Revised Races
From Fax Encyclopedicus
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Races are generally much more powerful here than in regular 3.5 (and even a bit more powerful on average than in Pathfinder or d20r), though they are (at least supposed to be) balanced in regards to each other. Racial features still remain a far smaller portion of a character's power than their choice of class, and the overall power level of a particular character shouldn't be too noticeably different compared to 3.5 with sources open (especially past the early levels). The main difference is that there are now a lot more racial choices for an optimized character than there were previously, and it's far more defensible to take a race like half-elf or half-orc than before (whereas previously they would only ever be selected in very specialized builds, at least for optimization purposes). | Races are generally much more powerful here than in regular 3.5 (and even a bit more powerful on average than in Pathfinder or d20r), though they are (at least supposed to be) balanced in regards to each other. Racial features still remain a far smaller portion of a character's power than their choice of class, and the overall power level of a particular character shouldn't be too noticeably different compared to 3.5 with sources open (especially past the early levels). The main difference is that there are now a lot more racial choices for an optimized character than there were previously, and it's far more defensible to take a race like half-elf or half-orc than before (whereas previously they would only ever be selected in very specialized builds, at least for optimization purposes). | ||
| - | I've also tried to emphasize differences between races so that characters of different races ''feel'' different from each other. I gave different races more distinguishing abilities that emphasized certain traits, even as I stripped away the filler abilities that rarely affected gameplay and needlessly wasted memory space. Presentation-wise, I decided to divide racial features into "primary" and "secondary" categories, with primary being the more powerful and defining aspects of a race, and secondary being the remainder. Each race gets all their primary and secondary abilities by default, so this wouldn't affect anyone who choose to be a normal human, a regular dwarf, or whatever. However, this allows for templates which trade lesser or greater racial features for those of similar power level, which I will go into detail about below. | + | I've also tried to emphasize differences between races so that characters of different races ''feel'' different from each other. I gave different races more distinguishing abilities that emphasized certain traits, even as I stripped away the filler abilities that rarely affected gameplay and needlessly wasted memory space. Presentation-wise, I decided to divide racial features into "primary" and "secondary" categories, with primary being the more powerful and defining aspects of a race, and secondary being the remainder. Each race gets all their primary and secondary abilities by default, so this wouldn't affect anyone who choose to be a normal human, a regular dwarf, or whatever. However, this allows for templates which trade lesser or greater racial features for those of similar power level, which I will go into detail about below. All racial abilities that aren't marked as ''Su'' or ''Sp'' are considered extraordinary. |
One of the advantages of having a higher power level on default races is that it allows for a far larger pool of possible races without needing an additional balancing factor (such as level adjustment). Whereas previously it might not be possible to express a race like the drow as LA +0 without stripping away most of what makes it distinct, now it becomes much more feasible. There is a lot of benefit to circumventing level adjustment because of how bad a balancing factor it is; losing levels is so crippling to a character that a race would need to provide a vast amount of power to justify even LA +1. When a distinctive racial feature actually is powerful enough that it still need something to tip the scales (like the four arms of a Thri-Kreen), I will include an optional racial class to provide the feature (more on that below). | One of the advantages of having a higher power level on default races is that it allows for a far larger pool of possible races without needing an additional balancing factor (such as level adjustment). Whereas previously it might not be possible to express a race like the drow as LA +0 without stripping away most of what makes it distinct, now it becomes much more feasible. There is a lot of benefit to circumventing level adjustment because of how bad a balancing factor it is; losing levels is so crippling to a character that a race would need to provide a vast amount of power to justify even LA +1. When a distinctive racial feature actually is powerful enough that it still need something to tip the scales (like the four arms of a Thri-Kreen), I will include an optional racial class to provide the feature (more on that below). | ||
