Talk:Sylva (3.5e Race)

Rating Response
Nalrashido: Give me a good example of what to do. Sorry I'm still very new to this. I was wondering if instead of Low light Vision I could give it Bio luminescence if possible, I would welcome any opinions that any could offer


 * Well, the +2 to four different ability scores (so it's a +8 net gain, which enhances Ghostwheel's initial complaint) is kind of a killer. You may notice that most of the SRD ones follow the "+2 to one score, -2 to another score" method. This doesn't necessarily make them good, but it's a reasonable place to start for an LA +0 race. So your options are twofold:


 * Give it Racial Hit Dice. Level Adjustment is just flat-out not good; please don't consider it.
 * Reduce the abilities given to match LA +0 standards. This is pretty simple; just pick one of the four to keep and strike the rest off.


 * As for other things, you can probably do more to enhance the plant nature of the race. Bio-luminescence is fine as an example, provided you have the ability to suppress it if undesirable. The controlling plants is probably fine since clerics don't actually use turning attempts for turning most of the time anyway (they use them for Divine Metamagic), so as long as the ability uses are strictly for that it seems decent although still kind of elf-like. You may be better off using the bio-luminescence and such as a launchpad for emphasizing the traits of it actually having a plant-like form rather than just being a treehugger. - TG Cid (talk) 07:16, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * [Edit Conflict, have not read what Cid wrote] Well, I think Ghost is worried that there's not a lot of new going on in the fluff above, but you're working at it and it'll happen as it does. The mechanical stuff is a bit more problematic. You give 4 +2 bonuses, and there aren't any races out there with that sort of boost that don't also have a Level Adjustment associated with it. You're trying to give a lot more than the core races because you want to match the idea of the race you have in your head, but you're not charging for it appropriately. Once you've got a good sense of the abilities you want them to have, look back over it and see how many levels you think then need to give up in order to get that extra stuff. And then give them that many racial hit dice (or level adjustment I guess, but I'm not a fan of that implementation personally).


 * Also, you can sign your posts by clicking on the sign link at the bottom or by typing ~ after your text. And welcome aboard:-) - Tarkisflux Talk 07:25, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Okay I'm gonna get rid of the Weapon Proficiency, and the racial bonuses to Spot,Listen and Search. I still think that it would be good for them to have bioluminescence and plant control. Still thinking of how the bioluminescence will work on them -Nalrashido (talk) 07:41, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Okay now lets make them immune to the effects of age,they can still die through injuries and afflictions Nalrashido (talk) 08:22, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Can I add +2 charisma or is that too much? Nalrashido (talk) 09:11, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

On Design
Alright, this is probably going to be fairly long, so hang in there, I'll try to make this as entertaining as possible while getting across the information I'll need to say. Let's start with the flavor text first, since that comes first and gives readers the first impression about what they're getting into and what to expect. This really boils down to having a really good summary to intrigue the reader and make them want to read the rest of the article. Let's see what you've got for us:

"Sylva are a curious race of botanical humanoids. The first Sylva sprouted through the White Tree about 300 years ago. It is believed that Obad Hai or some deity of Nature planted the seed."

Okay, in the first sentence we've got some confusion due to some meaning around the word "curious". You could interpret it as something like "Sylva are a curiously strange race of botanical humanoids." or "Sylva are a botanical humanoid race possessed of curiosity." Heck, you might even mean both cases here as "The sylva are an intriguing botanical race of humanoids known for their curious inclinations."

As we continue to examine the next couple sentences, there's some specifics we don't need in there. Since DMs and players are likely going to have to fit it into their game how they can, "about" and "roughly" are more important than "300 years ago". So, let's see what we can do with a quick rewrite:

The sylva are a race of inquisitive plant-like humanoids who first sprouted from the mystical White Tree in a recent age.

There, short and to the point. Things like the White Tree can be brought up and elaborated upon in the flavor text below. We don't need to know anything more than that in the summary. Leaving it vague is actually helpful to DMs and players because, well, a little mystery is good and it makes it easier for people who use this to fit it into their games. Also, you can add or remove some of these headers if you don't feel you need them. More on this in a bit.

At this point, we've established that they're humanoids. We'll get to why this is very important later and if we need to change that. Now, into the meat of the flavor text. We'll continue to have to be a bit vague or open in our descriptions from here on out, because like I've mentioned, it actually reads better that way. Also, we'll need to provide enough information for our readers to get an idea of what to do with the race but not so much information that it limits what they might want to do with it. This can be tricky.

