[3.5e Bloodline Guide] What in the Nine Hells is a Bloodline?

[Owrtho]

After some further thought, I think you're right about the Blooded needing some tweaking, Owthro. They start out with significant disadvantages, as you said, but they quickly begin making up for it, especially if they take their racial paragon. Which is just scary. With two major, one intermediate, they get 8 ability +1s. If you choose the correct bloodlines to get those bonuses in the same areas, you have quite a bit of power there. And the bloodlines become looking particularly wonderful to casters that desire the mental boosts that they find so rare in races.

That was my general concern. The race almost requires their paragon to not be terrible, but then if they take it, in 3 levels they practically get another class that they progress while taking levels in anything else. One thought I had was possibly giving them a 'free' bloodline level (thus allowing them to take an intermediate without needing to give anything up), then removing one of the latent bloodlines from the paragon (likely the level 2 one, and moving the bloodline level down to it's place from level 3). They would still be potentially powerful, but less so (if only slightly).

Though looking at it, doing so would allow for 2 major bloodlines and 1 minor. providing a total of +7 ability modifiers, as well as a smattering of other abilities, in exchange for -4 to abilities and 4 levels (3 paragon, 1 bloodline), which when compared to some other races with LA/HD doesn't seem that bad. Thoughts?

When I had original thought of a race or class using my bloodlines, the idea always revolved around changing which bloodlines were active at any given time. Though you may have the blood of eight different supernatural beings, they can't all manifest at once. The character usually started with a single Major Bloodline and access to two or three bloodlines. They could then spend a quantity of time assigning which bloodline was actually active within their Major. And then you can have all sorts of fun with Mudblood, as you can actually have all three active at once. So with this system, it eliminates some of the immediate dangers of the massive numbers of bloodlines, while still keeping it usable and interesting.

Well, that would actually be closer to TravelLog's idea. While I think it's a good idea that would be worth making, the idea of the blooded was for a race that would could have more than the normal bloodline strength on its own.

Still in part it can be somewhat difficult to judge bloodlines from a balance perspective at least with races. Namely as their scaling nature can make them overly weak at early levels, or overly strong at later ones (depending on what factors you give the race to try balancing it.

Owrtho