So, I've been wanting to make some Starwars Species, and to do so I've been reverse-engineering all the published races down to their constituent bits.

There does seem to be a pattern to them.

It looks like after you add up everything they get, it should come out to 300 xp. This assumes the skills are priced as in-career, and that the talents are worth 5. The tricky part is estimating what the unique abilities are worth, when they don't just look like an unnamed talent. (you're paying 60 to get all your attributes up to 1, in case you try to math and it doesn't work out because you gave everyone the first point for free.

The drall come out to 310, Not sure why. They seem to be getting Knowledge (Education) and their racial ability on top of the 300 points. But just because one race seems a tad off doesn't mean the pattern isn't there, given it seem to work out with 16 of the 18 other races pretty easily.

However, the pattern works pretty well if you're trying to see how much the unique abilities *SHOULD* be worth, combined (the difference between everything else, and 300 - often it's 15).

Droids in particular seem to be tricky. They get a bunch of positives and negatives, which shound come out to 50 points, if they're to match the 300 points that matches almost every other published race.

Here's what they get. Perhaps some others can help me peg down what these positives and negatives should be worth. Here are my best guesses. Tell me if you think these prices seem right in comparison to talents (5xp) and I guess, the other racial abilities. Let me know if you think any of these were estimated too high or too low, and what you think they should instead be worth.

A) Cybernetic Implant cap of 6 instead of Brawn. (15 points)

B) Don't Eat or Sleep (5 Points - I think eating and sleeping combined is worth about the same as breathing)

C) Don't breathe Breathe. (5 points - Gand, EotE Core)

D) Immune to poisons and toxins. (10 points)

E) Can't benefit from bacta. (-10 points this seems like a pretty big deal to me)

F) Medicine replaced by Mechanics (-5 points, You'll likely have a mechanic, but the fact that you need separate healing items and can't benefit from the ones the rest of the group is a slight drawback, unless in an all droid party.)

G) Can never acquire a force rating or have force powers (-5; if this was a big deal, almost everyone would be taking force powers.)

H) Immune to Mind Effecting Force Effects (+10)

Total Points: 30

For the life of me, I couldn't come up with reasonable looking prices for these things that made them all add up to 50. Maybe you guys could do better.

If the pattern (and thus my hypothesis that they are all built on a 300 point budget) is correct, A-H should add up to 50. If they don't add up to 50, I would say that points to Droids being underpowered, which I've heard people say they think is the case already. I currently speculate that it may be the case that FFG overestimated the power of some of these things, and that droids should have an extra ~20 exp or so at character creation.

Hmm. I realized I had forgotten to add in Wound/Strain Thresholds.

Priced as per ranks in the talents, the totals for Exp come to about 400 total, but its a bit less precise.

10 of them come to 400, 5 of them come to 405, 1 of them comes to 410, 1 of them comes to 390, and my estimate puts droids at 380.

Overall, not much has changed with this new information. I guess the question is still: Do you guys think the estimates I put on the droid's special qualities look right?

Would you consider it reasonable to give droids 20 extra xp to put them up to 400 in light of these estimates? Would you consider it reasonable to give the Gran 10 extra xp to put them up to 400?

Donovan is probably your best bet here. He and Fiddleback did all the number-crunching for the Species Menagerie, I think.

Donovan is probably your best bet here. He and Fiddleback did all the number-crunching for the Species Menagerie, I think.

Dono and I were the spearheaders behind the USM, and I can safely tell you that there wasn't much number crunching. We instead went for general feels for the species, something that seemed to irk a number of people because we weren't using math to back up our entries, but I'd rather have a species that was fun to play and fit the spirit than something soulless but written to a formula. We did reading on Wookieepedia, the WEG materials we had, and the Saga Edition materials and went from there when making our decisions. My best advice is just to read up on the species, assign some numbers and give it a test drive. If it doesn't work, change some things up. It's really a game of "feeling" instead of spending points. After all, how would you rate the Dralls ability to also hand out a Boost Die when providing skilled assistance? There is no ability in the game like that.

That said, I really like what they're done with the species in Enter the Unknown and now Suns of Fortune, and really wish we'd have known they were going to break so radically from those species in the Core Rulebook in terms of how they were built.

Hmm.

Its true that the Drall's ability to give a boost die with skilled assistance isn't paralleled anywhere else (though it seems on the same approximate power as a talent); but some of the races are made up of only skills and talents and numbers, and those things are pretty easy to gauge.

Personally I feel that going by general feel makes it more difficult to peg down the power level accurately (and therefore prefer to break it down into some kind of formula), but from what I've seen, you guys did a pretty good job. I haven't number crunched them, but evaluating them, they seem close enough to the same power level of the official ones that I would have a rather difficult time figuring out if any of them were over or under powered, without sitting down and doing a bunch of number crunching, and that tells me it's pretty close.

