Working on my setting, previous posts, took some time from lore work to do some rough outlines for the races. My setting has anthro races, NOT FURRIES. I was working out how each out be broken down between familiae and species each having an adjustment to their abilities scores both positive and negative ones. I then started working out which skills maybe they would have a natural leaning towards, and then moved this onto their "nationality" as in people from this region are generally more prone to being skilled in this and or that. I then saw that this was making the chosen races having a heavier impact on the PC then their chosen class.
     This seems somewhat logical of a approach as say a Bear fighter would look and have a differing skill set and all from a region known for producing savage great weapon fighters then say a Mouse fighter from a region known more for fancers and rapier combatants.
     Classes and all remain the same as in the books I am using for a framework, L&D and BoF. Just looking to get a few eyes on this and see what everyone else thinks of this, that race/nationality should be impactful on characters almost more then class. As always any and all opinions are welcome.
     

Quote from: d20DM on April 13, 2025, 09:33:46 AMThis seems somewhat logical of a approach as say a Bear fighter would look and have a differing skill set and all from a region known for producing savage great weapon fighters then say a Mouse fighter from a region known more for fancers and rapier combatants.

So is it the race (biology) or the region/culture (background) that imparts the familiarity with great weapons vs. fencing/rapiers? Does your game system differentiate between the two?

     It would be region/culture that gives that to the characters. "Races" is all ability scores and slight  powers while culture is skill adjustments. That's how I am looking at it for the moment, still toying around. I want to have who and where you are from to have a impact on the class you chose, I mean a viking raider and a ronin are both fighter type, but the culture has a major impact on them to where it's like they are 2 different types.
     I liked the archetypes that Pathfinder, in 1rst Ed, but that system kinda gets bogged in the math and I want to keep it flowing and simple, the main reason I fell in love with OSR and L&D as well as BoF mainly.

I think the best way to handle this idea within a D&D-like framework is with what I usually call race-classes (no idea if that's the correct term), that is: Each race has unique class variants only they have access to. So instead of having your class choice be "bear fighter" (race-and-class) or "bear" (race-as-class), you would choose "bear berserker", but you could also choose "bear shieldbearer" or "bear sage" or whatever.  There are some of these in Fantastic Heroes and Witchery and in Adventurer Conquerer King System. I believe Labyrinth Lord had some too. They were a thing in BECMI, so they tend to turn up in BECMI-inspired games. The most thorough implementation of the idea is probably in Talislanta, but that's not really a D&D derivative at all.

As it stands, I am looking at a outline like this, or something similar for each of the regions on my world.

Popular starting feat: xxx
Starting skill: xx
Skill Bonuses: xx
Languages: xx
Class adjustment: xx

Class adjustment is what I am looking at to add flavor and maybe a mechanical difference between how each realm approaches classes differently based on culture.