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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5205754" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sorry to be slow to respond.  I've been busy IRL.There are several things going on here and I think you need to separate them in your mind to some extent.Your stated goal is to make the PC's race relevant for their entire career. I believe this is a separate issue to virtually every other thing you mention in the post.An elf's immunity to sleep effects would be IMO a prime example of something that remains relevant throughout the PC's career.  The fact that a particular selection of rules doesn't have a lot of sleep effects doesn't mean that immunity is irrelevant to a generalized set of challenges.  In some games the power isn't relevant because the character is never subject to a sleep effect.  In other campaigns, the BBEG is the demon prince of nightmares and there are all sorts of hideous sleep effects, power word: sleep, and so forth (for an example, see Paxcreeg in the link in my signature).  You can't judge the utility of a power based on an expectation of its relevance.  You have to just look at the math.  An immunity is an infinite resource.  It cannot be overcome without a stated exception.  That means that if you have an immunity that there is a good chance you are immune to the God of Sleep as well as a sleep spell.  Incidently, I consider this a negative rather than a positive.  Full immunity goes to far, and I generally try to remove straight immunities from the game.  Typically, if I want to implement a race that is racially immune to sleep magic, I'll give them SR at something like 20+character level versus sleep inducing spells and effects.  This gives them near immunity that scales with level but removes 'infinities' and the need for special exceptions from the game.Secondly, you have to be careful with assumptions about how things scale.  A straight +1 bonus is always relevant.  It's a 5% increased chance of succees, period.  At 1st level when you have a +5 bonus and need a 15 to succeed, its exactly like being 20th level having a +15 bonus and needing a 25 to succeed.  The +1 bonus gives the exact same utility in both cases.  However, that isn't to say that a straight +2 bonus to two skills is as relevant as 1 extra skill point per level.  Obviously, the latter scales even better with level, however that +2 bonus is still relevant.  Don't assume that static bonuses have to scale with level.Where you do have to watch is bonuses that are generally rendered obselete at higher levels usually by ready access to magic.   A race that recieved bonus languages to start and a bonus to climb would find that for most campaigns without special rules limiting magic that their special abilities would decrease in utility over time (because of spells like Tongues and Fly).  In cases like this, keeping the ability relevant might require scaling up the bonus over time.  For example, learning a new language every level or recieving a bonus to the climb skill equal to the characters BAB would remain relevant even at higher levels in a way that one extra starting language a +2 racial bonus to climb wouldn't despite these being nice starting benefits.Now, back to your central issue, which is making the PC's race more relevant over the entire course of play.There are two basic issues here.First, EL +0 races bring a small enough set of bonuses that you don't have alot of room to work in.  It's very hard to provide alot of benefit in a racial template and still stay EL +0 and balanced with existing EL +0 races.  If you bring alot of flavor in a race and have truly relevant abilities the tendancy is to actually push EL +1.   One solution to this is rebalance your game so that races like human (or whatever your default race is) are actually EL +1 races.  Under this model, everyone starts out with a free EL +1 racial template.  This gives you more room to work out a flavorful and relevant set of bonuses.Second, regardless of the racial template, they tend to be quite front loaded.  In the case of PC races, they are entirely front loaded.  This makes it very hard for them to feel relevant at higher levels.   One solution to this is to grant new abilities to the race that arise only when the character has gained sufficient levels.  That is, you can make races work more like a class, with new powers gained at intervals as the character level increases.  If you were to go that route, my recommendation to you would be to create 8-10 racial feats for each race and give each race a bonus racial feat at 5th,10th,15th and 20th level (or whatever progression you prefer, but ideally the number of slots is only a fraction of the available options).  This has the dual advantage of allowing the player to customize his character and ensuring that each race maintains a unique flavor.   And it resolves the prior issue as well, since you can give players a package of small abilities without bumping up the effective power level of a starting character beyond what you'd expect for a 1st level character.   I'd air on the side of making the racial feats minor - the goal here is mainly flavor and player interest not greatly increase character power.I'll be happy to help with crunch once you decide on an approach.</blockquote>

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