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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5203593" data-attributes="member: 82106">At the risk of derailing the thread races don't have a "power" so they can't have a powerup. Only individual characters can be measured against each other (to some extent). A character made using a race with a choice of 2 stats for one of its bonuses isn't ANY more powerful than a character made using a race without those choices.There are also significant problems with trying to tack a flexible +2 onto existing races. Take dwarves as an example. What other stat are you going to give them? Dex, Int, and Cha don't exactly strike me as thematic for dwarves. That leaves Str. Allowing a +2 to Str for dwarves, given their existing racial features and available feats, would be quite unbalanced. It could be done IF you were starting over and designing the game from the ground up, but that's NOT what Essentials is doing. The same argument can be made for every single other race to one degree or another. Put the "human problem" on top of that (which giving them 2 +2's doesn't solve as again it would require deleting another feature of the race to balance out) and you can pretty rapidly conclude that existing races are not going to get flexible stat bonuses.Flexible stat bonuses really just aren't NEEDED anyway. The "classic" races have plenty of support that gives them a large amount of flexibility already. They are also perennial favorites (or why would they still be in the game, that's why they're classic). I think the main reason that the newer niche races have flexible stat allocation is that they simply aren't all that likely to be played much otherwise. By giving them a wider range of classes they are optimum for these new races get a chance to be a bit more appealing and see a bit more play than they would otherwise.Anyway, this gets back to the whole point, Essentials IMHO isn't intended to obsolete the existing rules in any way. If you make an Essentials dwarf he's going to be EXACTLY a legal dwarf in PHB1/2 etc. He may have a few powers, a class feature, or a couple feats that don't exist now, but that's no different than what happens when a new power book shows up. Anything beyond that starts to get quite ugly for a couple reasons. First of all what does WotC do with organized play? Either they have to ban Essentials material from official play, which isn't going to happen, or they have to deal with people combining stuff in things like LFR in unbalanced ways because deep changes are going to mean balance won't exist with characters that draw from BOTH Essentials and the core rules. Secondly is exactly that, what happens when you start combining the old and the new if they are slightly different designs? It just won't work. If its hard to balance a new thing NOW then how much harder would it be if it had to balance out between two slightly different versions of the game? Its just NOT going to happen. Heck I'll bet MY Avatar on that!</blockquote>

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