The Gaming Den

We know there's some bad 3.5 races out there.

It's really puzzling why the designers seemed to have a lot of hate for the stuff they were turning out.

So, in an effort to straighten out some of the races I actually care about/like, I'm just going ahead and taking a stab at giving them features people actually care about.

To start off, the SRD:

Half-elf
More solid than an elf, more twinkly than a human. Half-elves combine the features of both worlds, in varying ways.

-Medium Size
-Keen Senses: +2 to Spot and Listen
-See the Other Person's Point of View: +2 to Bluff and Diplomacy
-Low-light Vision
-30 feet per round base speed

-Upbringing: As a mix of two races, you get a favorable mix of biology, upbringing, and natural inclination.
Choose three of the following:
-Elven Weapon Proficiencies
-+2 Dex
-Human bonus skill points
-Human Bonus Feat.


Rationale: Half-elves get a bad deal in life. They're classically the only one of their kind growing up, and they either grow up too fast among elves, or too slow among humans.

Also, trying to average out elven and human traits just doesn't lead you to much impressiveness, so you might as well make a half-elf a semi-customizeable race, letting you mix-and-match features to get something you find interesting.

Eberron Races

Seriously, these guys disappoint me, as a whole. My ranking of them is:

Shifter (suck)
Warforged (Less suck)
Kalashtar (Unsatisfying)
Changelings (I like 'em!)

My notes so far are:

-Let Shifters 'shift' at will, let them scale/buff their shifting trait by taking a temporary hit to mental stat or stats. Also, remove the inherent mental penalties and give them total ability mod of +2 Str, +2 Dex. Also, let them be pretty. That picture of a female Shifter in the Eberron Campaign Setting is just heinous.

-Warforged could take a Str bonus and lose the Wisdom penalty. Don't have to take that dumb composite plate if you don't want to. Maybe a scaling natural armor bonus. Let them heal naturally.

-Kalashtar. These guys really just don't live up to the potential of their flavor text. If you tell us about a mystical martial art developed by the race, at least have the decency to give us some feats or a prestige class for them, instead of feat suggestions.

Changes:
- +5 to Disguise pass as a human.
- A 1st-level Psionic Power as a psi-like (read: Spell-like) ability. Or, alternatively, telepathy out to 100 feet. Concentration is always a class skill.

Changelings: You know, I'm down with these dudes. They're a blast to play, especially in a skill-heavy, city-street game. For me, though, they inspire Psychic Robot's complaint: If these guys are so cool, why are the rest so lackluster?

On the half-elves: While I definitely agree that half-elves need some shinier things, the "choose three of (stuff from elves or humans)" is too much - it makes the half-elf completely overshadow its parent races.

Choosing both elf traits and the human bonus feat, and removing common traits...

Elves have:
Immunity to magical sleep (a total of two spells unless I'm missing some)
+2 to saves vs. enchantment effects
+2 to Search
Tingly Secret Door-sense (a flavor ability and subject to the DM actually having secret doors around)

Half-elves have:
+2 Constitution (compared to the full-elf)
+2 to Bluff and Diplomacy
A bonus feat
More favored class options (assuming unchanged from the base half-elf since favored class isn't listed)

The only circumstances I can think of where a standard elf would be equal (let alone better) are times when you really want a good will save and don't care about hit points or when Search is a vital skill. That means full-elves will be preferred as anti-trap rogues, but not much else.

Comparing the half-elf to humans is even worse, as the half-elf gets everything the human does and more (even down to favored classes and bonus languages).

I'm not sure what can be done about that - perhaps choosing two from the list, and unable to pick both of the human traits? Refactoring both elves and humans as well?

Maybe "Choose one trait from each side" would be more appropriate...

Edit: 3.5 Half-elves don't get an extra feat like humans do.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/races.htm#halfElves

They do get more elfy stuff than I'd remembered, though.

Query: Why do we need a half-elf?

A_Cynic wrote:Query: Why do we need a half-elf?

Answer: Reply hazy, try again later.


