NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9411728" data-attributes="member: 2067">If we were to list out the more intrinsic traits, we'd have something like...<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Size. Size should have a meaningful impact on the capabilities of the character (this is Difficult for Reasons, but this is a wish list).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Locomotion. Walk speed (which should be more than 5' different if we want an impact), but also does it fly or swim or maybe even teleport or psychic hovering or whatever</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Body Shape. Do you have wings or a tail or are you centauroid or ooze or what, really? Does your shape give you natural weaponry, perhaps? Does it make some kind of locomotion hard for you, like walking on land?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Senses. If you are especially perceptive or can see in the dark or have telepathy or whatever.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Resistances. Are you resistant to poison or fire or sleep or whatever? That's intrinsic.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Special Action. What can you do during a fight that lets you assert your identity for a round? This is not skill or training, but intrinsic. Dragonborn have dragon breath. Tieflings cast dark magic. What else? (this is your racial power equivalent)</li> </ul>Those are all big and impactful and aren't something you can learn. No halfling raised by dragonborn would learn how to breathe fire. Being raised by aarakocra doesn't give you wings. Maybe we say that we need certain requirements in order to be a PC and we just live with it (is it medium size, the ability to travel on land, the ability to assume a humanoid shape?), being OK with not having Tiny or Large PC's unless we opt into them the way we'd opt into merfolk or ceptu or flying?And then you have more cultural elements. Bonus proficiencies. Groups you can influence. Places you have contacts. These are swappable, and everyone (even your bog standard human!) should get to choose this. This sounds like 2014 backgrounds by and large.Maybe sometimes the difference between a full species and a subspecies is more culture than nature (hill dwarves and mountain dwarves share their size, locomotion, body shape, senses, resistances and their special action, but have different proficiencies and contacts?), other times it's more nature than culture (hill dwarves and mountain dwarves might be different sizes (one small one medium!) or maybe mountain dwarves have better darkvision or maybe they have completely different special actions because one of them is tough to kill and the other one is given Moradin's blessing which allows them to enhance armor during a fight). This doesn't solve the problem so much as outline the shape of it, though. There's better and worse senses, better and worse resistances, better and worse sizes.</blockquote>

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