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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7735940" data-attributes="member: 1465">Speaking from my own little perspective, I have always witnessed the same, but said perspective is of a player/DM who mostly played with friends who are fairly casual gamers, or at least very rarely hardcore gamers, and countless times I've have players at their very first experience.To me it seems that whenever someone plays D&D for the first time, the choice of race is first of all a matter of "am I going to play a human or something else?", and only afterward it's a question of what else. No surprise that the first question already directs a lot of beginners towards not even looking at the non-human options. And the answer to the second question is of course more frequently a race that people are already familiar with through movies and computer games, LOTR and WOW have certainly gone a long way teaching what "elf" and "dwarf" can mean in a fantasy game. So these general statistics don't surprise me at all, even if I don't know how much of them are based off beginners rather than long-time players.This is also very typical in my own experience. Casual gamers and beginners do not know or understand the rules yet to be able to compare character choices in terms of power, so they choose by rule of cool. It doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want to also learn to make more powerful choices, but simply that they realize there is no time to do that before they start playing.But also, races aren't exactly the primary source of character power. Some editions encourage "combos" to leverage ability score bonuses, but beyond that, the choice of race has a diminishing importance as the character goes up in level.This is less clear to me. Quite certainly, each feat is a minor element of character design compared to the choice of class, even tho some feats have the potential to steer the character towards certain tactics and so they can really change the PC's behaviour during the adventures. But they still don't suggest to the average player the same level of characterization that the 3 "big" choices provide (even tho my personal belief is that the Background delivers a lot more narrative feel than functional abilities, we have to keep in mind that such 'feel' can be a lot more important to the player).However, why players would choose ASI instead of feats is complicated for me to summarize, there are lots of possible reasons, and even contraddictive ones (there's always people arguing that ASI are 'obviously' more powerful, and other people arguing that feats are 'obviously' more powerful and even game-breaking, at least if you pick the best ones). The increased character complexity, the added narrative, the fiddly bits, the specialization effect etc. which a feat brings, could all be either wanted or unwanted consequences, depending on the player, so who can speak for everyone?But we also have to keep in mind that many beginners and casual gamers never play long enough to ever have to make the choice, and this affects the statistics but again, we don't know how much.Mmm... kind of a self-defining sentence here <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Their primary choices are of course those "big 3" each one carries plenty of details and abilities already. Choice of spells, equipment, feats and class-specific abilities are secondary by definition because they are individual, smaller choices.</blockquote>

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