All-human play - replacing core races

mak

First Post
Our group has played in an (almost) all-human campaign world for the last 5+ years, so when 4e came out, replacing the races was the first thing to do:

ADMC / CharacterCreation

Why all-human? Well, technically not all human... We play sword & sorcery style, where the player characters and society as a whole is human (pseudo-historical even), but many adversaries are monsters. So no monocultural "races" that end up being rip-offs of human cultures and are played as humans with rubber ears.

Comments?
 

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I like them a lot! :D
I thought about something like this before, but you've done all the work ;)
I was watching Firefly yesterday and I was just thinking "they're all humans*, and they're so diverse". It's not that I don't like eladrin and tieflings, it's just I think there are too few humans in most groups (they are the "dominant" race, aren't they?). An aproach like yours might "fix it", though I'm not sure if I could run humans like yours along the other PHB races... could I?

* not sure about River, though ;)
 


I like them a lot! :D
I thought about something like this before, but you've done all the work ;)
I was watching Firefly yesterday and I was just thinking "they're all humans*, and they're so diverse". It's not that I don't like eladrin and tieflings, it's just I think there are too few humans in most groups (they are the "dominant" race, aren't they?). An aproach like yours might "fix it", though I'm not sure if I could run humans like yours along the other PHB races... could I?

* not sure about River, though ;)
From game balance point of view the aptitudes could very well be run alongside standard races, that's pretty much what they are after all. But this similarity might become a problem, as some aptitudes correspond almost directly to a race. So putting the aptitudes and races together will essentially create pairs of rules-wise very similar choices (with the exception of blatantly fantastic elements like breath weapon or teleport, which I have removed exactly for their blatant "fantasticity"). That's why the aptitudes are more of a replacement than addition to the PHB races.

In case they are not obvious, here are the inspirations for the aptitudes:
brave - dragonborn
disciplined - human, mostly
quick - almost direct copy of elf
sinister - tiefling, with some halfling mixed in
social - half-elf, some human & eladrin mixed in
tough - almost direct copy of dwarf

Halfling and eladrin were killed and their stuff distributed among the others to fill in for abilities that had to be removed to make the aptitudes look outwardly human
 

I like it.

For my own game I have a currently evolving 'build your own race' template that mostly lets you make anything that I use for my 'Cthonic Superhero Zombie Apocalypse' game.

It doesn't let me make Dwarves though, I haven't really codified how to get disadvantages and the somewhat weaker features Dwarves have to compensate for the speed loss.
 

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