Half-Breeding [CHALLENGE!]

[Halcyon_Dax]

Okay, so we have half-orcs and half-elves. Why no Half-Gnomes? Half-Dwarves? Quarterlings?

In fact, I would love it if ANY two reasonably alike races could interbreed. Half-gnome/half-halfling doesnt seem too farfetched, does it?

Well, it would be rediculous to have a separate race for every possible combonation, so I come to these Inspired boards for a solution.

Can anyone devise a system for blending two races together to form a cohesive half'n'half race?

Go at it, I know there is genius enough around here to accomplish this task.

Ideally it would be a system that could be applied to all races that have similar phisiologies (SP? Dont care.) instead of just the core races, but hey, we'll see.

[Squatting_Monk]

A simple solution is to use the bloodline (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/races/bloodlines.htm) rules to get the major traits you want from each race. Saves you from having to figure out each interbreeding.

Btw... I despise fantasy half-breeds. (That's... what? The fifth time I've said that this week? :smalltongue: )

[Tauman.EXE]

Interesting idea. I think I shall work some on it later. However I got a general idea. Each race should have a small pool of powers: a few combat related and a few non combat related racial traits. Also each race should have some background traits, the player choose which background he/she has an take the modifiers from this (the back ground could be dwarfs anti-giant training or the elves sword and bow practice).

Halcyon_Dex: Personally I don't like bloodlines and replacement levels. Also the page you linked to only covers distant relations with more exotic "species" and not any gnome/halfling breeds.

[Penguinizer]

what comes to mind for me is that why arent there half-animal races (penguin,wolf, etc.).

I suppose someone who was writing the races didnt feel like making them or forgot.

[Triaxx]

Btw... I despise fantasy half-breeds. (That's... what? The fifth time I've said that this week? :smalltongue: )

They say persistance is a virtue, so if you keep saying it... Just kidding.

---

That said, I've encountered my fair share of less than inspired half breeds. Mostly half-angel/half-demons.

Interestingly, somewhere on the board, before the move so it might have vanished, there was a Half-Dwarf race. Might give you a start.

Remember when combining, that certain characteristics are negated by characteristics of the other race. Half-elves are a good example. Humans have to sleep, but Elves only meditate to rest. A half elf has to sleep, but gains a resistance to sleep because of his elven heritage.

[Golthur]

Interestingly, somewhere on the board, before the move so it might have vanished, there was a Half-Dwarf race. Might give you a start.
Yes, and it was quite well done. If I were a BBEG, I'd definitely have a squad of them as my elite bodyguards.

EDIT: Ah, Here it is (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10365).

[Beta]

From a biological perspective, you could speculate that every racial trait is the direct result from a certain gene that species posseses.

This would result that halfbreeds have for every racial trait a 50% chance of receiving it or not, since this is how it works in the real world as well ( just a little more complicated) As example, if a father carries a certain family disease that the mother doen's have, each child has a 50% chance of receiving that disease. If the mother has blue eyes and the father does not, each child has a 50% chance of receiving blue eyes.

The same thing could work for halfbreeding ADnD races. Just line up every racial trait both parents have together, lining up similar abilities next to each other, and give every halfbreed a 50% chance to receive each trait.
Using this method means that a halfbreed could potentially be much stronger than both parents (lucky rolls during character creation could give you ALL beneficial racial traits and no negative racial traits), or it could turn out very bad (unucky rolls during character creation could give you NO beneficial racial traits and all negative racial traits ).
This would be more naturelike, succesfull halfbreeds usually have the better of both sides. This is because halfbreeds with really bad results die out soon according to Darwin.

For game balance however, this could be really bad. Players playing halfbreeds could easily be overpowered or even worse, underpowered. To prevent this, you could say that if you roll up too bad results, you get to reroll all traits, just like rerolling ability stats that are to low. Another option could be counting all traits from both parents, dividing that number by 2, an randomly picking that many traits.

Or ... something, ... I dont know, whatever, someone else might think different. Balancing out game mechanics has never been my strongest point.:smallbiggrin:
so, what do you guys think of the concept itself? Every trait ; 50% , add together from both parents.

[Khantalas]

For example, if a father carries a certain family disease that the mother doesn't have, each child has a 50% chance of receiving that disease. If the mother has blue eyes and the father does not, each child has a 50% chance of receiving blue eyes.

Umm... no?

If the mother has blue eyes and the father has brown eyes, the chances of a child having blue eyes is either 50% or none, depending on the father's genetic makeup. He may have two dominant brown eye genes, one dominant brown and one recessive green eye gene, and both of these will come out "no blue eyes" (unless there's heterochromia, which will really complicate things).

A familial disease (or symptom, as it's more properly known), such as color blindness or hemophilia, may or may not be on the allosomes, and if they are, the chances depend on whether the gene that creates the symptom is on the X allosome or Y allosome and the child's gender. Adding to that the chances of cross-overs and meiosis mistakes which may result in a gamet cell having 2 allosomes, the possibilities are so confusing that I hate genetics (and we haven't even come to genetics in the course yet).

Of course, I believe that most racial traits that are passed on to the next generation without fail must be recessive genes (although having two of the same recessive genes is said to lower the chances of survival, I don't know).

Yes, this is too much science for fantasy. And you're right, this will lead to overpowered and underpowered characters. And I am bad at balancing stuff, too.

[Serakus_DeSardis]

Half-dwarves were established way back in ADnD as Muls in the Dark Sun Setting. There might be some online resources that state the racial stats, likely in 2nd ed terms but fairly easy to convert.

