What are the Origins and Merits of Racial Abilities?

[InnaBinder]

Watch out on that 'beneficial to do so', my head went to Battlecaster bards, warlocks, duskblades, beguilers, etc in Heavy armor with no ASF, right from level 1. (or not if there's a pre-req, away from books ATM, but you see my point..)

One of the things WotC found out was armored mages really aren't that "unbalanced."  After all, they already get a bit of "medium" armor from Mage Armor.  I find it funny that quite a few cleric and wizard spells overlap, yet it's not unbalancing to give the cleric full plate armor and no spell failure.

Part of why armor isn't unbalanced for arcanists is because of stuff like Blink, Blur, and Mirror Image.  Having a 50% miss chance from a single spell tends to diminish the value of AC.

While that is true, I still don't like having the class-types with most of the best defensive cards in their hand stealing the rest of the deck.

That may be a valid fluff/stylistic concern.  It's not a great argument against armored mages from a crunch standpoint, though.

The other issue in play, to my mind, is that what relative merits various racial abilities may have in a game that assumes a 1 - 20 progression, have a very different weight if the game that's actually played is 1 - 7, or 14 - 20.  Hitting a good balance point on racial abilities, regardless of the levels played at a given table, doesn't appear to have factored heavily into WotC's design philosophy, or into TSR's before that.

[Rejakor]

Yeah, I play gishes, giving them armour just adds another layer to their already many-layered defenses.  It's not broken because spells are so insanely powerful and already fill the role of armour (mage armour, GMA, luminous armour, etc etc), and the good points of full plate are small compared to the downsides to just wearing a feycraft twilight mithral chain shirt.

Not to mention that the downsides to mithral feycraft nimble quick speed mechanus gear are pretty small.  0 ACP means you don't even need proficiency.

etc etc.  essentially armour is not a huge reason not to be a spellcaster ever so spellcasters don't really care if they get it.  Most would still go grey elf even if dwarf let them wear full plate and be an arcane caster.

[Bauglir]

My own thinking is that race should only be truly significant to a character if the player wants to go that way. Racial alternate class features or synergy mechanics or feats are a decent way to go about it; building in scaling abilities from level 1 for every race generally is not. The main exception is for abilities that will wind up being utterly useless if they don't scale, or which are too powerful at level 1 at their useful point at high levels (Dragonborn and Raptorans are excellent examples of situations where this applies).

Incidentally, heavy armor at level 1 is almost impossible due to the GP cost unless you are a wizard and sell your spellbook. I know that's really beside the point, but even so, it's really not all that broken since the penalty-free stuff is really high cost, and mobility is really important at low levels when nobody needs to full attack.

[SneeR]

How are raptoran too powerful at early levels? They can't fly until 5 HD. Before that, they can only negate falling damage.
Respectively featherfall at will, self only followed by limited fly spell, self only. Perfectly level appropriate.

I personally believe that raptoran are amongst the best-designed races. They introduce a strategy-altering ability, making you never forget what race he is. I actually think raptoran don't go far enough!

I agree that dragonborn push it a bit at early levels.

[Kethrian]

I think he was referring to the need to have their abilities scale with level instead of granting them all at once at 1st level.  If raptorans or dragonborn got everything at 1st level, they'd be too powerful.

[Jackinthegreen]

I think he was referring to the need to have their abilities scale with level instead of granting them all at once at 1st level.  If raptorans or dragonborn got everything at 1st level, they'd be too powerful.

And thus get LA.  We really ought to just take LA races and spread some of their abilities out over normal HD instead of forcing them into savage progression levels and crap.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, I was saying that if Raptorans got their full flight at level 1, or Dragonborn did the same (or got their full breath weapon or whatever), it'd be too powerful, but spreading it out over levels allows those abilities to be relevant at higher levels without being broken at lower levels.

I completely agree with the LA thing. LA is only fair for abilities that remain equally relevant at all levels, or otherwise scale. Ability score modifiers, for instance, have a pseudo-scaling feature because they stack with the ones you get normally. On the other hand, being of a weird type gets less useful as spells that affect creatures of any type start dropping out of the game as you gain levels. Similarly, most of a creature's specific abilities are only useful at a given point in the game, or use fixed numbers such that they're only viable at that point.

[Rejakor]

I dislike LA intensely.  The savage species level progression, with a lot less levels (slightly few than LA + RHD) would probably be much better for the vast majority of LA races.

[Bauglir]

I like the idea (trade off class levels for monster abilities), but I just think the execution was botched so badly that it's impossible to fix elegantly without rewriting every possible monster. Given that I'd be willing to bet the single largest mass of rules text in all of D&D is monster stat blocks, you might as well just rewrite the game entirely at that point. It'd work better if the system were designed from the ground up to account for monster races, rendering LA unnecessary (since it's just an arbitrary kludge anyway).

EDIT: The primary problems with LA are in the way the mechanics work, in which even if done properly you'd tend to wind up with a glass cannon whose special abilities are effective enough to keep up but who lacks all the miscellaneous stuff that D&D just sort of assumes you'll have at any given level, such as hit points or saving throws, and with the details of execution, where all the designers had a tendency to assign you LA based on your monster's abilities without paying attention to hit dice, effectively double-charging you.

[Rejakor]

That's why the savage species level thingies are ideal.  they give hitpoints and base saves and monster abilities as class abilities.. only bad thing is that in savage species they take a LA +3 RHD 5 race and turn it into a 12 level class, which is just fucked.  Should be a 6 level class.

It does take a bit of design knowledge about to space things out over levels to do, but the guys who wrote savage species basically kludged it and it works fine the way they did it...

They just split up the bonuses numerically, split up any signature abilities into scaling by level abilities(Minor Gaze of Death, Middling Gaze of Death, Gaze of Death), put any minor abilities (+2 spot) near the start and any binary (fast healing) powerful abilities near the end.  That's a massive kludge, and it works fine.  Honestly any DM should be able to follow a relatively simple step by step process to do that.