Talk:Shocker Lizard, Civilized (3.5e Race)

Comments on Balance

Sorry for this being a long post, there's a lot to discuss and explain.

Alright, this race gets a lot of goodies. Race design is hard and I'm not going to pretend I've always gotten it right myself. Even after revision. There's a lot of weird, complicated factors that come into play with associated and non-associated bonuses as well as benefits that continue to be relevant versus ones that drop off in relevancy as characters level.

In race design, players pick races (typically) that grant them associated bonuses and try to minimize any associated penalties, things that directly grant boons or hinderances to the thing they want to do or perform well at. If all your penalties are non-associated, hindering things you're already bad at or don't care about, then such characters may end up over-performing unexpectedly. This is something to keep in mind for racial ability scores, giving out only physical boons and only mental penalties goes to some effort to assist players in min-maxing that decision. That said, +2/+2/–2/–2 is usually okay since you'll end up with some sort of unavoidable defensive or proactive deficiency, even if minimal (Sense Motive, Perception skills, the sorts of really common skill rolls that can get you into trouble if you fail personally).

As some quick points, Magical Beast can be very strong on a PC. Small size is usually pretty close to a wash as far as balance, being just a little better than Medium. Darkvision is obviously good, but also something other PC races get.

Their speeds though, hoo-boy. They're faster than base races and have two extra modes of movement. What we've got so far with none of the following features are enough for a race (barring some flavorful abilities that don't really have a strong mechanical effect). Electricity Sense is mostly a flavorful ability, and that's fine, unless I'm missing something about it.

Keep in mind that the monster you are adapting is CR 2, and monster ability and PC ability don't always line up in relevancy and balance at the same point. Immunities, natural armor, big skill bonuses, these are all things you need to be very careful about introducing. Right now, because of their size, a racial skill bonus and a racial ability bonus, they get +9 on Hide checks.

It's fine to go for ECL 1/LA 0 (I honestly recommend trying to figure that out and go that route), but with everything you have here and everything you want, it's going to be tricky.

As for addressing the racial paragon feat: Dear heavens no. Never use creature improvement HD increases stacked with PC levels. Those are for plain featureless HD advancements to attempt to keep monster CR relevant. There's a tome feat that grants these size bonuses and in a Very High balance game, they've broken every character I've seen use them (which was like, 5 characters or something, all across the same setting).

Short Advice: Take a look at comparable existing published material that you know would get approved in a game and try to add/subtract features of relative value until you come to a solution. That can at least help. --Ganteka Future (talk) 03:26, 13 June 2022 (UTC)