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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5829797" data-attributes="member: 32536">Balance is important, giving races powerful abilities is important, and approaches like level adjustments or level limits are a terrible solution. What is needed is an entirely different approach.I think an important part of the solution is recognizing that the choice to be human should have really huge benefits to it. Not silly stuff like bonus feats and such, but rather core aspects of humaness. Things like "can hold weapons" or "can wear armor" or "can write" are racial advantages inherent to being human. Races that are significantly different from humans may not be able to do these things, and would get a different set of bonuses. The difficult part is figuring out how to quantify and balance this sort of benefit.I'm a fan of separating racial choices into two broader categories: species and sub-species (species and race, or major race and minor race also work, but I'll avoid those for clarity's sake right now). Humanoid would be a species, with humans, elves, and dwarves all being sub-species of human. Something like talking animals would be another species, with talking dogs, talking cats, and talking bears all being sub-species of that. Dryads and nereids could be sub-species of nymphs. Fire and ice giants could be sub-species of giant. Different species would have a large pool of major mechanical differences from each other, while sub-species would only have a small pool of minor differences between each other. Sub-species could be differentiated from a baseline like most races are differentiated from humans now, but different species are completely different choices from the ground up.It is something of a complex and potentially problematic system, but it has its interesting elements. For one, it can be dialed. One campaign may only use species variation and ban sub-species variation, while another may do the opposite. It allows for both small and large differentiation to exist.The main problem is figuring out what abilities are in the realm of "humanoid" and what characters need to give up from that pool of abilities in order to access the other species...</blockquote>

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