Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

Not to quibble, but you gave one semi-underground race only Night Vision (Dwarf), and two semi-underground races Dark Vision. Perhaps swap Dark Vision out for Night vision there, and give them light sources underground if they live such.

As far as point costs, going with the same costs makes sense, as its more a plug-in-the-template for DF. Adding points to a human also parallels d20 where choosing another race removes 1 feat and some skill points from the total. However, using the idea that humans are a 0-point baseline package, the racial templates could be added for consideration in the optional parts of the class templates (all of them have "a further 20+ points added" sections).

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Racial Template - Hobgoblin

Hobgoblin [+25]

ST +1 [10], DX +1 [20], IQ -1 [-20], HT + 1 [10], Darkvision [25], Bad Temper 15- [-5] OR Stubbornness [-5], Social Stigma - Uneducated [-5], Social Stigma - Minority Group [-10].

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

Except that they have 25 points in other advantages; including higher skills, higher advantages, higher DX, or higher other abilities. "Lucky" does not make or break a character in comparison with this, even with Extraordinary Luck (which is 30 points anyways, and 30 points in equivalent advantages can buy you all sorts of things. Think about it: In an Easy skill, 28 of those points would give you DX+8! DX+7 in Average, DX+6 in Hard).

I think he's operating on the D&D system, which gives you +1 Feat and extra skill points. You could say that humans tend to learn more than other races in an equivalent amount of time, or just put in the "gain extra points" thing as a balancing thing more than a "race" thing. *Shrugs*

I fail to see how.

In my GURPS Wasteland game, I give all humans either a [7] template or a [-5] template, making them +7 or -5 points each.

I fail to see how this would cause unintended consequences, any moreso than giving any race a template?

But the point is to make it easy to add and substract from the templates given in Dungeon Fantasy, which are also all 250 points.

Personally, I like it.

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

I'm going with the upcoming 4th Ed Dungeons and Dragons decision to say that Dwarves are only a semi-underground race. They have removed Dark Vision from D&D Dwarves and give them Low-Light Vision instead, my Dwarven template reflects this. The other races with Dark Vision have more of an 'attacks at night' archetype, so I left them with Dark Vision. You could change this, of course, and I'll admit that part of the reason those races have Dark Vision and not Night Vision was to raise their template point totals. If you want to change them, I'd suggest replacing Dark Vision with Night Vision/5 and using the other 20 point on stats.

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

Some current official Gurps templates already include racially learned skills. In Dungeon Fantasy stereotypes Humans tend to be more diverse and more skilled than other races, therefore I included skills in the Human Template but left the selection of what skills they were undetermined. Many genres of fiction include the notion that humans are able to compete with other races who are individually superior because humans have determination and pluckiness. I chose to model this in GURPS tems with Luck, thereby reflecting the human ability to succeed in a crisis with the GURPS ability to use Luck to reroll failed rolls. I don't think the fact that this makes all the other races 'Unlucky' compared to humans is either a big deal or matters in Dungeon Fantasy [1], if I were running GURPS Professional Gamblers of Multiple Races, I'd do it differently.

You're quite right that since the different races have different ammounts of racial disadvantages they may not be perfectly balanced. I just don't think that it matters for Dungeon Fantasy, I wouldn't do it this way in some other genres. Most of the templates have no more than 50 points in advantages, and no more than 25 points in disadvantages (not counting reduced characteristics as disadvantages if they're 'cancelled out' by increases to other characteristics). The human template deliberately has no disadvantages because I don't think that there are any sterotypical disadvantages that all humans have, either in reality or in Dungeon Fantasy.

The fact that these templates are all going to be 25 points does mean that some cool Fantasy races can't be included, at least not without throwing on crippling levels of disadvantages. Fortunately many of these races don't have a strong tradition as player characters in Dungeon Fantasy, because they don't fit in the dungeon (Dragons (unless very young), Centaurs, Giants), don't do well on land (Devilfish, Dolphin, Merfolk, Shark Men), are too powerful or unbalanced for the genre (Djinn Ascended Ones, Vampires, Faerie, Sphinxes, Trolls) or are even too weak (Kobalds). Some of these races might be point balanced if they took just a racial template, and skipped the class template, but I'm not going to do it that way in my upcoming Dungeon Fantasy campaign because I think that archetypes are a big part of Dungeon Fantasy.