Okay, the Personality header. This one is easy to screw up. It has to be open enough to allow roleplaying opportunities for multiple character classes and still be functional for NPC commoners and average folk. You reiterate and establish that they're curious, but that's it. It's certainly not exciting and doesn't really give us much to go on and show us how they're really different from humans in general. Does their curiosity prevent them from focusing on certain details, making them appear aloof? Does their curiosity manifest as a compulsive disorder? Does their curiosity make them prone to trickery (are they gullible because they just have to know?)? What about their racial abilities that affect their personality? Surely the things they do make them different in how they act. Tell us that! Readers want to know these things.

Now we're into Physical Description. This is another important one, since it gives players and DMs an idea of how they're supposed to describe these things to everyone else around the table. There's the old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words, well, since you don't have a picture, give us those thousand words. Okay, a thousand might be overdoing it, but we need something. Is their skin bark-like? What kind of texture does it have? What color is it? Where do they have leaves at? What colors are their eyes? What shape are their leaves? Do they have any other unusual feature like long fingers, pointy ears, lack of fingernails, extra toes, elongated torsos and short limbs? What color is their glow? How bright is it? Can they suppress it? Does it happen in reaction to something or just dark areas or automatically on some biological clock between sundown and sunrise? What are their children like? What about their elders? Do they change at all when they age? Do they like tattoos? Do they scar easily? Do they get fat? Are their builds stocky or lanky? See how I just listed a whole load of questions there. Consider answering some of those within the race's text. I didn't even get into what they like to wear or how they walk and present themselves, because that's important too. We know a dwarf is generally serious and throws his weight around to compensate for his height. We know elves generally walk tall and proud, with grace. These things are just in our heads from exposure elsewhere. Sylva are something new, we need to know these things. One last bit on this topic, the part about what they eat doesn't belong in this section. As I mentioned earlier, you can make new headers, something like "Habits" or "Behavior" could work, or you could lump this under Personality if you want. Moving on!

The Relations header is less important, and this is usually because DMs and players need to figure out how the race fits in with their world, so, speaking in generalities rather than specific races and giving reasons is better here. Knowing they hate orcs is less helpful than knowing they hate races that pillage the natural world and despoil resources, even though orcs may do these things. Again in this section you mention their curiosity, which seems to be the only thing I really know about them at this point... until I learn that the sylva are badass at crafting arms and armor. This is unexpected and something that immediately feels at contrast with curious plant guys. Plants that love standing over a forge, hammering out iron? What madness is this? Do they simply wish to shatter our preconceptions of plant-like nature races? Suddenly I'm intrigued. This is an important piece of information about them, and when introduced, should be introduced clearly. I'm making a big deal of this because later on, we find out something else that flips this idea once again (but still also needs explanation).

Alignment is often best kept short, and really just needs to explain "why". That is, why are they aligned like they are? Saying that they are a varied group doesn't say why they're usually neutral. Saying that their inquisitive nature makes them open to many viewpoints does. Their lack of an established ancestral history might even play into their alignment inclinations. Put some work into this. We need to know why.

Lands and Religion really are both about their culture, so I'll be discussing them at the same time. Since D&D tends to treat races as having a single culture (often, but not always), that's fine to do. We gotta know more of that "why" once again, because there will likely be situations where players and DMs are going to have to fit this into a campaign setting where things might be just a bit different and need to do some problem solving. We don't really need to know the name of their apparently singular city (knowing they have a rather low population would be important though) or the names of gods they worship. We do need to know that they isolate themselves in wooden forest cities and worship deities with particular domains or portfolios (and why). Heck, tell us what the cities look like at night when these guys are glowing all over the place. This is fantasy stuff, don't be afraid to write some fantastical things.

The leaf/wood manipulation/shaping sounds cool and totally changes the idea established earlier about "forging". These things need to be mentioned together for cohesion when they are introduced, since "forging" carries with it a lot of mental imagery. Since we're deep into this culture thing at this point, we might as well talk about what their houses are like, if they live in family groups, how their government works, if they have a strong working class or mostly peasants and lords. This stuff serves as the "default" of the race. DMs and players can change it how they see fit, but having a good starting point makes it more likely anyone will use this article.