Truthfully, out of tradition, if nothing else. It's a dumb reason, but people seem to have gotten used to having half-elves around, so if someone wants to play one, I'm not going to tell them 'no' (unless my setting has no elves at all, of course). I'd just rather have them playing a half-elf who's got some stuff you'd care about.

just let them choose two traits from the list. don't say it has to be one from each side. all it means is that they favor one side more than the other for some god-damned reason.

so this guy has elven profiency and a +2 to dex. awesome.

and this guy did the human bonus feats and skill points -- okay cool.

wait this guy has bonus feats and a +2 to dex - awesome still.

now this dude, he has to be a douche, and go and be all like I want to have the weapons and the skills -- jeez, I guess that's also awesome, I guess.

eh, you get the point

If you get the human skills and feat though, you're a Human with extra skill bonuses and low-light vision - better in every way. Are we trying to balance to the existing races here, or are we going the Pathfinder "bump everything up a notch" method?

Ice9: you are correct about that.

But pathfinder really didn't bump everything up a notch.
~

Let's look at one particular aspect of the Half-elf now.

+2 dex.

Why exactly is this important? You might say the elf heritage. Oh, But isn't the rationale that they don't fit into either side as much.

I'd rather think the versatility factor of being both the half-breed who got raped (yes, I'm going with that angle) by the human father and having the mommy who wants to sail off to new zealand gives the half-breed something different.

how about choose a +2 to any stat?

too powerful?

A_Cynic wrote:Query: Why do we need a half-elf?

Need? We don't. End of discussion. Why do we still have the half-elf? As Maxus said, Tradition.

It doesn't come up much in my games so I have no problem just saying that the baby ends up as one (and only one) of the parent races.

Elf + Human = Human OR Elf

Human + Orc = Orc OR Human

etcetera

Throw in some percentages for how often a human/elf pairing makes an elf and there you go. Yes, I know it doesn't follow RL genetics but neither does building a castle on a 40+ ft thick stable cloud formation make sense compared with RL physics.

As always, YMMV.

A_Cynic wrote:Query: Why do we need a half-elf?

Agreed with the above: we don't. Play a brawny, round-eared elf or a pointy-eared tree-huggin' human, dammit.

Lots of people will point to Tolkien as the source of the Necessary Half-Elf. Do you know how many official, sanctioned, author-recognized Elf/Man pairings there were in the entire, multi-millenial history of Middle-Earth? Three. How many children did each pair have? One.

Can we talk about fixing the shifter some more? The mechanics are weak, but I love the concept. My only problem with unlimited shifting is that there's no reason for a shifter to not walk around shifted all day...which invalidates the very concept of "shifting." Maybe it needs to keep the limited uses/day but just be better.

Talisman wrote:Lots of people will point to Tolkien as the source of the Necessary Half-Elf. Do you know how many official, sanctioned, author-recognized Elf/Man pairings there were in the entire, multi-millenial history of Middle-Earth? Three. How many children did each pair have? One.

It's also worth mentioning that each of the Tolkien half-elves specifically had to choose whether to live as a human or an elf.

Mind you, as with so many things, the half-elf tradition didn't originate with Tolkien, his form is just the most popular. Celtic and Norse mythology both present some version of the same thing, and those half-types usually do have a mix of their parents' traits.

The answer to the half-elf dilemma would be to have elflike humans and humanlike elves.

Apply certain traits of one to the other, but a complete half-half crossbreed would be culturally independent (unique?) and.. well.. an anomaly.

Keep in mind that Aragorn's kid would be mostly elf thanks to his own not-so-pure-human heritage with Arwen's 3/4 elf - 1/4 human traits.
How would one handle that in D&D rules?
An elf with select human traits.

.. and maybe some half-orc. Euggh.

WHO THE FVCK CARES? There are far more interesting races that can be put out there than another half-breed. Seriously. You want a half-elf. Play an elf and say it looks kinda human. Or play a human and say he's all tall and hates them dwarves. Seriously.

Looks like the consensus is: fuck dem halfbreeds.

*Thread Necromancy*

Seeing as how Tome material is getting expanded, any have any idea for how to make Shifters (Tome of Trees) and Warforged (Book of Gears) worth it?

The easiest thing I could figure for Shifters is they get to pick some kind of scaling bonus, and then get racial feats to improve it or something. But they really need to be buffed up. And they need to be prettified; that iconic picture of the female Shifter is just heinous.

Warforged...I don't know, I feel like there are indeed worthwhile ideas in the Eberron books. I liked the Mithril/Adamantine armor feats, and some of the PrCs (Like that one which gets runes engraved upon them to increase spell effects), but the base class chassis is...overzelous. Not to mention the two Mental score penalties. But they should be scaling, I guess.

