What are you, a mouse or a man? Oh, you are a mouse? I'm terribly sorry.

Races are a pretty big hurdle in most RPGs that have them. They could be too traditional, too radical, too insensitive, too boring, too powerful, too weak, too many, too little, or any other complaint.

This is can be more apparent in a multigenre game, where almost any race is possible, and encouraged! But what's the stop the dragonman from outclassing a regular ol' human.

Well, guidelines.

How I see it is that things can quickly get out of hand without some sort of guidelines. Thus, Warp-Corp will have some very simple guidelines, but they should help start the mitigation of power balance. Here are some of the guidelines I will most likely include.

1. The race must be humanoid in nature. What is humanoid? In Warp-Corp, a humanoid is a character between 3 and 10 feet tall, that walks upright, and is at most 5 feet wide.

Now, you may be shocked about this: What if I want to be a giant? Or a dragon? Or Cthulhu? Well, your GM can easily override this rule if they feel, but it is to prevent power issues. A giant will be much more powerful than a human, so why would anyone want to be a human? A half-giant isn't out of the question, though!

Another point to consider is that between the 3 and 10 ft range, that falls in the size brackets of Small, Medium and Large in d20 era D&D.It will be easily manageable, the characters will be able to enter mostly any structure, and they won't have to sidle sideways in some corridors (I'm not sure is large characters will be 10 foot wide yet)

2. Special advantages should be balanced with appropriate disadvantages.

If someone wants to be a dragonman, it is understandable that they may want to breathe fire, have claws, and maybe fly a bit. This is fine, but the GM should keep in mind a) what could imbalance the game and b) that these advantages should have like disadvantages.

What would be a sample disadvantage? Well, the easiest one would be a simple bonus to an attribute, and a negative to another attribute. So, a +1 to Strength and a -1 to Intelligence for, say, an orc. This is the easiest way, along with doing some alterations of saving throws.

When it gets into the supernatural abilities, that's when things get a little more plastic. Let's say our orc is an ice orc, or whatever, and the player wants a resistance to ice. This could easily be balanced by a vulnerability to fire.

We could also say the orc wanted to have ice breath. That's getting a little to far into imbalanced territory, and if the GM grants the ice breath, they should have a pretty bad disadvantage, such as a health reduction.

Furthermore, people could get a little 'advantage happy', trying to min-max a character out the butt. For this reason, I would impose a limit of 3 advantages, each with a subsequent disadvantage.

I will probably write out more concrete examples as my thoughts coalesce, so I can have some ideas in the final product ala Savage Worlds, but these are my thoughts for right now.

Next time, I'm going to focus on the next part of character creation, attributes, saves and derived statistics.

See ya!

An Apology! I'm sorry, baby. I did you dirty.

Sorry about the lack of, well, anything on this blog! The main reason is that I am functioning as the assistant editor for John Stater's new game, Blood & Treasure. Check out his blog here.

This is taking up literally all my time, and I haven't had much time to think about Warp Corp. I'll hopefully make a post sometime this week, most likely dealing with a sticky wicket when it comes to multigenre games: races.

So keep your eyes peeled, and all that good stuff!