Help with Plane / Elemental-Touched Templates House Rules

[RMcD]

It has always bothered me that all elemental touched and plane touched races are medium sized human copies. No dwarves or elves with celestial history in their past, no drows or duergars with demon heritage.

Instead of plane touched and elemental touched being races, I believe they should be templates, this allows them to be applied to any race and you can have a gnome whose mama ran off with a water elemental.

The concept I think is perfect, there's not even any tribes of those creatures in Golarian outsides of the planes they are part of. However the issue I am having for geniekin and the such is that it's really hard to 1. balance templates and 2. give a reason why everyone wouldn't want to take them. I don't mind some races being in general weaker than others but I would like that all the templates have specific things that they are good at.

The concept I've been throwing around is each has a primary and secondary attribute. So:

Earth Heritage:
+2 CON (Earth is tough)
+1 STR (Earth is strong)

Water Heritage:
+2 DEX (Water flows)
+1 STR (Water is strong)

Fire Heritage:
+2 CHA (Fire is fiery)
+1 DEX (Fire dances)

Air Hertiage:
+2 INT (Air is lofty)
+1 DEX (Air flows)

As well as this what I'd obviously like is some general bonuses as well, for example Air heritage could have +10 feet base movement when you have a fly speed. Water could have something similar for swimming and Earth for digging. As well I was thinking of either doing it specific by class so Fire might have extra rage rounds as a barbarian, Earth might give them a bonus to CMD against movement while raging, Air could be movement speed or bonus against AoO/acrobatics, and Water, etc.

Obviously if you do it by class instead of only having a couple of changes you're making the heritages much more complicated as well as coming into issues with Archetypes, but it allows the heritages to be interesting between plays as you'll have new things to try out with different classes instead of flat bonuses.

Also I'm not sure as I said how to balance it to stop all my players having celestial and fire heritage in their family tree (as I would like the templates to be stackable too).

Help and thoughts?

[Da'ath]

I don't let players use templates, as a general rule, in race creation and especially not stacking ones. I also don't allow them to advance their age category before a game starts, unless they're willing to do so without benefit of statistical advantages (it's funny how it's always spellcasters who want to do this until they realize I'm not letting them game the mental stat benefits, though I have had one barbarian character who wanted to, once upon a time).

I have two pieces of advice. The first relates to templates, the second relates to an alternative.

I. Find a CR +0-+1 that has the layout you want. Sub in the changes you want made. Saying "no" is the way you prevent abuse.

II. Dump the template idea altogether. Design a variant subrace for these races you want it to include. In essence, design the racial traits you deem important to the theme and exchange these traits for the current traits of the race of comparable value. Suddenly, instead of your standard Drow racial spells, you might have fire themed spells and be resistant to fire instead of sleep and so on.

Hope that helps.