30 Day Challenge: Day 2 -- Favorite playable race

Since I think the plan was to complete the 30-day challenge within September (and I didn't start until today, Sept. 9th) I thought I'd go ahead and do a few more, to get closer to "up to speed."  After all, these are all pretty easy.

The question for Day 2 is to describe your Favorite Playable Race.  And the "generic" array of D&D races includes humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, half-elves and half-orcs (mostly.  A few different editions have a few different options.  That seems to be mosty the "classic" line-up from AD&D and 3e, and covers most of the list with the exception of 4e).  To be honest with you, I don't really like any of the classic D&D races, with the exception of human (which isn't really a D&D race, mind you.)  I'm tired of the "classic" D&D fantasy races.  There's not a single one of them that I care to play anymore, and frankly, not even a single one that I care to see put into another sourcebook.

Who do I like, though?  Clearly, I like humans, and the dominance of humanocentric fantasy in the literature makes that a compelling paradigm, but I do like some variety.  My favorites are humans--but touched with a little something-something, and my own homebrew setting works that way.  For example, the plane-touched races--aasimar, tieflings and genasi, are all quite nice, and I like what they bring to the table.  Tieflings were even introduced as a core race in 4e, although I don't really like what they did to them--I prefer tieflings as envisioned in earlier versions of the game--primarily 2e and 3e.  Shifters--from Eberron--are also nice; humans touched with just a bit of werewolf.  Like the planetouched races, they feel exotic, yet also human.  Mostly.

My DARK•HERITAGE campaign, then, has what are nominally races like this (at least in concept, if modified in name and mechanics.)  I've got fire genasi, tieflings, aasimar and shifters (and Neanderthals just for good measure.)

Of that bunch, my favorite is probably the tiefling.  It may be a bit overplayed as a planetouched race, and it may be prone to too much brooding anti-hero abuse by poor plyaers, but it's also got a lot of potential.  I tend to envision tieflings not as looking like their 4e versions, but sort of like Nightcrawler (from the X-men) with Darth Maul horns.  That also means that they'll look quite a bit like Graz'zt, as it turns out.  Cool.