Iziak's page

Racial Traits

A gnome player character can pick 2 of the follow racial traits upon character creation:

* Weapon Familiarity: Gnomes treat any weapon with the word “gnome” in its name as a martial weapon.
* Obsessive: Gnomes with this trait receive a +2 racial bonus on a Craft or Profession skill of their choice. Treat this class skill as trained even if the character has no ranks in the skill.
* Gnome Training: Some gnomes receive special martial training against their racial foes. These gnomes gain a +1 bonus on attack rolls against humanoid creatures of the reptilian and goblin subtypes due to special training against these hated foes.
* Defensive Training: Gnomes with this trait get a +4 dodge bonus to AC against monsters of the giant type.
* The Knack: Some gnomes have a special knack for musical instruments. Gnomes with this trait gain a +2 on all perform checks with a musical instrument.
* Fey Blood: Gnomes are related to the Fey, gnomes with this trait have a particularly strong Fey heritage and cast spells at +1 caster level. Gnomes with this feat must choose the Sorcerer Fey Blood line

I think that this would be a step in the right direction. Although I doubt that Paizo would put these options in (but you never know), I think that it is certainly interesting. The only change that I would make there is that the gnome should be able to choose four of the traits. That way you can exactly build the gnome in the current Beta, or you can effectively "swap" some traits for other ones.

I'm not sure I like half-orcs and humans having no keen senses at all.

Maybe a +2 bonus to Perception (Smell) would work. I always think of orcs of having a powerful sense of smell, as many wild predators do.

On a slightly different topic, the elf's (and half-elf's) Keen Senses ability has always kind of bugged me: Wouldn’t it make more sense for the “spot secret doors” ability to be able to find any secret door within line of sight. As it is, most GMs, in my experience, just roll the check even if the elf is 20 feet away from the secret door, or even if the elf is across a 100-foot room.

Reading the Orc Ferocity description, I can't think of any time that I (or another player in my group) would have been helped by this. It may be useful for the first 3 levels or so, but after that most attacks that are going to put you below 0 hit points are going to kill you. I've been thinking about this, and maybe half-orcs should keep the abilities they have (minus the Ferocity) but get some additional ability bonuses... making it +4 Str, +2 Con, +2 Wis, -2 Int, -2 Cha? I also added in the Cha penalty for some more balance. This would make them the best warrior-type characters in the game (perhaps even too powerful), but further dissuade them from (non-Wisdom-based) spellcasting.

I mused over using a baseline of 3 buffs at 1st, then adding an available "buff slot" at 10th, 20th, 30th, etc.

This sounds like a good idea, although it might be tricky to implement in the actual rules. Wouldn't you need to have something like a "buff" descriptor so that it could function?

I think that Paizo should get rid of favored classes altogether. I personally haven't used them in v3.5 (both because my group usually plays one-shot games, but also in longer campaigns because it's nice to keep everyone at the same level). It also just seemed unduly punishing for a character who doesn't take that class.

Certainly, I like Paizo's method much better than v3.5's, but if you really think about it, it still just seems rather unfair. Races already tend towards certain classes because of their ability score modifiers (take the dwarf, for example. The dwarf gets +2 Con, +2 Wis, -2 Cha. This lends them towards playing melee-oriented characters, clerics, or druids much more than, say, sorcerers or bards. Adding in +1 hp/level or +1 skill point/level just seems like its adding more bonuses based on the dwarf's class).

For humans and half-elves, maybe just giving +1 hp/level or +1 skill point/level as a choice would help balance them, since that's really more a part of their racial features than other race's favored classes are.