[1] There are some genres other than Dungeon Fantasy where I don't think that it matters either. If I was running a GURPS Science Fantasy game like Star Trek or Star Wars, I'd probably use a similar (Luck and skills) template for humans to balance alien racial templates, but that is a topic for another thread.

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

Good Job pnewman, very nice set of templates.

You set the ground rule for 25 point templates, therefore your choice to have a 25 point Human template, and to choose Night Vision for Dwarves and Darkvision for Goblins etc to balance things is fine.
Different people will have different opinions on what are the right characteristics for a particular race, and how 2 different races should be compared to each other.

I wouldn't have made the same choices on some of the templates, but they all seem like appropriate interpretations of what each race should be like, and should feel right in a DF game.

As a side note, the Cleric, Druid, Martial Artist and Scout Templates in DF each only have 20 points to choose Advantages from !

On to my comments (and my own opinions):

I wouldn't have a Human Template for similar reasons as already mentioned, especially since part of the Human Template is to choose Skills (and why not Advantages) from the Professional Template - why not just make the Racial Templates another available Advantage to choose from, no Racial Template = Human, who spend those points on the standard Professional Template list of Advantages and Skills, etc

This then leads to not needing each Racial Template to be exactly the same cost. I probably wouldn't want Racial Templates to be too expensive, otherwise you'd be restricting Racial Templates based on the available 'Free Points' within each Professional Template. e.g. a 40 point Race could only be a Knight or Swashbuckler, and a Cleric could only be a Race with a point cost of 20 or less !

It looks like you've used Banestorm as reference material (Social Regard/Good Neighbour in the Halfling Template !), which is what I would do, along with the 3e Fantasy Folk, along with Eric B. Smith's conversions of those to 4e!

For the Elf Template, BS gives them +1 DX and +1 IQ, where as FF(4e) gives them +1 IQ and Perfect Balance. - I'd probably opt for +1 IQ instead of +1 DX.

+1 IQ for Elves would allow you to use the BS Half-Elf Template at 27 points, 26 with reduced cost for Extended Lifespan, with a Quirk of some kind to make the cost 25!

As for the Dark Vision/Night Vision question -
I don't agree with this interpretation of Dwarves at all. Dwarves (to my mind) live primarily underground, with no natural light source, Dark Vision suits them much better.
The cost is a bit too much for the Dwarven template, and both Banestorm and FF(4e) use NightVision for Dwarves anyway!

'Attacks at Night' races immediately implies 'Night Vision' to me - there is usually some light at night!

I have been thinking about Fantasy Racial Templates for another project, and with regards Dungeon Fantasy when the subject came up in various threads in the last couple ok weeks, but I hadn't got around to writing anything down - you've given me a great starting point to get on with own templates!

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

The other point on Racial Templates with Dungeon Fantasy is how to handle overlapping Advantages in each template - the obvious one (possibly the only problematic one) is Magery - i.e. Elf-Wizard

The Elf Template has Magery 0 [5]
The Wizard Template has Magery 3 [35]

Together these make [40] points in Magery, or Magery 3½ ??

While it is simple enough to just say the Elf-Wizard has Magery 3, that leaves [5] spare points floating about.

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

I've already found points 'floating around' in many of the templates; several have both Esoteric Medicine and points spent on First Aid, for instance, and in some cases selecting certain skill combinations results in buying up skills from an improved default (Rapier and Main-gauche on a Swashbuckler, for instance) which 'frees up' some points. I tend to think of the templates more as guidelines than actual rules as a result (with thanks to Captain Barbossa).

The swashbuckler I've built for the DF game being run here, for example, upgraded Weapon Master to 2-weapon (rapier + main-gauche) and made a few other minor changes not included in the template but which suit my personal playstyle.

That said, I really would have aimed for 20 points instead of 25 on racial templates for DF; Kromm's noted that it's likely to be the way he goes about it when it becomes official, and some templates just don't have 25 points to throw around.

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

Since the templates all include at least 20 floating points, and you can get 5 points from quirks, you can take a 25-point racial template with any class template.

Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Races - 25 point templates
 

I hadn't seen the 20 point comment, but the 25 points for these templates aren't supposed to come from the 250 point class templates, these are supposed to be 25 _additional_ points, making 275 point characters. If I were going to try to fit racial templates into spare points on the class templates I'd have done it differently. This is just my thoughts on 'Pick a class and a race for your character.'