Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

According to the wonderful charts posted with race distribution we can clearly see several options are practically unused.

Gold Dwarf: .4% to .9%
Deep Gnomes: 1.1% to .7%
Lightfoot Halfling: 1.1% to 1%
Wild Elf: .2% to .7%
Gray Dwarf: .6% to .5%
Air Genasi: .8% to .9%
Deep Imaskari: .5% to .7%
Tanarukk: .3% to .5%
Fire Genasi: .4%
Water Genasi: .2% to .5%
Half Drow: .7%

While I don't expect even distribution or huge numbers running around it would be cool to look into why they are like this and what could be done. I am not just talking about buffs either. For example Deep Gnomes are a very powerful race yet are rarely played. Perhaps there is another reason that could be addressed?

Ideas?

One of the main reason races get chosen is because of +x bonus. Its a problem dnd has continually struggled with and only recently (5e) have they curbed the power of this problem (note that i didn't say removed).

5e explanation for anyone thats bothered. I'm not really sure what would be a good thing to do for racial diversity. PC's are typically everything and anything and never the staple of the setting they inhabit. I'm happy with the current setup, though if anything were to be done mechanically I would opt in favour of options that remove the ECL from the ECL races. ECL races always seem to have this min/max forced class choice about them. An example of this might be to reduce the Aasimar to +1 Wis +1 Cha and drop its ECL to 0.

Then again FR is all about the crazy number of subraces so its not fair to say we dont have enough speckled-jim elves or anything.

Part of it likely has to do with the setting. We are in human dominated lands on the surface with a few communities for other races. I might expect deep gnome to start to go up once more RP gets generated around Rockrun vs Sshamath but even then, the nerf to their AC long ago hurt their desirability.

I know the answer in the case of the wild elf: they don't have the new head models that the other elves have..

The difference between Lightfoot Halfling and Strongheart is that Light foot get +1 unisave while Strongheart get a free feat that can net +1 unisave and +1 AC or any other feat. Lightfoot hardly seems worth it in that regard.

Aside from cool to flavor why would you ever pick an air Genasi over a Tiefling? It gets a -2 wisdom penelty and no real mechanical benefit.

Gold dwarves trade a Cha penelty for a Dex penelty. They also lose access to custom beards and heads. Not a good trade for most builds.

Air genasi make better fighter swashbuckler than a tiefling (no exp penalty). Gold dwarves can make EDM clerics, Tanaruk race is the perfect race for an arcane gish .. all of these races have decent, or even powerful, building options. I don't really know what the problem is with them

Valefort wrote:Air genasi make better fighter swashbuckler than a tiefling (no exp penalty). Gold dwarves can make EDM clerics, Tanaruk race is the perfect race for an arcane gish .. all of these races have decent, or even powerful, building options. I don't really know what the problem is with them

Maybe not many people roll swahbucklers without hips in which case Tiefling hide bonus wins the day or something? Gold dwarves are able to be edm clerics but that requirse a bit of min maxing and you will not be as powerful as many other races are with that build. Don't think I have ever seen a dwarf cleric at all really. Both examples feel like lesser choices on most builds.

I wish Tanarukk were on nwn2db. I digress though. This really isn't all about the power of those classes. The statistics don't lie. They are rarely played. How could we change that?

chambordini wrote:The statistics do lie though, or at least you're not interpreting correctly. A below 1 percent of characters in the vault being of a specific race does not mean that those specific races are the least played. Those facts don't carry over to overall time spent on those races. Nor do we know if those values retain their proportions when comparing any other significant form of player investment.

Those vault statistics are fun to see but hardly provide actionable feedback.
Even if we had such, it's fine that these racial subtypes are less played, both from a lore perspective for most of them, and a gameplay one.

In actuality I don't foresee any changes beyond visual ones like gold dwarves getting their cousins's beards, if people actually want such.

Actually I looked at all the statistics which include

Made on a copy of the vault today, PCs with less than 10k exp excluded (10588 PCs)

Another batch of stats, this time on PCs who were used in 2017 only, with more than 10k exp and less than 500 000 gold (because otherwise a few extremely rich PCs screw the whole graph )

One to focus on the "active mains" : 190 000 exp or more, 10 000 gold or more, used in 2017. Removing gold because unreadable and censoring deity data

XP is a good indicator of time spent. I posted the minimum and maximum of those charts for races that were noticeably less played. From a lore perspective many of them should be at least 2-3% of the population. Not all but then again many other races are outpacing their lore numbers by far.

I really don't know why people like Tieflings so much. Tiefling's favored class is rogue, but they're inferior Rogues.

Thorsson wrote:I really don't know why people like Tieflings so much. Tiefling's favored class is rogue, but they're inferior Rogues.

Fantastic wizards though.

Edit: and badass looking warlocks!

Honestly I believe its more about player choices and player biases.

Just like not everyone want to play a good drow, not everyone want to play a halfling, Imaskari etc.
Unless we start forcing players to make toons of specific races in the name of equality I fail to see how to make any larger number of players pick the odd cherries.

Statwise possibly the genasi might deserve an overhaul all things considered, but how many of us rethink it fun to run around with seashells in the hair or being airheads?
Fine we have Teris the mad and a bunch of earth genasi, I give us that.


Really personally I am glad the number of halfelves have lifted somewhat, it kind of used to be Mealir upstairs and Naty downstairs.

/M

PS. Gold Dwarves make the best Master at Arms, lest you forget.

Edit: An upswing in halfdrow population are to be foreseen if they are allowed a surface origin. Unless something has changed dramatically I fail to see this happening however.
Tieflings already play that background stigma part, with tails.

Laughingman wrote:The difference between Lightfoot Halfling and Strongheart is that Light foot get +1 unisave while Strongheart get a free feat that can net +1 unisave and +1 AC or any other feat. Lightfoot hardly seems worth it in that regard.

Aside from cool to flavor why would you ever pick an air Genasi over a Tiefling? It gets a -2 wisdom penelty and no real mechanical benefit.

so... ..i love the genasi.

air genasi are awesome for unarmored builds.

water genasi are pretty cool too.

of course everyone loves a good earth genasi.

i have not done a fire genasi build.

genasi get fighter as preferred class... ..so that opens some feat options if you have a concept.
also, some people (like me) really dont want to RP a teifling. They are superior rogue builds, (the dex) but in general, i personally built rogues because phantom was not available.

but ill be real, my biggest reason i love genasi is the way they look. They really help the oddball concept i am going for. They actually all were mules, but i fall in love with my mules so often...

i dont think an overhaul is needed on genasi.

Well, the main thing with Tanarukks, is that it is against the rules to RP the status of the majority of Tanarukks in Sshamath. It is only within the rules to play snowflake Tanarukks.