Are there some real, credible statistics about how popular non-human races are among players?

What's a non human? If it can understand language and learn from humans, it turns out it's man.

Coco the gorilla is a man?
Alex the African Gray parrot was a man?

>Not playing a human
You fucking Xeno Heretic

... Well. At least I'm not the only person who voted for Orc. That's reassuring.

Human master race reporting in

D&D isn't the only system. Plenty of system have races that are actually better than humans.

Why have non-human races when you can play different humans?
Why have humans when you can play different non-humans?

Is the human/non-human interaction really so important you have to incorporate both into the setting?
I don't think so.

...

Why not have both?

Nah.
You see, my dear user, it's elementary.
If you have both humans AND non-humans, even if both are diverse, then players will automatically sympathize with humans and humanoid races.

There are two solutions to this problem.
The first one - and the more safer one - is to remove the non-human races and make the human races just as diverse as in reality, so the players have no idea who to sympathize with - after all, all humans are just animals in human's clothes, are they not?
The second one - and the more riskier one - is to remove the human races and makes all the non-human races alien enough so that players have no idea who to sympathize with - after all, they have no idea what those strange weird creatures are capable of, do they?

Why it is important that the player has no one to sympathize with?

Because literally every fantasy setting already does that.

So they don't trust their first impressions. You'd be amazed how much people are prone engaging into tribe/pack thoughts.
"Oh, they look/think just like me, surely they must be like me in all aspects also! After all, "as default, unless stated otherwise", am I right?"

So I take away the default option, where they have to make a choice.
Whenever there is an interracial conflict, they will have to choose between two options they don't sympathize with (or subverting it in their own favor - also a suitable and valid third option).

There should never be a default option.

And to add onto this, the most interesting conflicts and decisions are made where none of the sides involved can be sympathized with.

One of the sides can be sympathized with: "Let's help them!".
Both sides can be sympathized with: "Let's make them befriend each other, so no one has to lose!"
Neither of sides can be sympathized with: "...Well, shit. I kill everyone/take the thing for myself? Except it's risky as fuck, and they will likely temporarily work together to try and fuck me over, so what the fuck am I supposed to do?"

Oh for fuck's sake.

And not fixing what isn't broken is bad because?

How should I vote for half-elf? Human, elf, or other?

>Humans in a massive lead
Too be expected, though I'm a bit surprised dwarves don't have more votes.

We don't have many Dwarfism Fuck Yeah threads over here.

No, but Veeky Forums always struck me as a board that liked playing as Dwarves more than Elves.

I always pick Human.

Unless there are giants who aren't ugly, for obvious reasons.

Name one that is mechanically worse for playing humans.

The closet you could get is statistics from MMO I guess.

He did asked for credible statistics though.

Shadowrun 4e. You want to be an Elf, an Orc or a Troll.

Wh40k.

WoD

OH JAYSUS MY FUCKEN EYES

Because everyone here has autism. I'd never play a game with anyone from here because I don't trust myself enough not to punch them whenever they open their mouth.

to be fair the image looks like shit even ignoring the glaring inaccuracies

I don't like fantasy settings with a bunch of near-humans. Personal taste.

Well, open, wizards noticed that players enjoyed tieflings and dragonkin enough to make them standard book races before half orcs and gnomes, which didn't see much play.

Who's the artist? I recall seeing a similar artstyle, a LOT, in Joker Quest.

Use the search function. Look at the filename.
>not recognizing tanakas samefaces

But Mages are the best :^)

That sure is a needlessly DnD-centric poll.

Oh wow. I've just found an immense amount of porn of the main girl. Now that's awkward.

As always, there are probably just a few dwarf-posters who need to feel important. It's always like this.

If there's anyting we can learn from US politics it's that whoever speaks the loudest is in the right, therefore Dwarf-posters must trump Elf-posters