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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 3975919" data-attributes="member: 19675">Yeah, I got that- sorry if I wasn't clear.However, the point remains that despite 30 years of history, gnomes were considered "marginal" enough to be excised from the 4Ed PHB- a decision I'm not fond of.And the second point stands as well: what WotC considers "marginal" may not be the case for many of their installed base as several posts in this thread illustrate.  Many campaigns and player choices are going to be affected by this attitude.This is especially the case if, as he says, that 4Ed won't include full hardcopy treatments of those races.  3.5 does just fine- a simple perusal of the various MMs, "Races of" books etc. have all kinds of variant races that one could call "marginal" and nobody complains about it.4Ed's minimizing the hardcopy info on those races gimps player choice right out of the starting gate, plain & simple.Didn't ask 'em to.Didn't ask 'em to excise gnomes, either.I know WotC did research, I also know that market research can sometimes be skewed by accidentally getting a non-representative sample. It's also very difficult to guage the actual quality of research that suggests that something that is a known quantity (gnomes) be discarded in favor of an unknown quantity (dragonborn), but many could easily interpret it as suspect.(Not that I'm knocking the dragonborn- they seem to be pretty decent so far- superior to many of the racial variants for elves, dwarves & orcs that have come down the pipe in the past few decades.)Considering:1) the number of DMs I've encountered in 30 years of gaming (experience, not evidence- YMMV) who bar PCs of any race not in the PHB, making them de facto unplayable for some players, and2) what an absence of racial feats could mean in the as-yet-unseen system as a whole, I can't give your response much creedence at this time.Those Racial feats could be marginal and largely flavorful, or they could be "must have" gold.  Right now, We don't know which they are.  If its the latter, you could see the virtual disappearance of players playing "suboptimal" races who lack them.Consider me an 'apprehensive wait-and-see" consumer.</blockquote>

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