The thing is, most of the races you did don't have any particularly unusual powers. Some of the ones I'd like to stat up do have some pretty beefy powers; such as an entire race of long range telepaths with fast regenerative capabilities and an unusual special attack, in addition to high strength and the ability to take lots of physical punishment before going down. (It will be more difficult, and is notably higher power than humans.) So taking the time to figure out approximately what these individual powers are worth will help me accomplish that. (I want to stat out some races from other Sci Fis, particularly those from Stargate, including the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis and the Ancients).

Side Note: In the USM 3e, the Defel have Light Sensitivity and Shadowed, and they mention page 392 of EotE Core, but 392 of EotE core doesn't mention either of those things, its a page full of adversaries. Where do I find the rules you're referencing? Were those page numbers from the Beta? Are those rules still in EotE Core?

Hmm.

Its true that the Drall's ability to give a boost die with skilled assistance isn't paralleled anywhere else (though it seems on the same approximate power as a talent); but some of the races are made up of only skills and talents and numbers, and those things are pretty easy to gauge.

Personally I feel that going by general feel makes it more difficult to peg down the power level accurately (and therefore prefer to break it down into some kind of formula), but from what I've seen, you guys did a pretty good job. I haven't number crunched them, but evaluating them, they seem close enough to the same power level of the official ones that I would have a rather difficult time figuring out if any of them were over or under powered, without sitting down and doing a bunch of number crunching, and that tells me it's pretty close.

The thing is, most of the races you did don't have any particularly unusual powers. Some of the ones I'd like to stat up do have some pretty beefy powers; such as an entire race of long range telepaths with fast regenerative capabilities and an unusual special attack, in addition to high strength and the ability to take lots of physical punishment before going down. (It will be more difficult, and is notably higher power than humans.) So taking the time to figure out approximately what these individual powers are worth will help me accomplish that. (I want to stat out some races from other Sci Fis, particularly those from Stargate, including the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis and the Ancients)

Side Note: In the USM 3e, the Defel have Light Sensitivity and Shadowed, and they mention page 392 of EotE Core, but 392 of EotE core doesn't mention either of those things, its a page full of adversaries. Where do I find the rules you're referencing? Were those page numbers from the Beta? Are those rules still in EotE Core?

Simply put, we didn't have any precedent for a lot of strange and unusual powers when we did the USM, and with the push back we got on some of the numbers, I can't imagine what it would have looked like had we done anything really out of the box. I've been thinking about touching up some of my contributions in light of these new races on my personal blog, but you probably won't see anything new in the Menagerie as we've pretty well decided that's going to be it for the Menagerie as a whole.

As for evaluating power level - that's what playtesting is for, my friend. Give them what you think looks good when compared to the other species we have, put them on the table and see how they perform before re-evaluating them.

As to the Light Sensitivity and Shadowed abilities, those were taken directly from the Defel Assassin stat block, so they're in that block on page 392.

I'll back Cyril in that we didn't rely on mathematical formulas when doing the write-ups for the USM. Our concern wasn't "is this mathematically balanced against the core species?" and more of "does this capture the feel of the species?" We both got a fair amount of heat because we opted for the 'looks right' approach, and that's without going as far outside the box as the last couple EotE source books have gone. If either of us had tried writing up the Toydarians or Drall as FFG did, we'd have gotten blasted for making those species so "one-sided."

Now all that said, I have been going through the various USM species after the last posted revision (I am a self-confessed "tinker monkey" after all), using a 400 XP "build pool" as the baseline since that's what the bulk of EotE and AoR corebook species weighed in at (with a bit of variance here and there). My benchmark for a "good build" was to come within 15 XP or so above or below, and most of what was in USM3rev generally did so. But as Cyril noted earlier, some species abilities are hard to put an XP price on. How much XP should a Toydarian's ability to fly cost? Or the Drall's extra boost die when providing skilled assistance? Even the Defel's light-blindness and stealth abilities would be tough to accurately price.

Besides, I doubt the writers themselves make use of strict formulas when coming up with species write-ups. I know that when designing several of the species in Galaxy at War and Unknown Regions, WotC didn't provide any magical formula for creating new species in Saga Edition, so I had to do a fair amount of guesswork. Some I did good (Taung, Squibs, Verpine), others not so good (Yuzzem), but it was guesswork with some feedback provided by Rodney to tweak things (Anzati got toned down from my initial draft based on his feedback).

There's also the fact that this isn't D&D or Pathfinder or any other tactically-focused RPG, so the species don't have to all be mathematically equal, be they official or unofficial.

Hmm.

I agree with much of what you said, and yeah, the USM races come to within 15 of the median result of the official races. Additionally some abilities are certainly more difficult to price out than others, at which point you have to start making inferences based on similarity to the existing options. Finally, it's true that it's not nearly as crucial that the races be perfectly balanced than in a tactically focused game.

