However, I don’t deny that those discrepancies do exist. My Dwarf Wizard capped at an 18 Int, at character generation, and that’s because I purchased it to start with! An Eladrin Wizard could easily have 2-4 points more than me, which is a +2 to hit and damage over what I could do. So I’d like to see a post going in-depth about these discrepancies, and whether they’re big downers, irrelevant, and if that bad, how to fix them. I’m working on a campaign setting with a whole roster of new core races, so this kind of information is really useful to me, and it’d be nice to hear it from somebody who doesn’t seem like the “hardcore optimizer” type. Somebody who can really speak to me. I think that’s you, if you’d be up for it. ;)

The more I think about it, the more I think I might be off-base on race/class combinations as far as stats are concerned. It might be worth sounding this out in a separate post, just to think out loud. On the other hand, maybe I can come up with something a little more systematic & simultaneously leverage my meager coding skills.

But basically it seems reasonable that every race should be a top-tier contender (e.g. 20/16) in one or two builds, and a second tier (e.g. 18/16) contender in a bigger number of others. I’m not sure whether that’s the case, but I suspect that some races fare better than others.

I’m curious, which races do you think suffer most from lack of optimizeable choices? What would you do with them? I’m big on making my own races, and race balance and strength always interests me.