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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8442690" data-attributes="member: 7006">Heh heh... oh no, I think even with the two races as you mention it would all still come down to "humans in funny hats", because the people trying to play these races are all actual humans wearing funny hats.  And this is why the arguments about racial features and such being "necessary" to distinguish races always ring hollow to me-- because those racial features are just game mechanics that affect the board game rules, but they do not in any way actually impact how the actual human players act or roleplay their characters.  The human beings at the table are going to try to act and roleplay as these bizarre alien species for whom they have no cultural or physiological reference... but what is actually going to end up happening is a human being talking funny with a couple of human quirks that have been cranked up or cranked down compared to what we'd consider "normal" for us humans.  That's pretty much all we are going to get, and to think otherwise is to give the D&D player base way too much credit in their acting abilities.  It doesn't really matter how involved or in-depth a DM writes their races for their setting-- they still have to be performed and represented by us schmucks sitting down around the table.  And Daniel Day-Lewis and Cate Blanchett we are not!  LOL!So at the end of the day, I believe the real question about all of this is actually  "How many unique game features do you want races to have?"  And for that, everybody is going to have their own particular desires.  For a long time it was determined by TSR and WotC that they felt it to be "about 4 or so"... merely 4 simple unique things that make an elf and elf and a tiefling a tiefling.  Which, let's be perfectly honest, is so simplistic it's almost insulting.  And now WotC is dropping that number even further and making some game features more adjustable and universal-- features that multiple different races could have (like bonuses to specific ability scores).And thus the argument comes down to this-- some people think that since 4 features is the only things these races have to separate them currently, losing even more really washes and blands a race out.  Whereas the rest of us think that 4 features is so low to begin with in trying distinguish one complete racial group from another that those 4 things barely even count as distinguishing features.  The races are already so washed out and bland that going from 4 to 3 or 2 is virtually meaningless.  So why get all bent out of shape about it?I mean look... if the game still had for instance "races as classes" and you had 20 entire levels of unique racial/class features that made a dwarf a dwarf and a halfling a halfling... and then WotC said "We're going to entirely remove these complete 20-level race/classes from the game because of the potential harm their existence might cause for some people"... I'd at least understand why the people who loved those things would be upset.  But to say "My elf can't be an elf anymore because my four unique elf features are now down to three"?  Sorry... but I just can't go with you on feeling like that's something to really be upset about.</blockquote>

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