Closed Discussion: ECL

[Ouroboros]

Another way to perhaps deal with this is ignore ECL, And still keep these races per PNP with all the abilities, Instead if someone is intentionally powerbuilding abusing the subrace just to get a mechanical advantage without RPing them properly then treat that like we do with the multiclassing rules.

Not a fan of this approach. Players, given the opportunity and incentive, will optimise. They will, inevitably, optimise away all other concerns besides winning; even at the expense of other things such as fun, enjoyment, so on. Allowing players to select any race with their fully intact PnP features will result in a disproportionate amount of PCs of highly 'exotic' backgrounds. Even if a player is accurately depicting that character in roleplay, they're still mechanically far ahead of other characters and as a result, players will have absolutely no reason to not pick those races for their statlines.

Making all races be purely cosmetic changes from a mechanical perspective means that players will be selecting races for the roleplay aspects related to them, rather than mechanical reasons. The sole reason to not take this route that I can think of is, to play devil's advocate, that it will dilute the actual meaning ascribed to playing a given race as everyone will be on the same footing. Elves will no longer be naturally athletic and swift, Dwarves robust and so on. I'd simply say that people should still be roleplaying those traditional aspects of those races, simply without the mechanical bonuses associated with them.

Either that or we revisit the entire conception of what races get, mechanically. Bonuses to your statline, skill bonuses and some weapon proficiencies are very tired ideas to me. I'd like to see more unique features, like how in tabletop Dwarven characters are immune to encumbrance slowing them down. Come up with other interesting quirks like that, which might offer some mechanical advantage but are nebulous enough that there's no clear minmax opportunities presented.

[Maiyannah]

I like the idea. Each subrace could have the same statline as the main race, but different racial abilities in keeping with it's "theme". Some of them already do this on the abilities side - spell resistance for drow, as an example.

This would also be trivial to implement. Just make a script that swaps out the racial "feats".

We'd just have to decide what we want the special ability/abilities of each race to be.

[Maiyannah]

Marking this as closed as some forums cleanup, when I get to adding actual subrace support we can discuss each individual subrace and whatnot.