Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6475109" data-attributes="member: 1465">I see you've already decided you don't need racial classes, so my comment is late...I was going to suggest two possible routes to follow to design racial classes, depending on what are the non-racial classes allowed in the game.If you were going to have only Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, and Rogues, then you could easily pilfer abilities from excluded classes, e.g. look into the Druid and Ranger and re-use some of their features for the Elf class. I think [MENTION=92511]steeldragons[/MENTION] have already provided excellent suggestions about this!If you want to use all PHB classes, then you need more unique features for the racial classes, and you need to design them yourself. I would still look around among generally available options (feats, spells, subclasses etc.) in case I would be willing to remove them from general availability and turn them into racial class-only features. Anyway, I'd try to focus on a few key stereotypes for each demihuman race, and design (or re-use) features around them:Elf - archery, arcane magic, swashbuckling, enhanced perceptionDwarf - underground exploration, resistance to magic, weapons knowledge, resilienceHalfling - bravery, stealth, luck, socialityThis could be true in some games, but it is a completely flawed idea for others. First of all, classes don't necessarily represent or correspond to society roles. Before 5e, society roles were not explicitly represented mechanically (this occasionally created problems in some games, e.g. a lot of people not being able to believe that the head of a religion didn't have to be a high-level Cleric). In 5e we have backgrounds to actually represent your role in society, not classes (although in the final PHB the idea got slightly watered down when they replaced Commoner with Folk Hero). Classes more properly represent your role in the adventures. If you want, you can then have a fantasy world where "Wizard" is a profession, but this is not the universal truth.That said, a lot of games of D&D just don't care for PC's society roles at all. Originally D&D is a game about adventures, and that's how the classes were always designed. An "Elf" class is a perfectly valid concept, when the game is only about adventurers, and that "Elf" is simply a short name for "Elven adventurer class". It doesn't mean all elves belong to the Elf class, just that all elves adventurers do. And if the fantasy world being used in this game has Elves living secluded in their mysterious cities, Dwarves living closed in their mountains, and Halflings rarely leaving their shires, it makes a lot of sense that the few who are seen in the adventures are adventurers.Note that this is not necessarily what I prefer personally... I'm just saying that the assumption that all demihuman races need to have fully-defined societies similar to humans, is not the only way. And it actually might even work against the otherwise very good purpose (IMO) of trying to make races more interesting by being different.</blockquote>

Verification