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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6303570" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm afraid that horse has rather bolted.Warforged are confirmed as in the DMG, last I heard. They stopped being a "setting-specific" race in 4E, if not before.Minotaurs were last a "setting-specific" race in the early '90s. Rational, non-curse-caused minotaurs are pretty much a generic fantasy trope at this point - far more so than Gnomes, and I would bet real money that in a totally honest survey of D&D players, we'd find more people had played Minotaurs than, say, Gnomes.Kender, Muls and Thri-Kreen are genuine examples of setting-specific races (though various half-dwarves have appeared in a ton of settings, going right back to 2E's release and perhaps before - usually they're just treated as dwarves or humans, though).Part of the issue is that the FR simply accretes races. Even if a race is setting-specific, you can bet that within five years, unless it's totally tied into that setting culturally, it'll have turned up in an FR product (this was true even 2E).The issue with Aasimar is that they aren't very popular, because simply being a Cleric/Paladin is "pretty much the same thing" for most people - they don't have highly distinctive features like Tieflings tend to (i.e. horns, colourful skin, scary eyes, tails). Aasimar tend to simply be "A really good-looking human that glows!". Well, my 18 CHA human Paladin is a really good-looking human that glows, so... WotC tried to fix this in 4E with their Devas, which had a bit more spin and distinctiveness than just "Angelic people" (part of the problem is that for our culture, angelic typically = beautiful, and beautiful = mainstream human, not weird features), and were actually rather sadly overlooked, because they were conceptually far, far stronger than Aasimar. Plus, let's be real here, "I am blessed by my angelic ancestors!" as a background makes you sound like kind of a boring advantaged rich person. You have no adversity to work against, and no real culture beyond that which raised you. Even an Elf has more adversity to work against, and an actual culture to boot (as Tieflings acquired in 4E)!So I think that, unless they can give Aasimar a better raison d'etre than "Well Tieflings exist so...", they should probably be pretty low-priority. Give 'em some distinctive features that aren't "Like a human/elf but prettier and glow-ier and probably smells better". Maybe they should have six eyes like Biblical Seraphim, or other scary/bizarre/whoa traits drawn from the angels and angel equivalents of world culture (the Bible has tons of scary/weird angels - the phrase "wheels within wheels" is a physical description of an angel, for goodness sake!*). So yeah, they need help. A lot of help.* = see here: <a href="http://biblehub.com/ezekiel/1-16.htm" target="_blank">http://biblehub.com/ezekiel/1-16.htm</a>EDIT - I'd also briefly mention that the main problem with Human/Elf/Dwarf/Halfling as the "core" is that it doesn't hit all the basic race types players are looking for. The basic race-types are, imo, "Human" (a lot of people just want to play humans), Pretty/Snooty Dudes (Elves hit this), Tough, Hard-working, Never-Say-Die dudes (Dwarves hit this), Short, Joke-y Dudes (Halflings), Big, Tough Honorable-Warrior Dudes (bzzzt no race - Goliaths, Dragonborn, Minotaurs and others can go here), Darksider (bzzzt no race - Tieflings are the perfect fit, Drow are good but being elves means some people who like Darksider-types will never like them), and Beastman/Freak race (some people always want to be something bizarre, or animal-men, there are a ton of races which can go here). Robot is also increasing in popularity, but not at the level of others yet (Warforged can go there).</blockquote>

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