I totally get you here. But my vision for this is to be all inclusive. If you wanna play a shrew and I wanna play an elephant we should be able to go dungeon diving together. That's the appeal of funny animals, to me. There's a ridiculous but sublime tone to the whole affair. The size differential rule was meant to balance that out. The wee mouse gets a beefy attack roll bonus against the elephant. And the elephant suffers a substantial penalty. But if he ever makes contact...BAM.SmootRK wrote:I agree with Joe to minimize or often just eliminate some of the Bite and Claw attacks... they are anthropomorphic and use equipment for the most part.
Personally, I would focus in on a subset of creatures... for instance, in Redwall the primary characters are mostly rodent and/or small woodland creatures.
Another sort of sub-setting might be African/Safari oriented, where everyone is Lions, Zebra, Rhino, etc. Lego-Chima takes this approach.
Yet another sort of sub-setting could be all Bear oriented (Polar, Grizzly, Black Bears as the main races, pitted against some antagonist race(s)).
While some size/ability equalization is good for a game/setting, I think it would be odd to have Mouse vs Rhino fights. The mismatch goes beyond just the mechanics. Some "Thematic grouping" would be best in my mind.
Someone also mentioned the HD issue. I don't have a big problem with it, personally. But then again I'm notoriously unconcerned about perfect game balance. If you end up with a d8 HD spellcaster I personally don't see a problem with it. If the rhino has a 13 or 14 Int then he should be just as capable of learning magic as the next guy. And if he's a rhino there's no reason he should suffer a small HD just because he's a magic-user.
But yeah, I will take a second look at that too. I will maybe come up with other ways to achieve a little more balance.
Thanks again for the great feedback. It gives me some inspiration to continue working on the idea. This is such a sub-sub genre it mostly feels like I'm writing it basically for myself. Most people just aren't interested in it.