Well, we got TPK'd last night after the main melee character got magic jarred and proceded to obliterate the rest of the party, starting with the clerics. So we spent the last half hour discussing what everyone's bringing to the table next week.
In the course of that discussion, I learned something interesting about our 89 total for ability scores house rule: that's the total after racial adjustments and before level adjustments.
Naturally, this makes races that have a total negative adjustment (like Half-Orc, Warforged, or Shifter) slightly more attractive - as long as I don't start anything above the racial maximums, this means that those negatives don't really apply for our game. I was already going to bring my Shifter skirmisher to the game, but now I'll have to up his stats first.
So, what other potentially interesting races have a net negative ability score adjustment? Anything up to LA 2 range is worth looking at; I can buy those off by our starting level. Templates are of interest as well - I'm going to write up that Dark Beguiler idea I posted about a few weeks ago as an Assassin for example.