However (and here are my reasons for preferring a point buy approach, even if at the end you have a few that are a couple points over or under):

1. The official races are all really close to the same number. The USM races are still quite close, but less so.

2. Figuring it out on a point-buy level makes it easier to break pattern with the current races while still hitting the right power level (such as the unusual 422211 array) or knowing that a 322222 array is worth the same amount as that, and knowing how much of a tradeoff to make for a more powerful attribute array.

3. Banging them out and assigning them point values, and making a point-buy method makes it much easier to make balanced races in the future, so you don't need so much skill and experience with homebrewing and game design to eyeball it and estimate power levels. Additionally, it makes each individual race (once you have the point buy hashed out) take much less time to do. That will save GMs time and make their races closer to balanced, as well as homebrewers making new things. I imagine you guys had to spend a lot of time evaluating the races you made, in painstaking detail. That would be much easier to judge if you have lots of parallels to draw between the thing you're making now, and the things that are already available.

4. If you're making a bunch of things or comparing to other people's homebrewed material, it helps reign in power creep. If 10 people all make new options for a game, and they continue to do so, at first, they'll tie it to the official materials. Then something will come up, and they'll have to make something a little different, and they'll have to do some guesswork. If they estimate it a little bit high, it's not that big of a deal. However, if the next time, someone else needs to make something that hasn't been done before, and they need to do a bit of guesswork too, and the closest parallel they can draw is the first guy's thing (and he doesn't realize it was on the high side) he could estimate a bit higher, compounding the problem, and introducing power creep. This can happen in the other direction as well, resulting in options in a particular category that are absolutely terrible, because they'e all based off of eachother, and they all keep undershooting the target.

Banging out the point estimates for the official races (and then putting in all of the USM3e Final ones after that), I saw that the USM does seem to introduce power creep. All the races are quite close to the official ones, but the average point cost seemed to be one step above the average in the official ones, and there were significantly more that were two steps above average.

You are absolutely right in that in a game like EotE that's not a big deal in and of itself. But if people go to do more homebrewed races in the future, and they use the USM as a benchmark, and they just eyeball it, there's a good chance the power will go higher again. Perhaps introducing 3 or 4 step higher races. They could also compare to some of the ones you guys did that came out a little weak, and make even weaker races still.

So yeah, a point-buy system in this sort of game doesn't need to be stuck to as gospel, but I think there's definitely value in having it for the purpose of making comparisons and evaluations.

[Edit] FYI, as mentioned in the d20Radio Forums, I'm working on a booklet to try and make this process relatively straightforward, using a point buy system of sorts. Once completed, I will put up a link here, and people will be free to comment and whatnot on what I've come up with. Hopefully it will be of use to more people than just myself, but if not, at least it will result in future time saved for me.

I'll back Cyril in that we didn't rely on mathematical formulas when doing the write-ups for the USM. Our concern wasn't "is this mathematically balanced against the core species?" and more of "does this capture the feel of the species?" We both got a fair amount of heat because we opted for the 'looks right' approach, and that's without going as far outside the box as the last couple EotE source books have gone. If either of us had tried writing up the Toydarians or Drall as FFG did, we'd have gotten blasted for making those species so "one-sided."

Ah yes. I remember that argument.

The problem with coming up with a point-buy method of allowing players to create their own species is you run the very high risk of those players min-maxing their characters to fit within a given role.

There's also the fact of the matter that being able to customize one's Characteristics to fit a given role is one of the main benefits to playing a droid. If you allow any player to twink out their character with a custom species, then the option of playing a droid becomes far less desirable, since one of their biggest advantages is offering that level of customization.

Plus, as was mentioned on the d20 Radio boards, some skills are worth more in terms of their usefulness, something that's much more difficult to put a price on. Sure on paper it may look like a free rank in Knowledge (Education) has the same XP cost as a free rank in Stealth, but Stealth is more likely to see use in play and thus provide a more tangible benefit than a free rank in Knowledge (Education), and yet that same free rank in Stealth could be seen as undervalued compared to a free rank in one of the two Piloting skills, much less a combat skill.

@Donovan Morningfire: Yes, you don't want to just give it to players and have it be part of character creation. The players end up with stronger characters due to being able to custom tailor the race to their character concept, and guaranteeing that everything synergizes with what they do.

That does seem obvious. However, I do think it's helpful for the GM to be able to make whatever races he wants to include in his game, and simplify making them reasonably balanced.

For instance, if someone wanted to use EotE to run an Andromeda game, or a Mass Effect game, or a Defiance game, or a Warhammer 40k game, or a Stargate game, or a Farscape game, they'll want a different assortment of races than the star wars ones, and making race creation pretty easy for the GM would help that be a possibility.