Eldariel
2009-08-13, 08:30 PM
I'll get this out of the way right off the bat: when I play a fantasy game, I want the freedom to be any of the fantastic creatures in the world, from a lowly Human to a mighty Dragon. This thread is meant for brainstorming on how one could do both on even grounds; I'm working on some ideas here, but I could use some help with fleshing out the details. I have an idea but only rough outlines of it to work on.
D&D 3.5e does the "lowly Human"-part really well (especially with the growth to being not-so-lowly Human), but leaves much to be desired with regards to playing a Giant, a Dragon or even a Drow - Level Adjustment as written sucks and you can't even play such a race in a game starting from level 1 without some weird workaround where you aren't a fully empowered member of your race before you've taken a certain number of monster levels.
While I find that Level Adjustment sucks, I find racial hit die to be even worse: Instead of taking a bunch of levels in some class, you take a bunch of levels in "your race" to become of equivalent power as a character taking levels in class. In spite of you having no class levels, you have a base attack bonus (which is supposed to represent your fighting skill; apparently The Tarrasque is the most skilled fighter in the realms in spite of never having actually trained fighting!), base save bonus and a bunch of hit dice for all sorts of weird effects.
I find that for monstrous races to work as player characters, racial hit dice need to be removed from the game. Every level 1 character needs to have the same BAB, base saves, skill cap and so on. It's simply impossible for monstrous characters to be of the same class level as the other characters if they already have "levels" when they start play, and to me the perfect system would have all characters get levels at approximately the same pace and be near the same level and similar level of power at the same level.
That is my central idea - make the game work so that no creature inherently has extra hit dice. Sure, they can be bigger and badder versions of the same monster, but I find that should be presented with stat increases. They could also be more experienced and cunning versions of the same creature, which would give them levels, be it in monster classes or character classes, but the idea that some races just start on level 7 doesn't really work out for playing the said races.
This generates some issues, to be sure - most importantly:
- Monsters would not start out with a ton of HP (a Giant falling in as many hits as a Human is unplausible to say the least).
- Monsters would not by default have a bunch of feats (though that may be a good thing - easier to give them levels without a feat overdose)
- Spells derived off HD would become much stronger than right now (Cloudkill, Sleep, etc. would hit a whole lot more targets than they do at the present)
- Level Adjustment would still need to be dealt with.
Starting creatures with their Con as HP (or VP if using that variant, as I intend to) could really fix #1 combined with some racial Toughness-type abilities that just notably increase the HP some races gain from the 1st HD.
This would enable an adult Giant or Dragon with no combat skill to still have a ****ton of HP while not needing a ton of Hit Dice for that. Mayhap racial feats that give multipliers to the Con-to-HP conversion could help too.
Racial bonus feats easily solve the second though standard races may require some boosts to gain in some other areas (such as bonus feats or extra skills or some static To Hit/Save/Whatever bonuses) as a compensation to having 4 times less HP than their Giant party companion.
The third one obviously requires just reworking spells that have HD-dependent effects. Luckily such spells are rather rare and reworking them shouldn't be much of a problem (though there's a large number of low-level ones). Most likely making them HP-based (or possibly Max HP-based) like Power Words would be the easiest without changing much.
Fourth...I still have no idea. Basically, this wouldn't make all races balanced vs. each other, but it would mean that all races would start gaining class levels at the same point (right from the offset) and would gain BAB, feats, skills and all other level-derived benefits at the same rate, which I think would go long ways towards making playing non-standard races work out right alongside the standard races.
But yeah, uh, any ideas to either continue this idea or to present an alternative? My fundamental problem is that Stone Giant Barbarian 1 has much, much, much better ears than Human Barbarian 1 just 'cause it has more "levels" even though both are level 1 characters and Giants aren't exactly known for their hearing.
I find that while the Stone Giant should be able to take much more hits (higher Con) and hit much harder (higher Str), it shouldn't have inherently higher skills in wielding a sword (higher BAB) nor inherently higher skill rank caps just because of its race. I find that race shouldn't really affect those beyond stat adjustments - paragon individuals should just have higher stats rather than more hit dice.