I guess a basic change would be "Knock off the inherent armor, and make it so they can have armor crafted to fit onto them, for a reduction in penalties. Or they could just, you know, wear regular armor."

Update: Have a Shifter worked up. Will have it posted here after I sleep

I can't think of another race that comes with a scaling bonus, so I don't know why you'd want to make one now for the Shifter. The issue I had with them was that their big thing was so very very limited. Remove the bullshit shifting ability and give the various shifter sub-races at-will things like natural claw attacks, 10' blindsense as a swift or move action, a secondary bite attack, bonus base speed, or whatever. So long as they're minor options on the same level as 'immune to sleep, bonus on enchantment saves, low-light vision, auto-detect secret thingies' we're good. Shifting was an interesting idea, but it would work much better as a scaling racial feat (or set of them) that did useful things.

I don't even know where to begin on warforged.

TarkisFlux wrote:I can't think of another race that comes with a scaling bonus

Dragonborn and Raptorans have abilities that scale with character level, I believe.

As a player of warforged, I have to say that I find the Body feats a mixed blessing. Yeah you get some good AC and some neat feats that tie into your body type, but the downsides suck.

Namely being forced to sit around and wait for your upgrades to be done, rather than swap your armour for something better. You seriously are stuck there for 8 hours a day while it's done. Lame.

I was initially unimpressed with 4e's warforged, but I've warmed up to them. They lack an AC bonus, but they can fuse armour to their bodies like a meatbag would wear it. Oh, and they can imbed weapons and items and be all like Inspector Gadget.

I dunno, maybe that would be a better solution. Frankly, composite armour is total bullshit. It's being stuck with leather armour forever. And to use normal armour and all that, you need to take a feat. To forgoe normal WF benefits. Argh.


Also...The Kalashtar already do have a psilike ability. A lvl 1 even. Not really sure why the disguise mod needs to be boosted. They're nearly human already, and the penalty for disguising as another race is only -2, so their racial bonus cancels it out. Hell, since the differences are so small, you could probably claim the +5 modifier in the Disguise skill itself.

Regarding their martial art thing, I'd have gone with some feat letting you use Perform (Dance) to replace attacks sometimes. Sorta like that Snowflake Wardance in It's Cold Outside. Or something.

Shifter

Shifters are the descendants of lycanthropes who bred with mortal races, and then their descendants bred with each other. The end result is a jumbled mass of traits and determining which are expressed is a genetic crap shoot that'd be almost impossible to diagram even if people knew about dominant and recessive traits. A shifter may not have much in common with her parents, what with their natural weapons looking completely different--or by having a completely different set of abilities. In any case, shifters are mortals who are more or less human (or could look elvish or dwarvish or whatever. I don't care) apart from some animalistic traits, which vary from shifter to shifter. One may have a brutish face, fangs, pointed ears, and excessive body hair, while another could me more or less human, with funny-colored eyes. Whatever. Point is, Shifters are incredibly diverse, and, if you stack them together, they're found in a wide variety of roles.

One of the peculiarities is that as they grow more powerful, shifters express a weirder amalgamation of traits normally, and the difference becomes only more pronounced when they shift. As said before, it's a total crap shoot here. A level 16 shifter could be a bestial combination of several traits, or he could be almost human, apart from claws and teeth and maybe ears and a tail. Again, whatever.

+2 to one of Str, Dex, Con, or Wis, and -2 to any stat.

Medium size

Base speed 30 feet

Shifting: You have the blood of many creatures running through you, thanks to your lycanthropic ancestors. You can shift into your beast form as a swift action, gaining the bonuses described. Staying in your beast form is more problematic. You can do it for a number of rounds equal to your character level + some bullshit stat (like Con or Charisma or Wisdom; choose one and stick to it) each time, and you can do it a number of times a day equal to 1/3 character level + some bullshit stat (same stat as above). If your beast form provides you with an enhancement bonus to the stat which powers your shifting uses and duration, you don't get extended time, nor do you get extra uses. I could see you salivating at the thought, you munchkin powergamer!

Rules:

As a shifter, you get the Shifter feat at character creation. Here it is:

Shifter [Racial, Heritage]
“I have the blood of werewolves in my veins. Or maybe were-cats of some kind. Or was it bears...Look, my ancestors were definitely were-somethings, and that's what matters.”
This feat scales to your character level.
Benefit: Pick a Shifter trait or some kind of bonus (those coming later).
1: Pick another shifter trait or bonus
6: Pick another shifter trait or bonus
11: You know the drill
16: Dammit, do I have to repeat myself?

