I want to run a fun and wacky campaign and am requiring my players to create or advance an existing race using the race building rules with a 15 RP limit. I had a few questions about some of the abilities, specifically the Spell Like Ability At Will and Flight. The spell like ability at will says you can get a at will spell like ability as long as it does not deal damage or attack. this is for the RP price of twice the spell level and it can only be used with 3rd or lower level spells. Would Cure Spells be allowed with this ability? Technically it does not "Attack or Cause Damage" outright, but it can be used to damage undead. also i'm not sure if having a character able to heal others at will would be hugely game breaking. The next question is on the wording for the flight ability. It costs 4 RP and has the Special at the end of the description that says "This trait can be taken more than once. For each additional 2 RP spent, the race’s fly speed increases by +10 feet, and the maneuverability improves by one step." Does this mean that for an additional 2 RP you can essentially upgrade the ability?
You're going to want to make your own changes to the results of what comes out of this process, as the Race Builder guidelines are more meant as a gut-check that you use as one of your tools in the process of race creation but not as a definitive way to create a balanced race, particularly when used to build a single PC rather than a race for the whole world. As just one example of many, getting a bonus feat that can be any feat costs twice as much as getting a specific unchangeable feat, but a player can just pick the cheaper one and take the feat they knew they wanted anyway.
So basically, it is excellent that you are asking these questions. If you want a good result, you'll need to be applying these sorts of discerning questions and skepticism to the races that come out of the process, rather than simply trusting the Race Builder to handle everything.
The race creation guidelines are not a substitute for game design skill. They're best used with a lot of GM oversight. I personally don't recommend letting your players use the rules to make their own PCs unless you supervise them carefully. As Mark Seifter recommends, you should carefully audit any race that your players create.
Remember that race power level tiers mean something. It's a common mistake to believe that RP is the only measurement of power in a race. This is not true as it's possible to have a low-RP race that's overpowered or gamebreaking due to having Advanced and Monstrous traits. Published PC races almost never have traits from the Advanced and Monstrous tier.
To answer your questions:
1) Cure spells are fair game for the At-Will Spell-like Ability trait, but I do not recommend allowing this trait unless it's a 0-level spell. Having an at-will spell-like ability is really powerful. Your gut instinct is correct in that an at-will healing ability will have a major impact on your campaign.
2) The Flight trait costs 4 RP and can be upgraded by increasing the RP by 2.
Rogues level 1 to level 9 can select the Minor Magic talent, which is an SLA cantrip useable only 3 times per day. Rogues level 10+ can select Major Magic, which is an SLA level 1 spell useable only 2 times per day. These are pretty limiting and won't be game breaking even if you open them up to constant use as At Will abilities at those same levels (if you provide limit to divination or adopt healing restrictions proposed below).
However, the racial abilities do not generally have a level prerequisite (page http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/creating-new-races/)
and basically has cantrips as the At Will list, and level 1 spells as once per day. Level 3 spells (even just 1 fixed spell selection, and limited to non-damaging) useable at will is pretty powerful.
As far as curing spells go, options I could see:
3d8+level (up to 15) for Cure Moderate Wounds would be game-breaking as At Will.
1d8+1 for Cure Light Wounds (without the level increase on the additive) may be tolerable
1d3 once per day per recipient for Heavenly Fire as per the Celestial bloodline of a sorceress is reasonable
1 point of healing as Cure Minor Wounds cantrip 6 times per day (about the limit that 3.5 had on number of cantrips)
1 point of healing as a level 1 casting of Celestial Healing with some limit per day
Those basically lessen (or basically eliminate if you do CLW at will) the need for the CLW wand, but you may want to revisit this if it proves game breaking. Maybe start small for this campaign, as it may be harder to hand out CLW at will and then try to reign it in.
Watch normal traits as well. Some limitations are only meaningful if you don't design the race around a purpose.
Compare:
Flexible Bonus Feat (4 rp) with Static Bonus Feat (2 rp) vs Weapon Familiarity (1 rp)
Specialized (2 rp) with Weakness (-1 rp)
Also, beware cheap but meaningful choices:
Fey (2 rp), Aberration (3 rp), Monstrous Humanoid (3 rp), etc, which add immunity to spells on top of low light vision or darkvision.
Climb (2 rp), Swim (2 rp), which circumvent skill challenges and can add another dimension to combat.
Yeah, the Race "Builder" is really more like a Race "Suggester." Some things in it are quite broken.
My personal pet peeve is that the cost for a large race is very high and the cost for reach is very low. That's fine if you are making ogre-like races that are bipedal and have natural reach. It fails miserably if you are making centauroids that are large but have just 5 ft reach (and medium size weapons), because you have to pay the large size tax without getting the reach advantage.