Then the more experienced ones should have levels (more experienced animals could have an animal class precisely like the present animal hit dice...just, I don't think standard ones should have more than 1), because that's what levels represent. Keeping this true for all races would make playing monsters much, much easier. Is my logic faltering somewhere?
D&D 3.5e does the "lowly Human"-part really well (especially with the growth to being not-so-lowly Human), but leaves much to be desired with regards to playing a Giant, a Dragon or even a Drow - Level Adjustment as written sucks and you can't even play such a race in a game starting from level 1 without some weird workaround where you aren't a fully empowered member of your race before you've taken a certain number of monster levels.
While I find that Level Adjustment sucks, I find racial hit die to be even worse: Instead of taking a bunch of levels in some class, you take a bunch of levels in "your race" to become of equivalent power as a character taking levels in class. In spite of you having no class levels, you have a base attack bonus (which is supposed to represent your fighting skill; apparently The Tarrasque is the most skilled fighter in the realms in spite of never having actually trained fighting!), base save bonus and a bunch of hit dice for all sorts of weird effects.
I find that for monstrous races to work as player characters, racial hit dice need to be removed from the game. Every level 1 character needs to have the same BAB, base saves, skill cap and so on. It's simply impossible for monstrous characters to be of the same class level as the other characters if they already have "levels" when they start play, and to me the perfect system would have all characters get levels at approximately the same pace and be near the same level and similar level of power at the same level.
That is my central idea - make the game work so that no creature inherently has extra hit dice. Sure, they can be bigger and badder versions of the same monster, but I find that should be presented with stat increases. They could also be more experienced and cunning versions of the same creature, which would give them levels, be it in monster classes or character classes, but the idea that some races just start on level 7 doesn't really work out for playing the said races.
This generates some issues, to be sure - most importantly:
- Monsters would not start out with a ton of HP (a Giant falling in as many hits as a Human is unplausible to say the least).
- Monsters would not by default have a bunch of feats (though that may be a good thing - easier to give them levels without a feat overdose)
- Spells derived off HD would become much stronger than right now (Cloudkill, Sleep, etc. would hit a whole lot more targets than they do at the present)
- Level Adjustment would still need to be dealt with.
Starting creatures with their Con as HP (or VP if using that variant, as I intend to) could really fix #1 combined with some racial Toughness-type abilities that just notably increase the HP some races gain from the 1st HD.
This would enable an adult Giant or Dragon with no combat skill to still have a ****ton of HP while not needing a ton of Hit Dice for that. Mayhap racial feats that give multipliers to the Con-to-HP conversion could help too.
Racial bonus feats easily solve the second though standard races may require some boosts to gain in some other areas (such as bonus feats or extra skills or some static To Hit/Save/Whatever bonuses) as a compensation to having 4 times less HP than their Giant party companion.
The third one obviously requires just reworking spells that have HD-dependent effects. Luckily such spells are rather rare and reworking them shouldn't be much of a problem (though there's a large number of low-level ones). Most likely making them HP-based (or possibly Max HP-based) like Power Words would be the easiest without changing much.
Fourth...I still have no idea. Basically, this wouldn't make all races balanced vs. each other, but it would mean that all races would start gaining class levels at the same point (right from the offset) and would gain BAB, feats, skills and all other level-derived benefits at the same rate, which I think would go long ways towards making playing non-standard races work out right alongside the standard races.
But yeah, uh, any ideas to either continue this idea or to present an alternative? My fundamental problem is that Stone Giant Barbarian 1 has much, much, much better ears than Human Barbarian 1 just 'cause it has more "levels" even though both are level 1 characters and Giants aren't exactly known for their hearing.
I find that while the Stone Giant should be able to take much more hits (higher Con) and hit much harder (higher Str), it shouldn't have inherently higher skills in wielding a sword (higher BAB) nor inherently higher skill rank caps just because of its race. I find that race shouldn't really affect those beyond stat adjustments - paragon individuals should just have higher stats rather than more hit dice.
Then the more experienced ones should have levels (more experienced animals could have an animal class precisely like the present animal hit dice...just, I don't think standard ones should have more than 1), because that's what levels represent. Keeping this true for all races would make playing monsters much, much easier. Is my logic faltering somewhere?