Detect Greater Balance – A Critical Review of Homebrew Race Creation

[thoroughlyS]

Detect Greater Balance

The Musicus scale for homebrew races has existed since the infancy of 5e, and has been immensely helpful to the community. However, its lack of granularity and sparse explanation of trait scores cause it to be imprecise. Detect Balance refines the units to be more granular, but similarly lacks effective explanation of traits. In some cases it is very unclear why certain features have higher scores than others.
This guide is designed to be an expansion on the foundations originally laid by Musicus and further refined by Eleazzaar, SwordMeow, and Zagorath. I reevaluated the full list of features and extrapolated more values to aid new homebrewers. I also made careful documentation of my thoughts and processes to provide greater insight into the scores.
Balancing races is still a combination of art and science—no system of numbers will tell the whole story.



The document also includes my personal houserules for most of the official races, which attempt to make every race have some kind of niche or general viability. Please leave any comments or critiques of the system or my fixes.

[thoroughlyS]

I have recently returned to this spreadsheet and included all currently released races, subraces, and variants except for those introduced in a Magic: the Gathering themed supplement, and tiefling variants which only change the ASI and spells (as they would receive the same score as the Asmodeus tiefling).

I would really appreciate any feedback on the scores presented, especially if you believe I have over or undervalued a trait.