Ah, Language, often an area of missed opportunity. Sure, you can just say "this is what they speak, the end" and move on. You could even go into saying that the reason they know certain languages is due to neighbors or trade or plotting against their enemies, but you'd be missing out on some fun stuff. What they sound like and how they say things can be interesting too. What their alphabet is like, if they have an unusual dialect and how they record their history (or don't) are all important and interesting aspects of language. Maybe they like books. Maybe they carve their daily journals into giant trees, starting from the bottom. Give us some cool stuff.

Lastly for flavor, we've got Names, another section that often gets overlooked for creative, fun things. You could just list some male and female names to start. You could go into syllable structures of names and meanings of names or if they don't care and just crib these names from elsewhere, seeing as how they don't have much racial history. Maybe they want to establish a racial history. You could go into how they name other things too, like cities, weapons and well, basically anything they create or own. All that stuff helps out DMs and players.

That's about it for the flavor, just a couple things before we get into mechanics.

On formatting for a moment, race names should be lower case when within sentences, such as humans and pigmen or some such thing. Another common error I'm seeing is not having a space after a comma. There are some other goofs in there, like missing periods and possessive-form apostrophes. Since you're going to have to go over everything anyways, you can catch that all then.

Making a race can be tricky. I find it very helpful to start by just making a list of things I want to include. Little bits of ideas about various attributes and abilities so I can figure out what they are during this concept development stage rather than when I'm trying to write out whole sentences to describe what kind of buildings they live in. From a design standpoint, you'll want to make sure your race gets a few important things, and they are: An ability that can be used at all levels of play that's easy to remember and fun to use, an ability that you can use in combat or out of combat that's unique and finally, an ability that's probably not all that useful, but serves to further their flavor. Sometimes these things can overlap, but the focus is "give them something that you'll want to use and makes them feel like their own thing". Alright, on to the mechanics, what makes it so people can actually use this race in a game.

Ability score modifiers are up first. They're often the thing people check first when considering a race, so a penalty to something can be a huge turn off. We know with ability score modifiers, what classes to expect out of a given race. Here, we've got it geared toward wisdom-based casters off the bat. This means that below, we can probably expect to see abilities that augment or compliment that character choice. However, in order to tip the scales, you can provide abilities that seem counter-intuitive and actually provide bonuses to characters which fall outside that basic wisdom-based caster mold.

Now, type and subtype are important. They determine how a lot of spells and effects and such relate to them. In the flavor, we've got a bit of troubling confusion that gives us a bit of a dilemma. We've mentioned that they're humanoids, but also plants. Both of those are types. Now, write-arounds exist to allow us to get the benefit of certain things and the drawbacks of others. To me, from what I've read, these guys are actually plants shaped like humanoids (in the same regards that many fey creatures are also humanoid in shape). So, what does this mean? Do we want them to have all those bonuses associated with the plant type? Probably not. Do we want them to be treated as plants or as humanoids? Well, that's the question, isn't it. With write-arounds, you can always say "Yeah, they're plant-typed creatures, but they don't get plant bonuses and they wear armor shaped for humanoids (as per humanoid armor costs). Plus, as plants, they aren't affected by spells which specifically target the humanoid type, but they take double damage from fire effects or whatever." -or- "Yeah, they're humanoids, but they get some bonuses attributed to plant-creatures, take double damage from fire effects and don't need to sleep." or whatever you want to go with. This is important, so read about those types and figure out what you want to do, since Humanoid (Plant) doesn't jive.

Size and speed are fine. Moving on.

That +2 savings bonus feels totally out of place from anything discussed up to this point. It's not mentioned in the flavor text at all. Either drop it entirely, or make a point to talk about why in the flavor text above.

Okay, gonna lump both Plant Defiance and Control Plants into one little talk here. Sure, they're abilities and you could use them. Plant creatures are fairly rare and you might not ever get to, however. So, balance for these is a bit rough, since it's entirely campaign dependent (you could fight a ton of plant creatures if that was the campaign, or not at all). From a design standpoint, it's annoying. It also doesn't fit with anything mentioned in the flavor text. We know they manipulate the shapes of plants, but nothing is mentioned about manipulating the behavior of plant creatures. Also, since we know they manipulate the shapes of plants, there should be an ability in the mechanics to reflect this... but there isn't. As a recommendation, drop these two abilities and replace them with something else that defines their abilities to manipulate the shapes of plants (and perhaps animates plants similarly to animate objects with some sort of scaling by level sort of thing for size, duration and amount at any given time, or heck, animating plants to serve as replacements for animals like summons, but plants like "I made a flying palm eagle to scout for us" or "I'm riding a shrub horse!"). Anything about their ability to craft would be good to mention here as well.

