Golem race would be bit different. Healed only by channelers golem-heal, tarma
could not heal em. Would spice up channelers a bit. Could need some quality
golem made by channu to reinc into one. Kinda like infuse soul into golem
body.

In some other game systems characters stats are not depended about their
race and player is allowed to freely to build it up. In some systems physical
stats are given minimums and maximums according to race. Then there is game
systems where races define all your stats.
Systems that allow more freely character build up have players that play
certain race because they think its most coolest of em all, instead of being
forced to play certain races because the system (more or less) demands them to
play those races.
You could make races unique having their own special abilities (thus letting
loose ogre-mages, duck barbarians, tinman miners and cyclop healers) and make
them stand more or less in the same line in power section. My idea would be
that you would choose your exp rate, ticking & stats when making the character
(races would age differently, e.g. tinmans get age when rusting vampiers get
age from sunlight, phoenix would gain less age when dying exp on, ect) and
while everyone gets the same starting point (except rebirthers get more) there
would be freedom to play any race because you would not be rambled down from a
wrong race selection.
Or you could continue the same drill and tune the races every now and then
resulting a race rush every time a guild gets tuned or a new nifty item gets
to play that can counter some problems in some race.

A hits you.

What Gore is considering really makes no difference whether you have 10 races
or 100 races. In a system where the mass majority of your power comes from
race stats, there will ultimately always be 1 or 2 BEST races for a particular
character combination (tarmadruid, offtank, deftank, blaster) and most people
will gravitate towards those best races because it gives them the most utility
and best chance to get parties, make exp/cash/eq, and so forth.

One way to get around this, which has been done successfully to some extent, is
to offer UNIQUE bonus abilities or handicaps to particular races, along with
rate tunes (like exp rates) to certain overpowered or handicapped races.

Elves can walk silently past aggro\'s in the outworld. (very nice mining
bonus!)
Ducks can fly, and swim naturally.
Undead races can walk the ocean bottom, or so I\'ve heard.
Skeletons (used to) be impervious to stun.
Gnomes get tinkering abliity.

And so on.

Taking a dimension like base stats out of a game or flatlining stats to be much
more similar is a horrible idea, which is essentially what \"balancing\" them
in terms of being able to be a duck barbarian or ogre magi would do.

My next reinc is going to be into Gnome, not because they\'re the statistical
favorite for mining or spellcasting in the merchant class. It\'s because they
get that cool ability called tinkering, and I want to mess with building
apparatuses.

Differentiate races through UNIQUE abilities.

Another mechanism to prompt variety of race among the playerbase would be to
make any given races stats/exprate/luck/something fluxuate up or down
dependant on how many active players are in that race. If 50 centaurs are
actively playing out of an active player base of 200, penalize the race. If
there\'s only a few active skeletons in the game, their stats increase. This
gives the effect of naturally balancing out the races, making less desirable
races more inviting through bonuses, and making overpopulated races less
impressive.

Something to that effect, of course with appropriate alterations for the invite
only races.

On a similar note, I know by now I would have tried alot more varied reincs if
it didn\'t cost SO DAMN MUCH to do it, in terms of cash, but also exp. Why do
I have to wait 3 friggin months after a reinc to get a low exp loss? What is
the purpose there? Punish me for wanting to try a new flavor of character? And
why do I pay the same amount in cash to make a level 80 character as somebody
with 500 mil totals? Do you REALLY believe the lvl 80 with 500 mil totals will
make cash at the same rate I do with lvl 80 and 100 mil totals?

I simply can\'t afford to reinc and try new things often - most players can\'t,
and that is really, really DUMB..

I like the idea of just differentiating the races that currently exist.

As you can probably see, I\'m a fairly new player. I\'ve been playing on and
off for a year, and as BatMUD is my first mud ever, I\'d like to think that I
have a fresh perspective to offer.

In regards to races, the same problem cropped up on EverQuest--ultimately there
was one \"best\" race for any given class. As a result, new players who didn\'t
pick that \"best\" combination got left out of a lot of stuff simply because
they had 10 points less here or 5 points less there. They were excluded from
high-level equipment runs, and a vicious cycle ensued.

I exaggerate, but only slightly.

The same thing seems to happen in BatMUD, only with guilds moreso than races,
but also with races to some extent. I\'ve been told that minotaurs are
worthless tanks (not enough DEX) just as often as I\'ve been told that Lords
of Chaos is a worhtless guild, and have had MANY people tell me I should reinc
right away and change to \"insert this person\'s favorite combination here\".


I\'ve always thought that it would be quite interesting if each race guild had
more possible levels and offered race-specific skills. I realize it\'s not
remotely practical to make race guilds into full-fledged guilds--people who
have been playing forever will complain, I understand--but even adding another
5 levels or something similar, and granting unique (but appropriately costly)
skills during those 5 levels might be awfully interesting.

Just to throw out an example--I\'m a minotaur. I\'ve wished for the longest
time that I had a way to boost the damage of my additional horn attack.,
without being required to be a 150M character and go on mythical equipment
runs to areas I\'ve never heard of before.

So, what if there existed, say, a skill called \"Gore\", that acted like a
weapon skill for horns? That would certainly help differentiate minotaur from
other tanks by giving them a bit more of an offensive focus, which seems to be
how the minotaur racial \"in-play information\" is geared. (Call it the
role-playing information or whatever you wish.) Plus it would go a little way
to offsetting the fact that we can\'t wear helmets and full suits of armor and
(as far as I know) never get any minotaur-specific headgear.

\"Gore\" was just an example. I would provide mor, and, in fact, a few months
back I drew up a pretty extensive list of these ideas, but I tossed it out
because I figured, realisitically, they had no shot of ever succeeding.

Anyway, there you go. Enjoy.