Has anyone tried this? I'm hesitant to pick it up without some feedback. I'd love a race creation ruleset, but I've seen some really horrible ones and don't want to waste the money if it's garbage.
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I have it, i picked it up once during one of the pdf sales. It is a very math heavy book. They don't just get into race creation but the nuts and bolts behind it and what is worth how much and why.
I don't know how balanced it is but it seems pretty well thought out. Like it gets into just what is really gained by giving a +2 str for example.
My big complaint is it doesn't lay out the core races as examples which i found made it a bit hard to follow and understand.
To be fair I have read the book but not yet tried to make a race with it yet. So i have no idea if the math is sound or not, which really makes a big deal on how valuable the book is.
I purchased this and was rather disappointed.
It goes into great detail about how much various options are worth (and shows you all the math they use). This is definitely helpful if you are making a race, so you don't accidentally end up making an unbalanced race, just by the combination of things you pick.
I expected this book to be more along the lines of telling me how many points I could use to create a race, then the point costs for all the existing bonuses as well as a bunch of new bonuses. Instead, it's more like "A +2 Dex is 1.3* times as valuable as a +2 Cha, unless you're a sorcerer, in which case, it's 0.9 times as valuable," "Low-light vision is 1.4 times as valuable as normal vision." These are helpful things to think about, but not what I'd call a cookbook.
* All those numbers are made up off the top of my head, and don't reflect the actual findings of the book
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Yeah it is helpful but like what Fanguad said it didn't have set numbers. i think it would be a lot more useful to game designers than GM Joe making a house race for his game. It would be helpful but not easy to understand and follow, or at least I didn't find it easy to understand and follow.
But if you want really indepth crunch to make sure the race is well balanced it does that and really deeply gets into what all the values really mean in game terms and how they effect other things etc.
Ugh,
I could follow the math, I got a degree in math. But, if I need my degree in math, it needs some work. And the fact it doesn't have examples of the base races walked through is... well I won't insult the people that put an obvious amount of work into it. I'll just say it was not a wise marketing decision and leave it at that.
Thanks for the info though, saved me a purchase.
Has anyone tried this? I'm hesitant to pick it up without some feedback. I'd love a race creation ruleset, but I've seen some really horrible ones and don't want to waste the money if it's garbage.
I bought a copy to balance out some of the races in my world (23+ playable races, plus at least 30 that just don't adventure, but are key to storylines.) It is dense. It has a lot of stuff I will never, ever use. There are a whole lot of features that are intriguing. If all you seek is a odd tweak on the Elf of the month, it is not for you. I gutted my copy to flesh out my own race creation ws. If you want to populate a world or pocket dimension with something new, this can be your answer. And they give you a race at the end that forced me to reset Types in my game. It was just too kewl!