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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8564146" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Wisdom is powerful, but it doesn't have Coolness Factor.Intelligence is naturally appealing to the core fanbase of D&D because we're nerds, we get the value of intelligence. Charisma is (in some sense) literally sexy, but it's also allowing us to be something a lot of us aren't. Strength speaks for itself, and Dexterity offers some of the benefits of Charisma (it's the "flashy stylistic" fighting stat, and has a bunch of powerful bonuses as well.)You may notice that there's a similar trend with Constitution. It's a desirable stat, but it's not a cool stat. Dwarves got grandfathered in; apart from them, "Con-primary" races simply aren't the sort of thing that draws a lot of attention.Part of the problem, of course, is that popularity of races is usually at least partly disconnected from power. Dragonborn rose to be the third-most-popular race (if you split elf by subrace, as D&D Beyond does; if you don't split by subrace, dragonborn rose to 4th, behind humans, half-elves, and elves, and ahead of Tiefling) before Fizban's fixed their frankly garbage racial package.Humans and elves have almost always been the most popular racial options because "character I can easily identify with" and "character that's inherently more graceful that I can identify with" are really, really strong selling points. This pattern holds true in nearly every game, including MMOs: the "beautiful" races will be more popular than the "savage" races in general. Guild Wars 2? Humans massively outnumber everyone else, and charr are by far the least common choice (particularly if measured by playtime: human characters have almost 45% of all playtime, while the poor charr languish at less than 10%, even though there are only five race options and always have been!) WoW? Humans, night elves, and blood elves predominate--and blood elves almost instantly became the most popular Horde race as soon as BC launched. FFXIV? The VAST majority of characters are the relatively slender and/or more-humanoid races (cagirls/"miqo'te," partly-horned/scaled humans/"au'ra," ordinary humans/"hyur," and humans with bunny ears/"viera" collectivel make up more than 72% of all active characters, even though that's only half the races in the game--with three of those other races having existed since launch, while male viera were literally only added three months ago.)As for the newcomers, it's not too hard to see why they're popular. Tieflings are very hot right now because "rehabilitated bad-guy image" is a big thing, yet tieflings lack the unfortunate connotations of the drow (a dark-skinned, matriarchal people that are super evil and into kinky torture...yeah...) Tiefling lets you have all the benefits of both "dark and edgy" AND "actually just a misunderstood puppy with a truckload of Issues from a terrible childhood etc." without any fear of contradiction. That's pretty straightforward.Dragonborn is, ironically, both easy and hard. It's easy because, I mean, they're dragons, dragons are just cool. But I can't really say why they're so suddenly skyrocketed in popularity such that they eclipsed even tieflings (on D&D Beyond, that is), at least for a while. (I haven't seen super-recent statistics so those numbers could have changed.) I obviously love dragonborn and am super happy to see them becoming so popular, but I really, honestly have NO idea why that's changed so heavily in the past three or four years. It's like some critical mass was passed, and after that their popularity was unavoidable.And the key thing is...none of these are Con-primary. All the Con-primary races are either beast-like (e.g. loxodon) or savage (e.g. orc)/not traditionally seen as conventionally attractive (e.g. dwarf), and none of the existing "sexy" race options qualifies--and the same can be said about Wis-primary races. Believe it or not, 4e actually helped address some of this in the past: after the PHB3, all races were updated to have one "fixed" stat and a choice between two other stats, so dragonborn were +2 Cha and your choice of +2 Str or +2 Con. And 4e elves were actually a Wis race (well, +Dex and +Wis or +Int), while half-elves were a Con race (+Con and +Wis or +Cha)!</blockquote>

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