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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2496916" data-attributes="member: 3051">I like the concept, but I just look at it differently, I guess.  Yes, the PHB Half-Elf and Half-Orc are a bit bland, but I blame that on the fact that the designers wanted them to always fall halfway between.  And really, the "pure" races simply aren't diverse enough for that to work.  So, we get a Half-Elf that's just like a Human or just like an Elf, depending on which ability you're looking at; this doesn't give much motivation to play one, because most people either want neat abilties and stat mods (in which case you'd go pure Elf) or they want the feat and skill points of the Human.If you really want to make this work, then, I only see two good options:1> Add more unique abilities to the mixed races, even if they're not very powerful.  For instance, the Half-Orcs in my last 3E campaign were the ideal trackers; they can take "Minor Scent" as a Feat, and later can take the full Scent.  They have both low-light vision and darkvision.  And their favored class went to Ranger, but that's more of a style thing.  Then, we added a custom Half-Ogre for the more brute-force types (somewhat similar to the Half-Giant from the new PsiHB, but a bit more brute-force, and ECL 0).We also explained this by adding a new ability to Humans, called "Thin Blood".  Basically, the reason that Humans can crossbreed with practically anything is that human blood is "recessive" with regard to magic; with any other combination there'd be an internal incompatibility.  On the bright side, this means that magic can't be purely anti-Human (no Humanbane weapons) because there's nothing magical to identify as "enemy".  On the downside, we added more enchantments specific to each other race, to make those Elf Blood and Dwarf Blood abilities worthwhile.  But, this meant that we didn't have to worry about making rules for Elf/Dwarf crossbreeds.2> Make the pure races more distinct.  For Elves, what if their stats were (+2 DEX, +2 CHA, -2 CON, -2 STR)?  Then the Half-Elves could be the old (+2 DEX, -2 CON), making them distinct from both extremes.This is actually close to what we did in the homebrew I play now.  Our pure races are VERY different, so that we can have a wider assortment of half-breeds.  In fact, most players seemed to gravitate to these, probably since most people tend to shy away from giving their character too many penalties, regardless of the number of offsetting bonuses.</blockquote>

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