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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4768710" data-attributes="member: 2067">No, I meant "usefulness." Having a lot of different races has much faster diminishing returns for the game as a whole than having a lot of diffferent...almost anything else. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> At the table, you use maybe six PC races over the course of two years or so, possibly up to ten if you have a high rate of new players, or retiring or dead characters, or PC's who never use a race more than once or something. More races don't add much to the game -- they are not useful in the most literal sense of not being used very much in actual play. In 3e, this was somewhat mitigated by NPC/PC transparency: the race was ALSO a kit to build NPC encounters with, in addition to being a resource for a player. But in 4e, there is no transparency, so the existence of this race doesn't really give you any NPC's -- just PC's. If your players aren't using it, it's effectively wasted page space, and even the most diverse group of players won't use more than a fistfull of races over, heck, the entire life of 4e. New races are not very useful to the game (mostly due to their limited impact). Their playtests haven't been anything of THAT sort at all, from what I've seen. But laying that aside, releasing fewer races would probably be the smart thing to do, because you don't need very many races, even in 10 years of playing D&D. The races they do release in the future should be all killer: deep races, rather than a broad selection of many races. And they can have "monster manual" races that give DM's something when they also give PC's something.</blockquote>

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