Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6439567" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you have your work cut out for you.In BECMI, at low levels, demihumans were basically strictly superior to their human counterparts.  There were also a notable lack of character concepts, in that BECMI didn't really put an emphasis on character exploration or melodrama as a focus of play and didn't need diverse character concepts.  Halflings just were thieves.  Dwarves just were fighters.  Elves were just fighter/magic users.  Each demihuman race had but a single representative character type, and arguably a single personality, because really, personality wasn't that important to the default game.Worst, I don't agree that this made demihumans feel different or play different from humans.  They didn't really have a lot of unique abilities, just a few extra abilities tacked on, on top of those of a single class.   Very little forced you to play from the perspective of say a being that would live for 1000 years and was intimately in a relationship with nature, or of an earth dwelling craftsman with strong family ties, obsessed with the making of things to the point of seemingly autistic in human terms, and more at home underground than on the surface.   Instead, in general, my experience with BECMI was the demihumans were basically indistinguishable in how they played from other classes.  They didn't feel different at all, nor did I observe players typically treating them as different.   Beyond that, you are fighting a strong historical trend against restriction in racial build.   Even such mild attempts to force similarity and tropes upon a race as 3e's favored class were more widely ignored than observed.   The truth is that very few players want to play that way, and you'll have to build a case for it that justifies any kludginess observed in your rules or have unhappy players in the long run.For my part, I'm building house rules off of 3.0e D&D, and it strengthen racial tropes I enforce favored class, 3e's racial modifiers, minimum ability score requirements to enter a class, and a wide selection of homebrew selectable racial traits which can be taken initially or as feat replacement.   But none of that is nearly as important has forcing the player to think about the race as being an alien thing, and giving the race a unique social role.Personally, I think your entire approach is wrong if you think "The Elf is probably easiest, since they're originally a Fighter/Mage."   If Elf is just a fighter/mage, then you won't accomplish your goal of having Elf feel unique.  To make Elf feel unique, it must actually be unique and not merely a group of combat powers.  And if everyone is using gestalt classing, that will be even more true, since you'll be able to make 'elf' in at least an approximation by multi-classing.  And if you try to import 1e gestalt classing straight up, you are likely to have huge balance issues that will need to be worked out.  I've been working on a racial paragon class for my 3e homebrew for a half-dozen years now and coming up with a solid design is not easy.</blockquote>

Verification