Excerpt: Racial Benefits

[Derren]

It's that the critter is turning his head/body and breathing a continuous stream of (insert breath weapon here) all around him.

That would result in a half circle and not in a square. Or at least it normally would but you can neverbe sure with 4Es Cuthulu geometry.

 

[Deep Blue 9000]

I'm not sure if anyone's brought this up before or not, but I had a "Eureka!" moment...

It's not that the breath weapon itself (dragonborn or dragon) is perfectly square. It's that the critter is turning his head/body and breathing a continuous stream of (insert breath weapon here) all around him.

It's all in how you visualize it...

That would still be a cone.

 

[eleran]

Group Insight and Light Step are pure suck. Unless skills are massively improved in 4e for what they can do in combat, then these abilities are total fail. I see little reason to take these above other, far more powerful, feats.

Perhaps the idea is that it doesn't always have to be about the power.

 

[eleran]

My first impressions? Not good. It seems to me that what they did is say "hey, lets take a bunch of those little bonuses, like +1 dodge against giants, make them feats people have to purchase, and then pat ourselves on the back for making races "important" beyond 1st level!"

You're right of course, except that you're wrong. No one HAS to purchase even one of these feats.

 

[Just Another User]

Two things:

1) I hope characters will have a *LOT* of feats. Between "multiclassing", racial feats and who-know-what-else they seems to be used for many, many things in 4e.

2) I wondetr if racial feats can be retrained, too "yes, I knew how to enlarge my breath weapon, but I forgot how to do that after I learned wizardry". Talk about memory problems

 

[Derren]

You're right of course, except that you're wrong. No one HAS to purchase even one of these feats.

Which doesn't change the core statement.
It looks like WotC made the race "more important" by removing all their boni and special abilities and made them purchaseable at a later level.
This doesn't make the race more important but instead only requires you to spend feats for something you got for free in 3E.

 

[hong]

But that will break D&D
because flying
is such a ultra powerful ability
and you can't expect
that in a world with many flying
monsters and
spells which make you fly
soldiers carry a ranged weapon
!!!!!!

It makes a special kind of sense as free verse.

 

[eleran]

It makes a special kind of sense as free verse.

Sadly it is too verbose for haiku

 

[eleran]

Which doesn't change the core statement.
It looks like WotC made the race "more important" by removing all their boni and special abilities and made them purchaseable at a later level.
This doesn't make the race more important but instead only requires you to spend feats for something you got for free in 3E.

Except for the fact that that buttload of abilities each race (except Humans) got at first level happened whether you wanted them to or not. This version is about the character concept.

Besides, why do you care? You won't be playing 4e.

 

[LowSpine]

We don't know how you purchase racial abilties yet. They might come from a different buying pool than class abilities in the same way paragon abilities are bought separately from class abilties. So you might not have to trade off class stuff for racial stuff.