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Message: <blockquote data-quote="War Golem" data-source="post: 25885" data-attributes="member: 142">Gnomes and Halflings were tossed from my homebrew from Day 1. What? Not done yet? Nope; out go the half-breeds as well.Never seen enough distinctiveness from Gnomes to justify their existence. The only compelling trait they had from back in the day is Illusion specialization. Bah - who needs it? The other races can cast illusions well enough.Halflings are just irritating and silly. The kender are fine for Dragonlance; their apparent non-stop dispersal throughout the rest of the known fantasy gaming universe has just been bad news for everyone. I'll confess, the 3rd edition version doesn't seem so bad; I've considered reinstating them.Half-elves and Half-orcs... someone please tell me why, with all of the incredibly imaginative race ideas floating around in literature, movies, other game systems, etc... that we need to use crossbreeds of races that are not usually role-played particularly well to begin with? In my experience, most people really don't do a very good job of role-playing the mindset of an elf or an orc very differently than a typical human, although perhaps with some few exaggerated personality traits (elf: arrogant, haughty, whimsical; orc: brutish, stupid, uncivilized). Why blur the lines even more by introducing half-breeds? I mean, if most gamers can't effectively role-play an elf (where they can lean on the exaggerated stereotypes to assist their personality), they certainly aren't going to have an easier time role-playing the gray area between humans and elves.I'm not sure if I explained that as clearly as I might have. If you followed my drift, great. If not, speak up and I'll try again to get my point across.So for those of you keeping track at home, that only leaves my campaign with 3 races: Humans, Elves and Dwarves. Not a lot of selection, what with all the imaginative races I cited before. That's why I've cobbled together three other PC races from other game systems (Kzinti, Skaven & Sauran), created  brand new one (Nali) and I'm considering adding a fifth (Wookies).</blockquote>

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