sure, we are bouncing back and forth, and again, if your entire point was just how much influence Tolkien had, I can see it being fairly minimal. DnD became its own thing fairly rapidly. It had a lot of "posts" laid down by tolkien, mostly kept into prominence by fans still insisting about them (see conversations about Gandalf, or "spell-less rangers") but it is overall, a fairly small percentage of the influences and more importantly the culture of DnD. But I want to seperate out "races" from "Tolkien" because I think it was the mixing of those two ideas that led to this whole tangent.But you are getting into a black and white fallacy. Maybe it didn't need "those races" maybe it just needed a few races. There is the idea of diminishing returns. In a game where there are three playable characters, adding two more is a huge upset to the game as it exists. In a game with 200 characters, adding two more is a blip on the radar, maybe. Maybe they needed specific Tolkien names, they certainly didn't take the Tolkien ideas. But, maybe they just needed some recognizable names and a tie in to fantasy culture that people could identify. Maybe T&T was too late, maybe it was too small, maybe it had poor distribution, maybe the idea of three more races wasn't enough to shift the scales and make it over take DnD. But, using it to insist that DnD could have risen like it did with only humans is not supported by anything except your own insistance of the that position.How about that increased range for the longbow? That isn't exactly a small benefit. And if you are level 20, and you are using a steel longsword, you have a problem, maybe it is a Flametongue, which would be a 1d8+2d6, increasing it from 2.5 to 11.5. Maybe 9 points of damage isn't much at level 20, but it is a rather huge difference in practice. In fact, it is enough to make them more than capable of one-shotting a weak minion that might try and ambush them. Sure, they are better off using the magic, but even having this option makes for a pretty big change in how you look at your character. You don't need a melee cantrip as badly, since you can actually use a decent melee weapon.And I can completely agree with that point, to a degree. I think that the races are a big part of the game, because they have been one of the two big aspects of player facing rules in the entire game. I build backstories based largely on how the race would interact with the world. I think about that aspect a lot, and it also effects world-building. Is there no DnD without Tolkien? I doubt it. Maybe it wouldn't have looked exactly the same, but Tolkien was only one part, like you said, not the entirety of the game.</blockquote>

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