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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WaterRabbit" data-source="post: 7540914" data-attributes="member: 2445">I am not clear on what you think balance is.  It seems to be just a personal prejudice in this case.  The best way to determine balance is by seeing what races are the most and least played.  In your game you pointed out that gnomes and halflings the players show no interest in.  QED, these are the most disadvantaged races in your group.  From my experience, given the choice, the variant human is overwhelmingly chosen over the standard human -- even by players that don't like playing humans.  The ability to chose a feat of choice at 1st level makes variant humans the best class right out of the gate, especially in a human-o-centric world that most D&D games are run in.Without the variant human, half-elves are the most chosen. But more important to this is the setting the races are in and how they fit into that setting.  In the game I run, Darkvision, would be worth 1/2 a feat at best since I apply the rules on it very strictly (i.e., disadvantage on Perception checks in total darkness).  In a game in which the DM is more liberal with how the darkvision rules and if darkness plays a huge part of the game, then darkvision is worth a full feat.  However, in most games there is almost always a character that needs a light source and eventually that person acquires something to put them on balance with Darkvision.  At that point Darkvision becomes almost worthless.To me, balance is about how much one aspect of the game dominates at the table.  The only race that I see as "unbalanced" are the Yuan-Ti (and perhaps the Aasimaar).  Otherwise I don't see anyone of them dominating play or having the other players resentful of them.IMHO, if you are going to tinker with the races, it should be in the context of the setting you are going to run.  So much of what is useful and not useful is very setting dependent that added as a variable, it will be difficult for us to suggest anything useful to "balance" the races in the manner you would like.</blockquote>

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