Here's a rough guide, subject to revision when someone comes up with something better:

Natural weapons increase their damage at levels 4, 8, 12, and 16. For penetrating DR, they are considered to be magic weapons with an enhancement equal to 1/3 your character level. And they have an actual enhancement bonus like you're using Greater Magic Weapon. Merry Christmas.

Likewise, if it increases a stat or whatever, it increases it by 1/3 character level—on top of any racial bonus, if applicable. These are enhancement bonuses.

Movement modes gained while shifting increase speed by 10 feet every 1/3 character level. Flight also increases its maneuverability at level 4, 8, 12, and 16

Shifters can take monstrous feats and gain the benefits while they're shifted, if they care enough.

Here's the traits (Probably going to need new names or something)

-Beasthide—Con, Natural armor
-Cliffwalk—Dex, +20 foot climb speed
-Dreamsight—Wis, you may always converse with animals and magical creatures.
-Brute—Str, 1 slam (1d6 base)
-Longstrider—Dex, +20 speed
-Longtooth—Str, Bite (1d8 base)
-Razorclaw—Str, 2 claws (1d6 base)
-Shiftwing—Dex, +30 foot flight speed (clumsy)
-Truedive—Con, Swim speed 30 feet, can hold breath a long time. (This one definitely needs work)
-Wildhunt—Con, and Scent (lame, needs to be replaced)

Shifter bonuses:
-You can have one of your beast traits (select which when you take this) active all the time, with all the bonuses thereof. Side note: They appear as what's most convenient. Therefore, if you pick up a pair of bat wings (Shiftwing), you don't have your arms webbed over and all that; you grow a pair of bat wings out of your back and hold something and fly at the same time. Therefore, excessively large claws will be retractable—even if you make your character into that werewolf from that old NES game and have claws 3 feet long—and other inconvenient anatomy will be able to be turned on and off as a free action.

-You could totally get yourself blessed, or unhallowed, or bestow properties on your natural weapons, or whatever. There probably should be some kind of ritual for this...

-Your natural weapons are not considered secondary, even if you're using another weapon.

-Some more to come when something decent enough is thought of.

Warforged. Hm. I suppose one way to get around the upgrades is to make them modular. As in, you can take the arm from one and fit it onto another's shoulder slot, while the original arm was being upgraded.

But here's the basics of what I was thinking:

+2 Str, +2 Con, -2 Cha

Medium size and normal base speed and all that.

Take a long look at that Living Construct type and see what can go and what can stay. Probably let them be healed for full value from Cure spells.

Gearheads: Warforged have gear brackets on their bodies. How is this different from ordinary adventurers? Not terribly much, except for making it harder to disarm them of the weapon or whatever. They can also remove body parts and replace them (within reason; they can replace things like hands or arms or legs or feet, but not things like their heads or their entire torsos) with other things. The major gear bracket is their Armor bracket. They can have some armors (usually plated or heavy ones) specially made to fit into those brackets--providing the same protection but for less ACP and ASP.

This way, it'd give a 'forged some flexibility. And it'd let them get gear made while they're not there. And, yeah, I'm aware that replacing appendages doesn't look that possible for the usual Warforged. I'm ignoring that, though.

Here's my stab at it.

Warforged
OK, so having robots in a fantasy setting is admittedly somewhat ridiculous. However, let’s not forget we already have established an accepted place that swarms with such creatures. In Mechanus, ‘forged do not stand out at all.
One other problem is that they get –2 Charisma and Wisdom and 5% spell failure. This means that even when you are allowed to play a robot, you are still discouraged from taking certain classes.
So here are the new Warforged, created by Modrons for tasks requiring greater flexibility than they themselves have – in another words, Modron-made PCs.

- Medium Size
- 30ft. movement
- Outsider Type (living construct and law subtypes)
- Darkvision
- +2 Constitution
- Customization: Warforged can count as being of any race for purposed of meeting the prerequisites of feats that can be explained as mechanical changes, such as Wings of Evil, Extra Arms or Large Size Fiendish feats
- +2 bonus on Craft and Knowledge (the planes and arcane) checks
- Favored class: any
- Automatic languages: Common, Modron
- Bonus languages: Abyssal, Aquan, Auran, Celestial, Formian, Ignan, Slaad, Sylvan, Terran.

