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So what's your favorite D&D race to date? and your least favorite?

Mine:

Fave: Tieflings are great in my opinion, not for their bonuses, but for their ability to roleplay. Nothing beats playing the outcast half-demon with horns IMHO.

Leastfave: I DM'd a session once where one of the players was a Fire Jovian. +14 Strength, +2 Constitution, +2 Charisma, -2 Dexterity. No real social penalty either. described as being "small by giant standards" yet they're still large class. He never missed an attack because of the strength bonus too. He one-hit-killed 12 kobolds at level 1. I got so sick of it, a kobold actually ended up getting the jump on him, and knocked him out with a club-blow to the head (yup, that was a crit.)

How about you? 

So i was going over the different races of Dungeons and Dragons, and i have come to the conclusion. Dwarfs are the best race. They are tough no matter what class you choose. They NEVER get knocked down (contrary to the popular Chumba Wumba song). They also can drink and eat pretty much anything (Starting with but not limited to Mead, Beer, Wine, Ale, and even pure Posion!). What could possibly be a better race? I don't think there is!

It's review time. I refer of course to the end of December surprise of one last playtest package before the end of the year. This would be our fourth real package, excluding the small updates with added an extra class or two to the mix. This time we have the full 1-20 level range of for five classes.

It seems like as good a time as any to really look at the playtest package and the playtest process in general.
Let’s start with the biggest addition to the playtest package, the one rule that makes me most happy: the addition of falling damage. I swear, this came up a half-dozen times in my playtests and I always bounced between d6 and d10 damage.

Poking Feedback

Wizards of the Coast has been managing this public playtest for roughly seven months, since the first package was released

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In most games humans are the dominant species, often supported by non-humans of various sorts. These people often provide support, assistance, trade, knowledge, food, and, of course, characters to play in the game. Sometimes they form a part of human society, more often they form allied and/or neighboring societies.

Very often they provide alternative ways of looking at the world. In most settings dwarfs are bluff and taciturn, hard workers and doughty troopers. Elves in contrast are introspective, insightful, and curious. The gnomes of Aerth (Mythus) are skilled business men and diligent merchants and financiers. Dwarfs are excellent miners, elves excellent foresters, and Aerth gnomes prosperous merchants, often dominating trade and trade routes.

However, when two species share land and ...

The dominant element in fantasy campaigns tends to be nations, be it tiny city-states like the city of Greyhawk, or massive continent-spanning empires like the Five Nations of pre-Last War Eberron. Expansive and detailed nations are a staple of fantasy worlds and separate fantasy from the vague unnamed kingdoms of fairy tales.

This is the Fifth Part in a series on fantasy world building

Chapters

Below are links to the other chapters in this series.

Introduction

Part 1: The Hook

Part 1.5: Factors

Part 2: Conflict

Part 3: Geography

Part 4: Races

Part 5: Nations

Part 6: Room for monsters

Part 7: Deities

Part 8: Cities

Part 9: Factions

Part 10: History

Part 11: Economics

Part 12: Culture

Part 13: Starting

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So, I was part of a great Dark Sun campaign over 10 years ago, which was 2E.  We had character trees, and made liberal use of  the combat and tactics and skills and powers books to do a little homebrew campaign.  Recently, i unearthed the folder with these old characters.  Our campaign was based around The Army of the Seven Angry Tembos, in Balic after the events of the Prism Pentad in the revised campaign.  We kept psionics from the first edition though.  I have tried to remake them for 4E, spiritually if not completely mechanically.......

Malvoleo of the Wastes, Male Half Elf Air Cleric/Fighter with the Oracle Kit.  I have re-imagined him as a Warlord first with the Elemental Priest theme, but that was not optimized enough to suit me, so I lost...

A few years ago, I woke up and realized what I thought was fantasy wasn’t the same for everyone else. Sure, people have had worlds with winged cats that could talk, elves with red cloaks, and all sorts of tweaks and twists to the basic fantasy tropes for years. And I’ve always known that things such as the Empire of the Petal Throne and Jorune lurked on the fringes, but they were strange things wholly alien to my sensibilities. You see I cut my teeth on Tolkien, Homer, Mallory, Howard, Alexander, and the rest. The old red box D&D let me play in a version of fantasy with which I was most familiar. It let me tell my own stories set in Middle-Earth or wherever because the fundamental concepts about fantasy ranged from “one ring to rule them all” to forbidden dealings

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To Start I support the ability to play a werewolf drow sorcerer, mind-flayer death knight, or even a dragon vampire. But I believe that these should not be contained within feats.

I have DM/GM and played 3.0, 3.5, 3.75(pathfinder), 4e & StarWarsRPG. From that experience base, my initial reaction is, yes it can be done. Then I paused and began thinking about the mechanics and groundwork that would need to be provided to players and I changed my mind.

To note, in all of my gaming groups, there was a house rule, if its outside of the players handbook and the Dungeom Masters Guide(v3.5), ask the DM.

Races was one of those things that my experienced players would ask about, since I have played a few, I knew very well how the Level adjustment system worked and could even build new races. But if

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