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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5559669" data-attributes="member: 4937">Much as the fluff of a race is campaign specific, exactly how the crunch of a race works out is campaign specific as well.  In most games an ability that allows you to get by without eating isn't as much useful crunch as it is fluff.  It may never come up because the DM is highly unlikely to throw any starvation challenges at you, and if he were to do so, in most games it can be easily fixed with 'create food and water'.   But if a DM modifies his game world so that 'create food and water' is difficult (a higher level spell), or impossible ('the five principle exceptions to Gamp's Law') then suddenly the otherwise minor ability to go without food becomes huge.Even without rules modifications, the utility of 'immunity to disease' is entirely capaign specific.  In a typical campaign, exposure to disease is a hazard associated with encounters with certain monsters and may never even come up and when it does is a minor inconvienance.  Immunity to disease is therefore a rather minor ability.  In a grim and gritty campaign situation where the DM is secretly making disease exposure checks on a weekly or even daily basis and plague ravages the nations, the exposure to disease is a regular hazard that if not avoided can severely tax party resources.In the overwhelming number of campaigns, 'doesn't age' is simply fluff because most campaigns don't last more than a few months or a few years of in game time.  But I have known games where years are assumed to pass between adventures and the campaign scope is measured in decades.  In that case, how fast you age matters very much indeed.So sure, humans are a powerful and popular race and rightly so, but its hard to compare their abilities with immunities without some context.  Absolute abilities get more and more important as the scale of the thing that they protect against expands.Assuming of course that we aren't limiting spells to spells in the SRD.  You are here assuming an optional and perhaps obscure race is balanced by the inclusion of an optional spell.  It's very hard however to say what additional material is included from one campaign to the next.   There are ALOT of 3.X hardcovers, and I'd imagine that campaigns that include every single one on a regular basis are not typical.  Most groups probably haven't invested the several thousand dollars requied to keep up with all the material even if they wanted to.</blockquote>

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