Subraces Pack : Genasi

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Hi, it's been long time since I played and modded IWD2 the last time, more than 4 years. I worked on "Subraces Pack" Tioma's Mods: Baldur's Gate, IceWind Dale adding Sun and Wood Elves (but it's not a big deal). Now I wanna complete my old idea of implementing Genasi too. Here what I'm planning to do :

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All Genasi are ECL +1 and start with the same XP as aasimar and tieflings. They have darkvision.

Air Genasi
Abilities: +2 Dex, +2 Int, -2 Wis, -2 Cha
electric resistance +10
Special Ability: (modified level-dependent) Whirlwind 1/day

Earth Genasi
Abilities: +2 Str, +2 Con, -2 Wis, -2 Cha
acid resistance +10
Special Ability: Stoneskin 1/day

Fire Genasi
Abilities: +2 Int, -2 Cha
fire resistance +10
Special Ability: (modified level-dependent) Aganazzar's Scorcher 1/day

Water Genasi
Abilities: +2 Con, -2 Cha
cold resistance +10
Special Ability: Smashing Wave 1/day
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For the sake of comparison, IWD2 Aasimars and Tieflings have +5 resistance to fire, cold and electricity (among other abilities).

Any comments or ideas ?

Yigor/Tioma

P.S. Genasi are extraplanar human creatures with "elemental blood" in their veins. Similarily, Fey'ri are elementaly planetouched elves, so I can implement them too.

Hmm ... and elementaly planetouched half-elves ? I guess we could call them Feynasi or Gey'ri.

 

The resistances that AAsimar and thiefling recieves are +5 resistance, not 5%. 5 resistance means that they ignore the first 5 points of damage from each attack of that element. If you would do it the same way with your races (with the +20), three of them would become almost immune to that kind of damage in normal mode. The earth genesi then becomes quite overpowered. If you manage to implement the %-values they become better balanced. Otherwise I would consider a +10 resistance in one elemental type equal or even slightly better than +5 in three and a resistance to bludgeon damage really powerful against quite a few foes.

Also the earth genesi recieves a bit too good stat upgrades. A half-Orc has to "pay" in 2 stats to get the bonus in strength.

A way to balance everything better would be to give the air, fire and water a resistance of +10-15 to the ones they have against (or +20 of you plan on making them almost immune). The stat bonuses on them are ok.
Give the earth maybe +5-10 against cold and +2-5 against bludgeon and maybe +4 con or +1 str, +2con with the same -2wis, -2cha.

and what is "Free Action"?

 

Your post looks as if you don't know the huge difference between resistances in 2E and 3E and is therefore pretty confusing. You should edit it.

The air genasi is inferior the tiefling subrace, less ability points and less useful resistances. With 20 points of electric resistance you replace the +1 for vs. all electric- and air-based spells with electrical immunity, but even this overcompensation isn't enough to even out the tiefling resistances.
I'd consider adding a few little benefits for balancing reasons. (like a free "scion of storms" feat)

For the earth genasi 10 points of resistance to bludgeon damage is a lot, considering that even morningstars do only 1d8 damage. It won't make a difference vs the goblin and orc hordes using slashing and piercing weapons, but ogres, bugbears, monks or other blunt damage dealers won't be threatening any more if they'll have to hit for at least 11 damage for a little scratch. If the resistance is cumulative with stoneskin even 20 damage won't do any harm.
For balancing reasons 5-8 points of bludgeoning resistance should be sufficient.

The fire genasi is similar to the air genasi, fire immunity is a little more useful than electric immunity, but he's still inferior to the tiefling.

The water genasi is weak, weaker than aasimar or tiefling. Even without considering the ECL penalty the shield dwarf is superior.
The air and fire genasi had at least +2 int which can make their spells harder to resist if you choose to play a (specialist) mage, but for other classes they are pretty weak too.

 

Hey Mudde and kmonster, thanx a lot for your comments! I didn't play D&D RPGs during 4 years, so sorry for mistakes. I'll make necessary corrections using your advices.

P.S. I've just changed elemental resistances to +10 and bludgeon resistance to +5 in the case of earth genasi. I should leave now, so I'll make other adjustments later.

How about Fey'ris ?

 

You might want to take a look at how those subraces were implemented in NWN2:
http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Races

 

I see that I differ somewhat from kmonster when considering the usefullness om one high resistance.
Having a high elemental resistance of one type really gives some great new options.
I planned once to make a character with a high enough electrical resistance to be safe against most attacks from the very powerful but dangerous "cloudkiss". a +5 bonus combined with boots isn't enough and many protection spells don't last long enough and are of quite high lvl. The air genesi gains enough protection to make that possible and don't loose much (-2wis) compared to the quite powerful race thiefling. But a resistance of +15 could probably make air genesi even more used without being broken.

