Racial augments/perks and classes

Classes being locked to races is really dumb. Being a tiny Tarutaru in Final Fantasy XI while also being the tank of the team and able to mitigate tremendous damage is amazing, and cutting that off just makes your game look weak. Every lock of a class on an attribute that players choose for identity (looking at you, BDO) is dumb.

I think determining attribute bonuses/penalties for given races is fine and reasonable, but don't lock any features behind it. If you want to be an Empyrian Tank you should probably get less toughness than a dwarf, but you shouldn't be locked into anything.

I don't think choice of race should have a significant mechanical effect.

Players who like the lore or aesthetics of a particular race might feel disincentivized to pick them if a different race is better in the meta, or has a unique ability they want.

I similarly dislike the idea of race-locked archetypes, as this would be a fairly arbitrary restriction on player freedom.

If you make any kind of perk or augment that is in any way 'meta' for a given class, or even given build, you're limiting player expression unnecessarily.

I do not want all Rangers to be Empyrean, all tanks to be Dunir, etc, because that's where the stats or buffs are. While my own propensities likely align reasonably well with my preference of races, anything that effectively race-locks a class, whether by hard effect, or even simply by 'meta', will make the game fundamentally worse.

If you want to create actual in-game (possibly even "justified") racism, and all of the nasty behavior that comes with it, this is the way to do it. People do not like it when you treat them as inferior because of their race. People are killed for this in real life. Do not create systems that result in this in games.

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I'm fine with races having minor differences/effects that are a function of their lore. For example, if one race hails from a place with a lot of volcanoes, and another hails from the Frigid Northlands, I think it's fine to give race 1 Fire Resistance and race 2 Frost Resistance.

Then you get into balancing, tho - what if one of those effects is overall more powerful than the other due to how the game's designed? What if there's almost no sources of Frost damage, but lots of Fire damage?

FFXI has differences between base stats (nothing too drastic, as I recall) for each race but nothing more complex than that.

On the other hand, I STRONGLY disagree with the idea of restricting classes based on race. Do not EVER do this, it needlessly limits character expression and player enjoyment. The only possible exception I can think of is like, a Vampire class or a Lycanthrope class or something, wherein you are a vamped or Werebeasted version of a given race.