D&D 5E Halflings are the 7th most popular 5e race

[Paul Farquhar]

Race as class forbids you from a huge variety of potential stories. It would go over like a lead balloon today to tell people that their elf clerics and dragonborn bards and gnome paladins are verboten because "elf" is a fighter-wizard mashup, "dragonborn" means being a magic-eating sorcerer-paladin* exclusively, and "gnome" has to be a kooky, quirky illusionist and could never, ever, ever serve a deity as a pious warrior.

Not necessarily the case. Race-class does not have to duplicate the effects of a class. Multiclass is a thing, and could be the default. Choose if you want to gain a level in your species or in your profession.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not necessarily the case. Race-class does not have to duplicate the effects of a class. Multiclass is a thing, and could be the default. Choose if you want to gain a level in your species or in your profession.

So, can your first level be Bard (or whatever)?

Because if not that's still a pretty significant limitation, and if so, it doesn't really sound like "race as class" anymore. Just...classes only available to certain races. Which are also unpopular but not as unpopular.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So, can your first level be Bard (or whatever)?

Yes. Two levels at character creation, one for species and one for profession.

 

[Mecheon]

The Warcraft RPG, of all things, had this thing were certain atypical choices, like Abominations (Warcraft's flesh golems) or Ancients (Treants) had a seperate class that gave them the bits and bobs of their archetype, before switching into something else

Mind, it did have the problem of being locked into those side classes until maxed out, which were sometimes good (Dragon whelp), sometimes quick to allow for multiclassing out of it (Centaur, dryads), sometimes basically made a class and were worth it even if you couldn't multi-class out of the 20 something level (Keeper of the Grove), and then you had the stuff that was just big and couldn't multi-class out of until Epic Levels. Which... Warcraft didn't have.

 

[Oofta]

Yup, just cut down on the lore, which people are going to change to suit their own settings anyway, and you can fit in a lot more species.

Variety without variation and uniqueness isn't really variety. I may tweak how a specific race works in my world, but I want a starting point for both me and my players.

 

[James Gasik]

Yes. Two levels at character creation, one for species and one for profession.

So like how Palladium has RCC's and OCC's?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So like how Palladium has RCC's and OCC's?

I made no claim to originality!

 

[Lanefan]

So, can your first level be Bard (or whatever)?

Because if not that's still a pretty significant limitation, and if so, it doesn't really sound like "race as class" anymore. Just...classes only available to certain races. Which are also unpopular but not as unpopular.

While I've mostly moved away from the bolded over the years, I'm starting to realize there's a good reason for it and will likely move back toward it a bit in the future.

That good reason is that if certain species can't be certain classes then you don't need to worry about balancing some otherwise-broken class-species combos. Mages are supposed to, as their primary weakness, be spindly fragile little things; but if you allow high-Con species such as Dwarves to be Mages that otherwise-built-in weakness largely goes away.

Without bans like this I'd probably have to harshly chop back on the Dwarven Con bonus and various other bonuses, which only serves to make the species all more similar, and thus blander. No thanks.

 

[Neonchameleon]

While I've mostly moved away from the bolded over the years, I'm starting to realize there's a good reason for it and will likely move back toward it a bit in the future.

That good reason is that if certain species can't be certain classes then you don't need to worry about balancing some otherwise-broken class-species combos. Mages are supposed to, as their primary weakness, be spindly fragile little things; but if you allow high-Con species such as Dwarves to be Mages that otherwise-built-in weakness largely goes away.

Without bans like this I'd probably have to harshly chop back on the Dwarven Con bonus and various other bonuses, which only serves to make the species all more similar, and thus blander. No thanks.

That's a slightly different matter. You're talking about classes being unavailable to certain races. There's a difference between "No dwarf can be a wizard" and "Only elves can be bladesingers"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

While I've mostly moved away from the bolded over the years, I'm starting to realize there's a good reason for it and will likely move back toward it a bit in the future.

That good reason is that if certain species can't be certain classes then you don't need to worry about balancing some otherwise-broken class-species combos. Mages are supposed to, as their primary weakness, be spindly fragile little things; but if you allow high-Con species such as Dwarves to be Mages that otherwise-built-in weakness largely goes away.

Without bans like this I'd probably have to harshly chop back on the Dwarven Con bonus and various other bonuses, which only serves to make the species all more similar, and thus blander. No thanks.

Seems to me the better choice is to have mages that don't become stupidly powerful simply because you picked up +2 to a stat. That you build the game so it starts out with better balance than "simply picking two of the default options together is broken."

The great irony to me is that this exact argument comes from many folks who claim to loathe balance based arguments because they limit player choice and make worse, less interesting games. Yet the alternative, here, is apparently that (for balance reasons!) we must...limit player choice, even if it means a worse, less interesting game.

If balance is going to matter either way, shouldn't we try to cut problems like this off at the pass?