Would you get behind Race levels?

[Hawke]

I would love love love it as an option. I can see a guy who is a dragonborn with some basic racial aspects that heavily focuses in on his wizard class to primarily be a wizard. Another player could be the same but spend more choices on dragonborn features (breath types? wings? resistances? skills?) at the expense of some wizarding choices.

Many races have such an iconic understanding about what they're about and their abilities that people would like to play up but often don't get as much an option to (or if they get options to, the race ends up OP compared to other races). It also allows some neat options for setting-specific race features to make elves in Dark Sun mechanically different in neat ways.

 

[TwinBahamut]

As I've said plenty of times before, I'm on board with pretty much any idea that gives the choice of race more importance to the game, primarily because it opens up more room for racial choices that are significantly different from the human baseline. Whether than is "race-as-class" or a "twenty level race", it doesn't matter as much to me, but it has got to be more important than racial choices in 3E or 4E.

I admit really don't know what you could do with elves or dwarves to make a system of leveling their races up work. Of course, I'm not really a fan of using those races as the main choices for race in the game anyways. Let those two be subraces of human, and leave the main choice of race be more significant than that. Centaurs, winged people, werewolves, fairies, and giants would be nice options.

 

[Consonant Dude]

Like, dislike, indifferent?

Dislike, because it just complicate the game when what I am looking forward to in 5e is a streamlining of DnD.

 

[Incenjucar]

I'd much prefer a generic "mutant" class that allowed you to build a monstrous character from a wide variety of concepts, rather than restricting you to a specific race.

 

[Grydan]

Yeah, put me down in the "No" camp on racial levels.

I want race to matter, continuously, as your character levels up, but I think there are far more elegant options out there for handling it than this.

I don't want to take a level in Human. My guy is already a human, he doesn't need to practice being more human, get trained to be more human, or seek out mystical tomes of what it means to be human.

The same goes for elves, dwarves, halflings, hobbits, gnomes, half-orcs, half-elves, dragonborn, tieflings, warforged, shardminds, awakened honey badgers, and pixies.

 

[howandwhy99]

I could definitely get behind Race Advancement. It's called aging. You get old, you die.

You get young enough, you die too.

All the other stuff relating to increasing abilities and whatnot, I'd go with a completely separate payment total and wouldn't call it "experience" at all. "Age points" works, though you'd start off with a base number for the standard beginning adventuring age. Plus, the whole group would need to agree to that number at start. (e.g. 16 aging points for 16 human maturation years. yeah, I'm guessing no one's looking to play unborn though).

 

[GM Dave]

Monte Cooke's Blog on racial importance is out.

It really doesn't have much of information in it but basically is a poll post. It asks whether having racial abilities that are mechanically built into the game are important or not.

There is also a bit on how much complexity that races should add to the game but no indication really of thoughts or implementation.

I guess this shows that depending on more sample polling they will think on where they feel people want races and how much mechanical support they should provide through the levels compared to classes.