Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
Who knows if it twas fair
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It wasn't. It's just another version of D&D's "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" problem. You can't balance a system where one class winds up more powerful later at the cost of being weak early -- or in this case, more powerful early but being weak later. No matter what multipliers you use, there's always going to be only one point where the two power curves cross and give you balance. You can get complicated and make the areas between the two curves equal, and call that "fair". It would be, in a sense, over the whole game -- but it just means that players concerned about that kind of thing are going to be unhappy on both sides of the balance point. And even that assumes you know exactly how long the campaign is going to last. (Otherwise, the area on the far side of the balance point will wind up too small.)
Make the PC races balanced to start with, and keep them that way. Or, decide that that kind of power balance doesn't matter. Perhaps the only thing that matters to your group is equal spotlight time, or some other metric for fairness. Or perhaps your group even all feels that balance of any sort is unnecessary, as long as they're having fun.
(The "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" problem -- which the TV show could simply ignore, and which the RPG tried to address the second way, by having a meta hero point sort of currency with which to affect the game, even though the character "class" abilities weren't balanced.)