As mentioned earlier in the thread Elrond is a half elf who chose “the life of an elf”. His brother chose “the life of a (hu)man” and was an ancestor of Aragon (who did the typical royal thing and married his cousin).
They aren't redundant.
And does this stacking systems on top of one another serve anything but page bloat and rising barrier to entry? I'm of opinion a good system should have few rules, that can be applied to all but most edge cases.
To be fair, gnomes are also redundant and should go away if not for D&D's desperate clinging to things for tradition to the point that it's super rare for cruft to be excised.
I could somewhat see Gnomes and Haflings working if they're being diffirent enough. On Mystara Five Shires is hafling's land that is like Tolkien's Shire, but more militaristic and weirdly libertarian. Meanwhile, Gnomes are flying around in an advanced mechanical city of Serraine, with WWI-level technology/magitech and sharing the city with not-skeksis and not-flying apes from Wizard of Oz, and makign Top Gun jokes.
I agreed that the mechanics packages as presented to me were redundant. That doesn't mean a better package couldn't be constructed. Level Up's system is IMO an example of just such a package. And the reason I feel a better way to represent orcs and half-orcs (and elves and half-elves, and other species and half-other species) is that the presence of such beings serves much more than a mechanical need.
I am not of that opinion. A good game IMO should have rules for whatever it wants to model. If you want to model a realistic fantasy world, first of all you state that intention, and secondly you create rules to cover the things you want or need to cover to meet that goal. You don't have to use all those rules in every given campaign at every given table if they aren't needed at the time, but they're there if you want them. If you want to model superheroic power fantasy it's the same; first of all you state that intention, and secondly you create rules to cover the things you want or need to cover to meet that goal. That will sometimes mean that some games have a higher inherent complexity than others. So be it: that is not always a bad thing to be avoided IMO.
D&D never set out to model anything in particular (apart Conan stories a little in the early days), and thus it could be played lots of different ways. Hence it’s success, whilst more specialised games have fallen by the wayside.
That statement strongly implies that little to no one plays anything but D&D, or at least that D&D is objectively the best RPG. I hope you're not saying that, or suggesting popularity is a measure of quality.
Statistically, this is true. People playing other RPGs are a tiny fraction, and what those competing RPGs are has changed on a regular basis. Whatever happened to Vampire: The Masquerade?
Certainly not true. But you don’t want to be “the best” you want to be the one that the maximum number of people consider good enough to be worth playing.