Fire genesi can be very useful as a magician and aren't worse than thiefling but a +15 could probably be used here too.

Earth is still a bit too good and a no-brainer for a general fighter-type.

Water genesi is the worst choice here and could need a boost to be equally powerful as the others.

 

Hey kmonster and Mudde, thanx again! I've glanced in NWN2 implementation and it turns out that their water genasi are resistent to cold when earth genasi are resisent to acid. Actually, dats good cuz it balances better these 2 subraces. I've replaced also the resistance to bludgeon with Stoneskin 1/day for earth genasi. In the case of air genasi, I've replaced an inexistent Free Action with Call Ligntning.

Any additional ideas/comments/remarks ?

 

For the water genasi I'd replace "rainstorm" which - in spite of it's name - appears to be a quite useless air spell with "smashing wave" which has more in common with "create water" (also a level 5 druid spell).

 

Non-detection is junk. How about Blur?

Regardless, this class makes half-orc useless.

Nobody would take this with Air Gensai available.

Not worth the ECL penalty compared to dwarves. Not as good as Earth Gensai.

 

kmonster : done, I put Smashing Wave instead of Rainstorm

JT : I made substantial changes, now Earth Genasi have Stoneskin 1/day (cf. the first post). It's close to NWN2 implementation of this subrace. High fire resistance is probably the most useful, so fire genasi is interesting option anyway. Water genasi is now modified with cold resistance and Smashing Wave 1/day.

I've started to work on it hoping to finish this week. Subraces slots are hardcoded so the mod will propose to install 1-4 genasi (as well as sun and wood elves) into 7 human, elf and/or half-elf slots (of your own choice). It means that you should reinstall before starting an other game. Example1 : you have 2 parties, one with humans and elfs and second with genasi. Then you should install genasi before playing the second game and uninstall it before playing the first. Example2 : you wanna make a group with tiefling, drow and 4 genasi. Then you should install those genasi into human's, aasimar's, moon's and wild elf's slots and uninstall after playing if necessary. Example3: you don't use half-elves in your current parties but have fire genasi. Then install it into half-elf's slot, it's not necessary to uninstall in this case.

In conclusion, there will be no restrictions despite of hardcoding, only certain unavoidable annoyance with install/uninstall. The mod will be compatible with other WeiDU mods, for example, with Undead Targos or my own Cleric Domains. Btw, I should add head genasi deities to that mode, if you have descriptions of their domain spells, pliz let me know!

Yigor

 

Hey Taluntain,

I've just replied you. Take care,

Tioma

 

Recent modifications : Aganazzar's Scorcher for fire genasi (it sounds more interesting than Burning Hands) and Lightning Bolt for air genasi (Call Lightning works only outside). I'm planning to create later a minor version of Whirlwind.

Take care, Tioma

 

Scorecher and burning hands are both junk. If you used fireball, how would it calculate the caster level? A 2d6 or 3d6 fireball would be fair.

 

sorcerer of a same level?

 

JT: Fireball is a too powerfull and overused spell. Without modifications, it will give 1d6/level up to 20d6.

mata5 : JT meant Aganazzar's Scorcher spell not Sorcerer.

 

I know, but he also asked how would you determine damage of the fireball, and I said "Sorcerer of the same level?"

 

I'd take "static charge" than "lightning bolt" for the air genasi since it represents the uncontrollable elemental power better than the aimable old standard spell for mages to study.

If you know how to edit spells change the "Stoneskin" special ability of the earth genasi to cast on self so you don't have to select a target when using it.
In general I'd consider to remove the level caps and change the casting times of the special abilities to instantaneous to simulate that's an natural ability instead of the learned and performed spell.
For the fire genasi you could edit his "Aganazzar's Scorcher" to do level dependent damage so that it's not overpowered at the start and useless at the end or just use an uncapped "burning hands" instead.

Although your genasi look a little more powerful than the NWN2 ones they're still not as powerful as aasimars or tieflings.
The spell abilities look powerful at the first glance but at low levels spell effects are low too and once you can cast level 8-9 spells it doesn't really matter if your party can cast one level 5 spell more or less per day.
You can even add more funny special abilities to get the balance, I don't know if the genasi fans rather want them close to the D&D rules or balanced compared to the other -1 ECL races.

 

mata5 : I've got it now.

kmonster: okay for Static Charge, modified Stoneskin and level-dependent Aganazzar's Scorcher. Thanx again for your comments!

Btw how about Whirlwind ? It's not that powerfull and suits perfectly to air genasi.

Tioma

 

I finished Air Genasi and tested it a bit. At the moment, I put Whirlwind as a special ability. I could modify Air Genasi's Whirlwind and make it level-dependent, for example. Any ideas ?