[RPG] list of playable races with a fly speed

The D&D 3.5 FAQ inherited the reputation of its predecessor, the “Sage Advice” column in Dragon magazine. The Dungeons & Dragons product line has long had two channels for rules corrections and clarifications: errata and Q&A. Rules errata are edited into the rulebooks themselves and published in later printings. The Q&A channel was originally a regular column written by Skip Williams in TSR’s in-house magazine. Over time, the game evolved and grew, products changed hands, and Williams moved on from Dragon to the core design team. Wizards of the Coast shifted Q&A to their customer service department, which released selected questions as the FAQ.

The common problem with the Q&A articles, both “Sage Advice” and the FAQ, is that they were written by second parties with no better judgment than a good DM or StackExchange contributor. Yes, Williams and his successors were employees of the game publisher, and hypothetically had inside knowledge, but in practice they mostly worked from the rules and first principles like the rest of us do. Overall, their rulings were decent, but they also published quite a few screamers. As a result, online forums and Usenet groups like rec.games.frp.dnd regarded the Q&A folks as no more reliable than a smart player, and rejected arguments that used “Sage Advice” or the FAQ as authorities on the game.

Thus, there’s a bit of confusion between folks who reasonably expect an official rules document to be authoritative, and folks who’ve been in enough online rules debates to realize that you need to take the FAQ with a lot of salt — mostly because it wasn’t written by anyone with any kind of special authority or oversight or quality control.

I spent about an hour looking, but I can no longer find the article, interview, video, or tweet I'm looking for. However, I'm certain that at some point there was a discussion with the designers about how much a given PC race's vision type counted for balance, and the response was basically, "none at all." In other words, the game designers did not rank PC darkvision as being significantly more valuable than normal vision for balance purposes, and treated it as a flavor component of each race.

I know a lot of players disagree, probably because every player seems to have a self-sufficiency reflex. And the Darkvision spell seems anomalous until you realize that it's 2nd level because it's specifically for when the narrow uses of darkvision exactly come into play. It's the same reason Knock and Spider Climb are 2nd level. They're not needed all that often, but when they are they're very useful.

Keep in mind that if you're following the game's rules that complete darkness is dim light to a character with darkvision, then characters with darkvision wandering around without a light source is only slightly less stupid than it is for characters with normal vision (-5 to passive Perception and disadvantage on Perception rolls). Such a party is all but guaranteed to trip every trap in the dungeon, and tasks like reading are likely going to be flat out impossible unless the print is particularly large. Even a party of Dwarves should be using a light source in an unfamiliar tunnel. Though light sources can be seen by other creatures, sound is often a bigger giveaway about the presence of other creatures.

Bottom line is that, from a design perspective, it's apparently not worth very much. At that level, I would grant an additional language, vehicle proficiency, or tool proficiency. Alternately, you might grant perception advantage in certain circumstances (e.g., Dwarves and Rock Gnomes underground, Elves and Forest Gnomes in the wilderness, etc.).