Racial abilities & stereotypes.

[Lanefan]

Why? I don't mean that in a snarky way, I'm actually curious about this line of thought.

If I want to make dwarves resistant to enchantments, why do they need a penalty to go along with it? It isn't a balance issue, because races just need to be balanced against each other. If I give every race a few bonuses and specialties, and none of them penalties, they are still all balanced. They are all viable options.

Except Humans, being the baseline, in theory should get neither bonus nor penalty; meaning that if other races get benefits without cost Humans - in strict mechanical terms - become a less attractive option.

So what are your reasons for this?

If every race gets bonuses then sure, they're still balanced - but setting the balance level at X+Y rather than just X only serves to needlessly increase the overall power level by Y. So why not just set it at X - the unmodified Human baseline - and set all the other races up to balance against that via a bonus/penalty system. And sure, you could easily set it up such that certain races are better than Humans at certain classes but to counter this they should be worse then Humans at other classes or even - dare I say it - unable to be those classes at all. (Dwarven wizards, I'm looking at you)

Disclaimer: I somewhat prefer a Human-centric campaign, which is much tougher to achieve if Humans are the mechanically weakest race.

Lanefan