Amechra
2020-07-16, 11:31 PM
So, what with all the kerfuffle about D&D's... interesting... relationship with race, and the common refrain that Variant Human is one of the strongest choices in a game that allows feats... why not go all the way?
To put it bluntly: throw the current mechanical implementation of races out of the window. Everyone is, mechanically speaking, a Variant Human - you start off with +1 to two different ability scores of your choice, a bonus language, a bonus skill, and a bonus feat. Instead, races boil down to a set of backgrounds - for example, "Elf" could be a background that hands out...
• Proficiency in History and Perception.
• The Elven language and a tool proficiency.
• A background feature that gives them the whole "trance instead of sleeping, you live for a really long time" package.
• A list of suggested starting feats.
It's a stupidly simple idea, but I kinda want to try it out.
To put it bluntly: throw the current mechanical implementation of races out of the window. Everyone is, mechanically speaking, a Variant Human - you start off with +1 to two different ability scores of your choice, a bonus language, a bonus skill, and a bonus feat. Instead, races boil down to a set of backgrounds - for example, "Elf" could be a background that hands out...
• Proficiency in History and Perception.
• The Elven language and a tool proficiency.
• A background feature that gives them the whole "trance instead of sleeping, you live for a really long time" package.
• A list of suggested starting feats.
It's a stupidly simple idea, but I kinda want to try it out.