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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1152763" data-attributes="member: 3146">Other people have already made a lot of the points I'm going to make but I think I can tie this into the dwarf discussion.You see, the secret of racial balance in D&D is that races can't be balanced against each other in the abstract. They have to be balanced in terms of their suitedness for a particular class. For instance, a hypothetical small race with -2 str, wis, cha, +2 con, +2 int, and +1 to evocation spell DCs and nothing else would fare quite poorly in the kind of stat comparison that is being done here. Yet such a race would be the pre-eminent choice for wizard characters everywhere? Why? Because the benefits are the benefits a wizard wants and the drawbacks are penalties that, by and large the wizard doesn't care about. There are people who play half-orc wizards and sorcerors, but they're deliberately playing against type.That's why half-elves are generally thought to be weaker than orcs or half-orcs despite the mechanical analysis showing that they get significantly more benefits than half-orcs. The half-orc and orcs benefits make them the best damage dealers around. The half-elf's abilities don't make them good at anything. (The best they can do is take elf-specific prestige classes without having the elf-drawbacks--if you want to be a bladesinger with good con, an arcane archer with bard or sorceror levels instead of wizard, or to have the heir of Isildur template, you pretty much have to be a half-elf. It turns out that the elf-blood ability is the only thing that ever makes half-elves a solid mechanical choice).Similarly, it's why orcs are a strong race. +4 strength is hard to beat for bashing heads in, making orcs excellent choices for barbarian, fighter, and melee ranger characters. The penalties to mental attributes are less important since the character probably didn't plan to have strong mental stats anyway. The light sensitivity is a disadvantage, but as others mentioned, most of the time it won't injure the PC. And the challenge of role-playing an orc? Well, that's part of the attraction to a lot of players. Against the wood elf (a very strong race in its own right), the orc's higher strength and lack of a con penalty make him the clear choice for a straightforward headbasher. (Elven weapon proficiencies are completely irrelevant to a warrior class and the elven ability to find secret doors is almost completely irrelevant to a fighter or barbarian (their search generally isn't high enough to find the doors anyway)). For an archer, the wood elf is a clear favorite but not for a front-line type.Bringing the topic back to where it began, the suitability of races for particular classes is why the 3.5 dwarves are particularly eggregious. Nearly every benefit they gain is tailored to be useful to a fighter and nearly every drawback they suffer is irrelevant to a fighter type. (Even the seemingly innocuous Stability enables a dwarven trip fighter to ignore the possibility of a countertrip in nearly every situation he has a reasonable shot at tripping his foe in the first place--and with trip being such an effective tactic in 3.5, that's not small potatoes). It's not the number of benefits that dwarves get that make them too good. It's how well they are all tailored to the fighter and barbarian classes. (With sides of Ranger and paladin if appropriate).</blockquote>

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