I'm increasingly of the view that if I never again see another elf, it will be too soon. Same goes for dwarves, half-elves and half-orcs, halflings, and gnomes. Dragonborn and tieflings too, for that matter, although less so. In fact, any and every race produced by WotC (and Paizo) for the various editions for the game should probably be dropped.
My fundamental problem, as I've mentioned before, is that these are mostly treated as a package of powers, with the flavour utterly ignored in favour of a "human with funny nose" approach (like the various aliens in Star Trek). Which, frankly, sucks.
Instead, I'm increasingly inclined to think that a setting (any setting) should introduce the races that it needs to fit its theme, and only the races that fit the theme. And, additionally, that each of those races should come with a package of traits that is inherently tied to theme - both that of the setting and that of the race. And no ability modifiers*, since that's inevitably the #1 reason for choosing a race. Ideally, the setup should be that you choose to play a Warforged only because you want to be a Warforged, and in playing said character you are inevitably pushed towards Warforged-ness.
(This is as opposed to the approach where you say, "I want to be a Cleric", then look for a race with Wis and Con boosts, and choose that... and then ignore everything about the race except those lovely lovely stat boosts.)
* Of course, there is one alternative to "no ability modifiers" - just let everyone choose whatever modifiers suit them best. So everyone gets to choose to assign one +2 and one +1 (or three +1s) as they see fit. And that way, the race isn't chosen to fit the class since it makes no difference in any direction.
Oh, and incidentally... I was pleasantly surprised on Monday at the Pathfinder game to see an... interesting choice of PC races on show, that very much appear to have been chosen out of interest rather than exploit. Which is nice.
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