Review: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (RPG) Part 2

Book One: Player Handbook
Part The Second: Player Character Races

Up to now, the player character races have been as follows:

Human
Elf
Half-Elf
Halfing
Dwarf
Gnome
Half-Orc

With D&D 4e, they've switched some stuff up, as follows:

Dragonborn - Humanoid dragon-folk
Dwarf
Eladrin (Think "High Elves")
Elf (Think "Wood Elves")
Half-Elf
Halfling
Human
Tiefling (Half-Fiend)

Just a few thoughts. Before I realized they'd split Elves into "Eladrin" and "Elf", I wondered why they had two elf-like races. But apparently they've decided to focus the Elves on their woodland nature-y side, and came up with Eladrin as the more Fey focus. That's fine. Were I to run the game, I'd have the collective slang for Eladrin and Elves be "Elves", and maybe have some people distinguish the High from the Wood Elves, and Eladrin be what the High Elves insist on calling themselves.
Obviously, another reason Elves have been split up so that Eladrin can be the Tieflings' foil. That's all well and good, except Tieflings already have a foil: they're called Aasimar, half-celestials. The foil of Elves are the Dwarves, and the Orcs.

Which brings us to the missing Half-Orc class. I've heard that one reason the Half-Orcs were scrapped was because it was assumed that they were the product of ravaging bands of human women forcing themselves upon orc males. The designers didn't really like the idea of one of their core races being implicitly the product of rape, so they replaced it with Tiefling. Sure; and Half-Orcs were never really my favorite of races; but why not replace them with, say, plain old Orcs? Bahamut knows they're more iconic in fantasy than Tieflings are.

Perhaps one reason is that Tieflings are intended to have that "TrollBabe" effect, where they're trapped in two societies but don't really fit in either. But they're not necessarily big and dumb like half-orcs usually were. Well...fine. I guess.

But let's talk about the Dragonborn for a minute. I...really don't like them for some reason. I think they look ridiculous; I think they're intended to fill a hole that didn't exist beforehand. They should be in the Monster Manual, not the Player's Handbook.

And Gnomes have been gotten rid of because they were never all that popular to begin with, and World of Warcraft has focused so much on the Gnome tinkering side that Wizards didn't want a part of it (much like Family Guy focused so much on Non Sequiturs that The Simpsons eventually stopped using them). That left the woody side of the Gnomes, which the Elves had already moved in on. So Gnomes have been sent to the Monster Manual, and probably not too many will miss them much.