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Not to be too real-world, but that the "race you come from isn't relevant to your abilities" is literally the basis of the American Civil Rights movement over the last seventy years. And in fiction, including fiction that does nothing to challenge this notion, we still see different characters...

Gambling is probably part of it. Even if you know it probably won't help, the chance that it just might is always alluring. But there's also the "clicky clack shiny plastic" bit. That said, you tend to have to be pretty unlucky to not get at least one good score. So it's not that much of a...

This. Character creation rules are for characters. NPCs do not, in any way, shape or form, need to conform to character creation rules or be "legal characters".

I get the feeling you didn't read to the end of my post.

An I the only one who thought of Nodwick when reading this thread? Regardless, if you don't like the idea of the heroes doing so much heavy lifting, arrange for em to get a minion (or multiple minions) who follow em around to carry stuff.

Now do Spartans and Athenians. Or Norfolk military tradition and New York Bohemian tradition. Or New York low-class and New York high-rollers. Or Jocks and Nerds. Social groups at any level, be they tribes, villages, city-states, or nations are not mono-cultures. If you go into this...

I chose "totally freeform", but what I actually have in mind is something like all (species, culture/background/whatever-you-call-it, class) having a bonus, and then during character creation you choose one. The consequence is probably close to "players just assign it wherever they want", but...

Now that I've had more time to think on it, I remember something I came across (I doubt it was an original idea of mine) years ago. If the PCs, and basically everyone they were coming across, was going to be using guns... then just swap out longbows and crossbows for guns. You get the flavor...

Not quite what was being asked, but I think rules/guidance for scaling technology up and down would be interesting. What changes should be made to weapons/armor/equipment in a bronze-age setting, vs colonial-era setting, things like that. That said, if you take away stuff or make it "weaker"...

My #1 point was don't assume racial or national monocultures, so no. My main point had nothing to do with crunch. That said, the entire idea of splitting race into "ancestry" and "culture" is basically off-loading some crunch onto a "backgrounds, but earlier in life", so it shouldn't be...

Having read most of the thread now... I like the idea of ten level classes. A few of the 5e base classes sort of do that anyway, and it would encourage design that attaches a "cap stone" at level ten, which would be neat cause a lot more folk reach 10 then 20. Also would mean that not all...

My ideal "redesign" would be to break down classes into a level-based classless system, and then re-present the classes as "kits". So folks that want to stick with the simpler option have a pre-made class have that option, but someone that wants to combine rage with arcane casting as a custom...

And now that I'm caught up with the thread... Nations aren't cultural monoliths. Nations are made-up of many different cultures. So folks shouldn't confuse a "middle-class from the dominant ethnicity" giving a bonus to helicopter-moming with "everyone in the nation is like that". For that...

I'm reminded of Shadowrun, actually. For those unfamiliar, in character creation in Shadowrun you assign a "rank" (A to E) to five categories, and that determines how many points you have to spend in that category. So one PC might rank their species high, which gives them access to troll...

As a rule of thumb, if a statement is ambiguous, you look to context and surrounding language to determine meaning. And the surrounding context is that when there are limits to how often you apply an ability (be it per long rest, per short rest, per turn, etc), the PhB is unambiguous. So at my...

Oh yeah, combat in Star Wars d20 was quite different to D&D. But that's part of my point. If you want a more "realistic" system, it's one design to look at. But a more "realistic" health/recovery system while keeping high fantasy combats? Competing design objectives. That said, I did...

Anytime I come across the "I want to add more realism to hit points!" argument, I think back to the old d20 Star Wars RPG, which separated HP into "wound points" and "vitality points". Vitality was basically what we normlly characterize "HP" as. Luck, flesh wounds, stamina, etc. In most...

I've seen the output from machine learning. It's far more likely to warrant an intelligence penalty.

As noted early in this thread, balance only matters in-so-far as it effects niche and spotlight and things like that. That said? It's much easier to not step on each other's toes if someone isn't shooting themselves in the foot and splattering their toe all over the place. And that said, I've...

A few weeks back the party was going into some sewers to look for were-rats. One of the PCs (let's call him D) thought he could play his pipes of haunting (or something like that) to scare them, making them reveal themselves. (No, D's player didn't double-check how the item worked before he...