by PId6 » Wed Jan 26, 2011 6:45 am
Some random thoughts:
My problem with racial abilities like Improvisation is that they can be incredibly minor and not useful at lower levels, to the point that they're just forgotten completely. For your first three levels, Improvisation only grants a +1 bonus once per day, which is so minor a boost that it's not worth tracking. The fact that both aspects of the ability (uses per day and bonus granted) improve with level means that it does improve in usefulness at a fast rate, but racial abilities should really have more impact at lower levels, especially since race is one of the biggest distinguishing features of a character when he only has a single class level to his name. A solution would be creating a baseline for the effect so that the starting bonus isn't as minuscule (5 + level / 2 would make the ability a lot more interesting early on). I could see the baseline being a static value (5 is as good a number as any), or a relevant attribute (like the character's highest ability modifier). Either way, I think that racial abilities should have an impact right from level 1 so as to solidify the flavor of the race as well as provide color to characters that otherwise don't have too many ways to distinguish themselves from all the other class 1s.
Putting my ruthless power gamer hat on, when I look at that human, I immediately feel like I have no need for any other race. The choice of +2 to an ability along with the bonus feat means that human becomes a great choice for pretty much any character build, and only rarely would another race be a better choice. While I haven't gone over the other D20r races with a fine-toothed comb, just a casual glance at most of them makes me fairly certain that from a purely power-based perspective, this human is just better than most of the rest. A race like goblin, elf, or gnome just seems like a very sub-par choice when human is available. I have not looked at racial feats yet, so it's possible that they are strong enough to make up this difference, but I doubt it. I think this is a pretty important issue since having races on vastly different levels of power really does hurt variability of character.
Personally, I believe that other races should scale up to the human's power rather than scale the human down, since having different races provide more benefits helps make different characters distinct. Currently, the bonus feat is just worth so much more than most racial features, while the changeable +2 stat is just leagues ahead of the elf's +2 Dex, -2 Int. I think most other races should at least be +2 on two different stats and -2 on one, along with some kind of ability roughly equivalent to a bonus feat. This would make selecting different races a lot more viable since one isn't just superior to all the rest. Human would still be superior in flexibility, which is where it should be best at, but the other races would have their niches too and may be better in specialized builds (a goblin race with -2 Str, +2 Dex, +2 Int along with some kind of decent stealth ability [like Darkstalker] would make for a better rogue, for example, though you know that a human anything would never be too bad).
