Ok so analogous to, although with different consequences to, Jedi after order 66 and the purge.

presumably all these races have a magical affinity, have you considered adding a seventh characteristic for magic use?

but what my original idea was more along the lines of reduced difficulty on some social checks, so a human in a human shop gets 1 less Difficulty on Negotiation checks.

Another idea would be something like the Dressellian Low Tech trait. The non human pc’s are considered unaccustomed to the Human world (think wizards in Harry Potter), gaining increased difficulty on social and technology related checks where appropriate. If however they spend 20 starting xp to represent a life lived amongst humans. That way you can bump up their base characteristics, abilities or xp and balance it.

The other option is to have 2 human sets of stats. Those in the know. and everyone else. Those in the know start with an amount of XP bringing them up to around the same power level as the other races. Give a listen to the Dice pool podcast/ there is one where they discuss the costs in building a custom archtype. work out the cost of the most expensive race and bring everyone up to that xp amount ,

Thanks for your help, guys . But I'm pretty sure I can't do this setting in Genesys. I'll keep trying, but the NDS is my favorite RPG system currently, and I still haven't been able to do it.

Good suggestions, though!

Sorry for derailing.

I guess I wanted to point out that the archetypes don’t actually need to be balanced with xp. You need to ask yourself “why would a player want to play a human? (Edit: and why wouldn’t they want to play Dragons, i mean come on!!!)” Not in a min/max point of view but a story point of view. Is that reason something that can be represented with xp value, such as boost dice when doing things in the human world? or is it Narrative like the eat/breath/sleep benefits of Droids, such that humans end up 20 or 30 xp short of the other species?

How much better are the non humans? Is it possible that some of their cool abilities get better over time? If so they may have a basic set of less powerful abilities that can be improved during play with xp.

Lets look at a Half Dragon that may possibly have Fire breath. It starts as a Short range Damage 5 Crit 4 attack but can be improved to medium for 10xp, gain 3 more Damage and Blast with 15xp, and finally a Crit 1 Vicious 2 Upgrade for 20. None of those contribute to the Talent pyramid, but make for a really powerful weapon. Humans end up with more diverse talents, half dragons watch the world burn.

11 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

Sorry for derailing.

I guess I wanted to point out that the archetypes don’t actually need to be balanced with xp. You need to ask yourself “why would a player want to play a human?” Not in a min/max point of view but a story point of view. Is that reason something that can be represented with xp value, such as boost dice when doing things in the human world? or is it Narrative like the eat/breath/sleep benefits of Droids, such that humans end up 20 or 30 xp short of the other species?

How much better are the non humans? Is it possible that some of their cool abilities get better over time? If so they may have a basic set of less powerful abilities that can be improved during play with xp.

Lets look at a Half Dragon that may possibly have Fire breath. It starts as a Short range Damage 5 Crit 4 attack but can be improved to medium for 10xp, gain 3 more Damage and Blast with 15xp, and finally a Crit 1 Vicious 2 Upgrade for 20. None of those contribute to the Talent pyramid, but make for a really powerful weapon. Humans end up with more diverse talents, half dragons watch the world burn.

Yes, I saw where you were going, and I agree that social/narrative benefits can go great distances for balancing. The main reason to play a human would be mostly narrative; while certain races of elves (and most therians, to an extent) would definitely have trouble navigating the human world, dragons start life as humans, and so would be just as familiar, so that came be used as a universal metric.

And "half-dragon" is a bit misleading . "Dragon-blooded" would have been better; they look exactly like humans (because they're basically humans+).

But you're absolutely right, most of the non-human species have abilities that get better with time, and on long timescales, so that's a decent place to start. And Sensitivity as a seventh characteristic is something I'd thought of, and would definitely use of i could get this setting to fit in Genesys. But it is a good idea .

(And barely more than a quarter of dragons breathe fire (~28.57%); stop stereotyping, Richard !)

10 minutes ago, Absol197 said:

(And barely more than a quarter of dragons breathe fire (~28.57%); stop stereotyping, Richard !)

Here’s me, having delusional thoughts that all dragons are awesome, now I find out only ~28.57% are! You break my world ??

1 minute ago, Richardbuxton said:

Here’s me, having delusional thoughts that all dragons are awesome, now I find out only ~28.57% are! You break my world ??

Hey, those that don't breathe fire can do other cool things! They either fly (without wings, just riding the air!), or can swim and breathe underwater, or have Cortosis scales and Breach claws. Some rare ones are even venomous!

So what I'm saying is that they're all awesome, but in different ways!

And to answer your edit from before, I'm not sure why anyone would not want to play a dragon ! Everyone I've done a system-less free-form RP in this setting for has played a dragon, so .

Anyway, enough de-railing. If we want to continue, that's what PMs are for!

32 minutes ago, Absol197 said:

Hey, those that don't breathe fire can do other cool things! They either fly (without wings, just riding the air!), or can swim and breathe underwater, or have Cortosis scales and Breach claws. Some rare ones are even venomous!

So what I'm saying is that they're all awesome, but in different ways!

And to answer your edit from before, I'm not sure why anyone would not want to play a dragon ! Everyone I've done a system-less free-form RP in this setting for has played a dragon, so .

Anyway, enough de-railing. If we want to continue, that's what PMs are for!

Another option is to just make humans a non playable race. With the caveate if you want to 0lay one they ate significantly weaker. If ypu pull humans off the scale things may balance easier