Living construct traits (revised)
—Immunity to poison, sleep effects, paralysis, disease, nausea, fatigue, exhaustion, effects that cause the sickened condition, and energy drain.
- No need to sleep, eat or breathe
- Living constructs are ageless
- Living constructs can be targeted by effects that affect constructs (e.g. Repair spells),
- An appropriate Craft skill can be used instead of Heal

I like bits of yours better than my hazy idea. And I totally missed that 5% spell failure when I was going over Warforged traits, which I would have left out anyway.

Customization is very cool. The fluff is intriguing but requires every Warforged to be from Mechanus and know things about there. I'd say that Eberron has the possibility of them being a free agent without Modrons sending the Maruts and other Inevitables after you.

Also, how do they pick up the feats? It'd seem like that they're modified by someone (or themselves), which would bring us back to the "Your character can't go anywhere while someone only works on him for 1,000 gp work a day. And 1,000 gp is chump change."

Of course fluff is just fluff - mutable and setting-specific. I went for that one b/c the standard cosmology has a place swarming with living constructs that has no PC race, but has a niche for such a race, so it's logical to make them come from there - a Mechanusian counterpart to Aasimar and Tiefling. I was writing this so somebody can just pick it up and convince their DM to let them play it with a reasonable chance of success as the DM would have to admit he has issues with the standard cosmology.
I am in no way opposed to, say, a Warforged made by a mortal Wizard, the thing is - somebody must have made it. There will be a creator-creation relationship.
Mechanics - wise the things that connect what I have written to Mechanus are:
- +2 to K(planes) - easily swapped for some other type of Knowledge
- Modron language, which IIRC is composed of clicks and whirrs and as such cannot be spoken by non machines so I am not quite sure about removing the machine language from the robot race
- Outsider type - I was using the Tiefling as balancing point and if having a fiendish grand grandpa is enough not to be targeted by Charm Person, so is being a robot. At the same time Outsider (native) and Undead (Dark Minded, Unliving) are the only types that give you about as many or more vulnerabilities than immunities - and "living construct" already gives them a lot of the latter
- Law subtype - actually, I'm not not quite sure why I added that

So, revised version

Warforged
- Medium Size
- 30ft. movement
- Outsider Type (living construct and mortal* subtypes)
- Darkvision
- +2 Constitution
- Customization: Warforged can count as being of any race for purposed of meeting the prerequisites of feats that can be explained as mechanical changes, such as Wings of Evil, Extra Arms or Large Size Fiendish feats
- Reprogramming: you can use the retraining rules even if your fellow PC can't. Alternately, you can spend a month of time to retrain as if you levelled
- +4 bonus on Craft checks and Craft is always a class skill for you
- Favoured class: any
- Automatic languages: Common, one other
- Bonus languages: Abyssal, Aquan, Auran, Celestial, Formian, Ignan, Modron, Slaad, Sylvan, Terran.

*Mortal: as "native" but doesn't determine your plane of origin

Living construct traits (no change)

—Immunity to poison, sleep effects, paralysis, disease, nausea, fatigue, exhaustion, effects that cause the sickened condition, and energy drain.
- No need to sleep, eat or breathe
- Living constructs are ageless
- Living constructs can be targeted by effects that affect constructs (e.g. Repair spells),
- An appropriate Craft skill can be used instead of Heal

Character Backgrounds available to Warforged are:
Modron creation
You were made to help fulfil the will of Primus. For some reason, right now it means you are to join an adventuring party. They say you don't need to know why. They always say that.
You have a faint Law aura and have a perfect memory giving you the Sound Imitation ability. Your second automatic language is Modron, allowing you to talk with gear spirits and other machines. Also, Modrons might have some missions for you in the future, but right now you are supposed to adventure, gaining power, knowledge and magic items to be more useful in the future.

Mage's assistant
You were created to be a helping hand for a spellcaster. You know more about magic than most people assume you do.
You have +2 to Spellcraft and Knowledge(arcane) checks and these skills are always class skills for you. You can also cast Detect Magic as a spell-like ability at will. If your creator is still alive, you probably are executing his orders or hiding from him after you escaped. If he's dead you are most likely fulfilling his last will.

Mage's bodyguard - mechanics of Experimental stock from RoW, the rest as Mage's assistant

Veteran of The War - Eberron Warforged have this background