[Golthur]

Half-dwarves were established way back in ADnD as Muls in the Dark Sun Setting. There might be some online resources that state the racial stats, likely in 2nd ed terms but fairly easy to convert.
www.athas.org (http://www.athas.org) is the official 3.x Dark Sun site. They've converted Muls, of course.

[Halcyon_Dax]

Yeah, I wasnt the one who linked the bloodlines thing, and I agree that that doesnt work. The 50/50 thing was an interesting idea, but I usually dont like to have something important be random like that.

Heres what I was thinking:

Each type of racial trait has a certain amount of 'points' attributed to it. Really powerful traits (Like A Bonus Feat) would cost more points than an almost negligable one (+Whatever bonus versus giants). Each type of general trait would have an amount of points corresponding with it. Then you would (using this point system) get the total point value of the two races in question, then average them out. This would be the amount of points that the halfbreed could choose traits with max. Obviously the half-breed could only choose traits to spend his points on that one of the races had.

Logically, this checks out. Obviously two humans would have the same amount of 'points', so if they had a child, he would be human and his 'points' would be the same as his parents. And since he can only choose from human traits, he would gain all the traits of his parents.

For ability scores, they should (for organizations sake) come in packs of two, and each pack of two would have a certain amount of points. A character could adjust his score in accordance with his parentage. For example: A half Dwarf/Half Elf could choose to adjust his Con positive 2 or negative 2 or 0, His dex positive 2 or 0, and his cha negative 2 or 0. Obviously taking negative abiliites would have to give 'points' back to spend on other traits.

Im poor balance-wise, so Ill refrain from asigning points to any traits.

Any thoughts on this idea/ points to asign?
If not Ill post some later.

[Golthur]

Any thoughts on this idea/ points to asign?
If not Ill post some later.
Like this? (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=667683)

I haven't looked it over in detail, but it seems like what you're talking about.

[Beta]

to Khantalas,

You're right, my description of reality wasn't completely true, reason for this is that I didn't want to go into details too much. I thought I had mentioned that in my post, but I guess it got deleted along with some other pieces of text I deleted before posting.

Also about the eye colours, I completely forgot about green eyes, only taking into account brown and blue, like the textbook example of fenotypes and genotypes. In such a case, the father could either be an homozygoot, which would lead to 100% brown-eyed heterozygoot children, or he could be an heterozygoot, which would result in 50% blue-eyed children and 50% brown-eyed children. Either way, all four of the parrental alleelen has a 50% chance of being inherrited and since in dnd, there's no way of telling which traits are dominant or reccesive, I didn't mention it at, trying to keep it simple. :smallbiggrin:

And by the way, what's a gynosome? I don't think I ever heard of it, and neither has my good friend Google

[kanachi]

well what you have to look out for really is firstly "is something a racial trait or a life experience trait?"... basically by this I mean that a +2 bonus to dex is genetic, its a physical benefit from being of a certain race, however being particularly skilled against "whatever monster" is a life experience trait, its something you pick up through living you not born with limbs of giant dodging, you simply learn to dodge them through training and life.

So I say pick which of the two (or more) societies the character grew up in and they therefore draw any life experience traits from that society. Then you role off to a good genetic trait against an equal one (or two is one trait is very strong). Or you could do a kind of point buy system with your DM.

Either way you should work it out with your dm.

Also if you pick to gain your life experience traits from a society that is obviously more beneficial you should sacrifice good genetic traits to equal the equation or except a level adjustment (if you really want to be an excellent example of a mergence between two races).

[Khantalas]

Uh... What gynosome? I never said such a thing!

[Cocktail Umbrellas]

This isn't as great in terms of assigning traits and skills- but for determining appearance, why not make tables of possible outcomes and roll for them? So if you've got something half gnome half human, you'd take possible physical traits of each, list 'em and roll to see what you get. This probably works better with wilder mixes (I'm thinking of Tiefling tables... those should still be on the interweb someplace... here (http://www.ekkaia.org/rpg/dnd/ps/tiefling.pdf)) but I think it would still work with not-so wild mixes. Something to try and it would avoid chatter about chromosomes, alleles and inheritance in general (reality is complicated, dice make unreality so easy :smallbiggrin:)

As for half animal races, the closest thing I can think of are guardinals (http://www.planewalker.com/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.php?intEntryID=95), but I think if you called them half animals it’d be a bad time hehe ^_~ And it might be a little more than difficult to convince a DM to let a player play as one.

The 50% chance thing seems reasonable for assigning skills, though something that is less likely to be over or under powered would probably be ideal. Buuut, I really can't think of any other suggestions, these sorts of rules are really not my forté hehe.

[Mauril Everleaf]

ive kinda done this in my campaign already. i took the base races (human, dwarf, elf, orc and gnome) and wrote up combinations for all of them. since all the half human races were done up for me (half-elf and half-orc being present, half-dwarf being posted here, and i called halflings half-gnomes) this just left me with the combinations of the demi-human races. the only one that was really viable as a pc race was a dwarf-gnome, and they were pretty similar, so i just combined the stats, and they balanced out pretty well. dwarves, elves and orcs all hate each other with such passion that there would never be enough interbreeding to constitute a race. and if a base race bred with a half-race, i just assumed that it was a 75% base race, and made them congruent with the base race in everything but culture (wherein they are shunned, but slightly less than the half-races). maybe that helps, maybe it doesnt, but thats what i did.