Now, their bioluminescence is off to a start as a fun flavor ability, but is missing some things. It's basically light, centered on themselves, and that's fine. We need to know the brightness of the light and if this is an extraordinary (Ex) ability or a supernatural (Su) one, or perhaps even a spell-like (Sp) one if you go that route (in which case, you'll need to make mention of that caster level and spell resistance information type stuff).

Blah blah, not much else to mention on anything else. Yeesh that was long. Hope you got something out of this. --Ganteka Future (talk) 22:01, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Guild Wars 2
Why not just call them Sylvari and be done with it? White/Pale tree... check. Bio-luminescence... check. Inquisitiveness... check. Humanoid but made from wood/leaves/etc... check. --Ghostwheel (talk) 22:06, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Wonderful... let me start from scratch....At the moment I'm changing a lot of things.... I think I'll name the tree something else... I'm using Gaelic Scottish and Irish references so I have to change a lot hopefully I get this right.  Nalrashido (talk) 05:31, 17 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Now I'm not sure if I should add Bio-luminescence... Nalrashido (talk) 04:44, 20 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Does Animate plant sound broken? Nalrashido (talk) 05:53, 17 March 2013 (UTC)


 * First, let's talk about the ability to generate light and the power it carries in game. At first level, a character can purchase torches for cheap, or lanterns for a bit more. These methods are so cheap they're basically free after first level since they generally require holding one in your hand. By second level, a character can afford an everburning torch for 50 gp and just stick it on their belt or something. There's also the light spell, which is cheap, long lasting and readily available. Making basic light is easy, available and cheap. Having a character be able to generate light on command, even at first level, is very low power to the point of being a flavor ability, especially when darkvision and low-light vision are prevalent. At higher levels (like 3rd level and up), being able to generate basic light is something everyone should be able to do with gear for very low expense (wands of light, continual flames stolen out of dungeons, sunrods, torches, lanterns, that sort of stuff). If you wanted to rethink giving these guys a light-generating ability, you could probably manage it, since even the little power boost it gives is quickly overshadowed very early on by cheap supplies.
 * As for the Animate Plants ability, currently, yes, is not balanced. You're basically giving out a free 7th level spell to 1st level characters. Some re-scaling will help here quite a bit. Starting with a tiny object as your base might be appropriate. Also, you'll probably want to mention that caster level for this ability is equal to character level. Below is a rough adjustment to the Animate Plants ability useful for brainstorming and tinkering. It bases animating plants off his HD instead of caster level and the plants stay animated for as long as he wants (less tracking of durations, functions more like a druid's animal companion this way, but weaker).
 * Animate Plants (Su): As a standard action, a sylva may target a living (but inanimate) plant within 30 feet. The targeted plant then becomes animated, as though by animate objects (using the stats of appropriately sized objects for these plants). Such plants animated in this fashion are under the sylva's control for the duration when they return to their previous state.
 * At first level, a sylva may animate one Tiny or smaller plant which remains animated until he dismisses it or it is killed. As a sylva grows in power, so too does his ability to animate plants. He may animate a number of HD of plants up to his HD, though, the strongest plant he may animate can be no higher than his HD-2 (he may still animate a up to a Tiny plant at first level). Attempting to animate more plants than his limit allows causes the oldest animated plants to de-animate first.
 * As a swift action, a sylva can send a mental command to one of his animated plants.
 * This ability has no effect on non-living plant material (such as wooden planks) or plant creatures.
 * That's all I've got for you today. --Ganteka Future (talk) 05:13, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

OK now because they have wood for skin I was thinking of adding a sort of minor barkskin like effect for example they get +1 to natural armor and that's it. Nalrashido (talk) 21:08, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

OK waiting for any advice you could give I hope the changes are ok Nalrashido (talk) 05:56, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

I might just call them "Woodborn" instead Nalrashido (talk) 04:48, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

What else is missing for it to be considered complete?Nalrashido (talk) 06:45, 31 March 2013 (UTC)