Anyway, my gripe aside, you would likely be much better served if you had your players write a flavor-text only description of their race, with few to no mechanical features specified, and then built them yourself.
Alternately, say you have five players, so you get five write-ups. Write up 3-5 yourself for NPC races you want to throw at the PCs. Hand all write-ups out to the players so that no one gets their own and there is no way to tell the NPC foe races from the PC races. Then let the players build them to 15 points, or however many. They won't know if they are making races for their friends or foes they will have to fight!
[edit: typo]
There are several nice essays and checklists on this subject and you should be able to find several. My big suggestion is to figure out a 'theme' to the race, the why it is appropriate, etc. in the campaign. Dragonlance uses the stolen eggs as the basis for the Draconians for example. A nautical game might have aquatic races abd a planar might have PC Githzari.
I believe it says is the idea is for a GM to make a race, and that the race should have a reason to be some sort of spellcaster and some sort of martial. If the race is pure martial (orcs) it shouldn't be that expensive. So set feats should be things that are equally attractive (or useless) to both types of characters and not STRONGLY favor 1 side.
So a decent check is if a guy makes a race for a barb, ask him why a wizard/sorcerer/cleric would want to be that race, as at least one should have a reason.
So my players are super excited about creating a race and they did make sure to make the race as an actual race and not a I am gonna power up this character with these abilities. I have modified a few things to not be overpowering such as the at will spell like abilities. These require my approval because some spells would be to game breaking. I also allowed damaging spells at will because a character able to to a low level damage spell every turn isn't much different than a character able to simply make an attack. Although no one took at will spells. Also the speech abilities I found oddly priced. 0RP to allow your character to know their language and common with a list of other potential languages is ok but I don't know why 0 RP to only know their language and possibly learn from a smaller list of languages. I allowed them to take the later for -1RP as it is vastly weaker than the normal language option
One player (who always make exciting and interesting characters) made a hilarious race of Hellines. They are elementals from a fire plane that look like small humanoid cats that love fire and explosions. He gave them everything for fire and made an alchemist who's ultimate goal in life is to build a rocket powerful enough to destroy the moon. His last attempt failed and he landed in Golarion through a (in his words) minor miscalculation.
Would Cure Spells be allowed with this ability? Technically it does not "Attack or Cause Damage" outright, but it can be used to damage undead. also i'm not sure if having a character able to heal others at will would be hugely game breaking.i would say that cure spell can't be taken since it damage undead, since its positive damage its still damage, if you let it you should create a creature that do an inflict version of the spell since it to don't do damage in a way since it heal undead, but both of them are considered damage since its either negative damage or positive damage that either heal or damage creature based on their energy afinity, and a cure SP at will is not that game breaking if you limit it to a CLW
During actual encounters CLW at will would not be game breaking in the least, but between encounters it would be overpowered
During actual encounters CLW at will would not be game breaking in the least, but between encounters it would be overpoweredbetween encounters its still not game breaking its just a CLW and the number it will take at higher lvl you can always put a random encounter, so if they focus on healing one person only that one person is ready for that encounter, and don't forget that you can always craft an object that can cast CLW at will too, it only cost as if it has a 100 charge to craft
If you have a barbarian who has D12 HD at level 10 with a con mod of +2 his max HP should average to about 86ish. CLW would heal about 5 HP average per round. To cure the barbarian from 0 HP it would take about 18 rounds or less than 2 min game time. after every encounter at level 10 the group would only have to stop for approximately 10 min to heal everyone if all the party members are very close to 0 HP and have a high HP. As a GM I don't think i would allow certain spells to be at will or on an infinite use object, CLW being one of them.
The ARG formula has a number of potholes and 'at will' is one of the bigger ones. 3.5 had a 1hp cantrip (cure minor wounds?) that effectively healed the entire party during downtime, utterly shattering spell economy dynamics. I hated that silly concept until I saw this in action, then I understood.
Since then, we started a list of how to abuse 'at will' X cantrip/orison. One has over 20 entries! and 'NO' it isn't Mending.
Languages and racial ability adjustments are others that take a bit of watching.
Maybe someone will post their improved formula...hint, hint, hint.
If I recall correctly in 3.5 the 0 level spells could not be casted as many times as you like. Every spell caster had a limited number of spells per day for the 0 level spells as well as all the other levels.
There were a lot of people already using that mechanic, many of them involved at the Golem. We got a early version from someone who spent their Reserve time in WA. He also gave us a heads up on some of what Paizo was planning.