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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PowerWordDumb" data-source="post: 1040690" data-attributes="member: 8614">The way I see it, rather than reading through Gold elf, night elf, high elf, wild elf, jungle elf, etc (ditto for the other races), you would instead have one basic elf race.Applied to that would be different templates which add or subtract skills, feats, ability modifiers, whatever makes sense for a character from that particular background.Presumably there's something about living in a jungle which makes jungle elves different in that way, right?  Wouldn't that also hold for halflings, or dwarves?  Rather than having fourteen variants of each race, have the races simplified and build the variety into the optional templates instead.Mechanically it's not that different.  It just exposes what they're currently building into the subraces and filling books with as mechanics that can be applied more generically.  This lets me pick and choose the mechanics I want to allow or tweak, and build my own flavor text as necessary.  Don't like the idea of wild elves, but maybe some nature-loving nomadic dwarves appeal to you?  Great, just throw the "wild" template onto the dwarf instead!This is probably more a pet peeve of mine as I read several settings, and discerning just how or why this type of elf is different from that type of elf is beyond annoying after several years of it.  It's even worse now that all the human subraces are being introduced and I have to re-read race descriptions several times before I can get a mental image of (for example) the Fhokki as norsemen, the Dejy as american indians crossed with asians, the Kalamarians as Anglosaxons, the Brandobians as Normans and the Reeanarians as Italians (or whatever), when what they're really trying to convey is that one type is more barbaric, one type is more nature-oriented, one type is more diplomatic, etc.  It would be much easier to just come out and say that instead of burying mechanics under piles of not necessarily descriptive flavor text.This isn't a slam against Kalamar - it's just the poster child for subraces causing me endless headaches in trying to capture the "feeling" of what they're about and thus my ability to form a mental picture of them.</blockquote>

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