Critique my House Rules

[Fanaelialae]

I did actually think about that, but I'm concerned with impacting the average rather than only the outliers. I think the -4 to str is pretty easy to justify, even with point-buy, because of the modification to item weights for small characters. Strength is generally not used in a relative fashion in D&D (if it was, larger creatures would not have dramatically higher strength scores the way they do), so it makes sense to penalize strength but give a racial bonus for certain types of strength checks that involve relative rather than absolute strength.

Why not just give them disadvantage on strength checks involving absolute strength? Then you don't have to worry about giving them a bonus to checks based on relative strength such as climbing, where they should arguably be better than medium-sized creatures because of muscle to weight ratio. After all, they may be child sized but small sized races seem to possess physiques more closely resembling that of adults.

Given that small races typically get a Dex bonus which pushes them towards finesse weapons anyway, coupled with their inability to effectively wield heavy weapons, and I'm not all that convinced that a strength penalty is necessary for preventing them from making strength-based attacks.

However, I'm obviously having a harder time justifying the con penalty because of just how many different things in impacts with no way to get around. I still like the idea of keeping it and just giving better features, so I'm going to keep thinking about that. However, barring that, perhaps dropping it altogether and instead lowering HD by 1 size is the most prudent choice.

For a frail homebrew race, one of my DMs limited the size of their HD to a d8. It steered that race towards classes like rogue. If you wanted to play a barbarian of that race you could, but given that your d12 HD would become a d8, it wasn't an option anyone chose to exercise.