GLOG: Everything is a Template

Race-as-class is the only true way and everyone doing it differently is doing it wrong.

Beastfolk Party by WarpZoneTrigger

 

Okay, now that I've started a flame war, an explanation is in order. I have been struggling with races in my GLOG, or how to implement them in a way that supports character-making consistent with the world as I envision it. Here are my personal design goals:

1. I like largely human worlds surrounded by weirdness you can venture out into. While the standard super-simplified races of GLOG work fine mechanically, having that many easily used races encourages players to be something strange rather than the plain old human, so you end up with a menagerie of a party. Which is not a problem, except that a thousand lings force a different vibe on the game than what I prefer.
2. I want humans to be plain and basic. That means you can play up both the weirdness around them and how their adventuring life is changing them. Every mutation, every new ability is making them stranger and more interesting, which is much harder to properly emphasize when you already start pretty weird. On the other hand, just giving them a free skill/feat/attribute point to make them desirable is pure gameist trash.
3. I do want other races to be available, but I think they work better in juxtaposition to the mostly human civilization around them. They should have interesting abilities that set them apart, and here the design space of only one perk and one flaw, as is custom for GLOG races, is actually quite limiting. Some races could do with more abilities, even more power, so there needs to be a way of scaling different races rather than fitting them all in the same mould.
4. I also don't want to limit race/class combinations, as standard race-as-class often does by locking you into the abilities of only your race. Let there be halfling barbarians and half-ogre courtesans.

So I want humans to be boring and desirable at the same time, and without giving them any numeric bonuses. You can see my dilemma, now.

I may have figured it out. It's in the first sentence. It's a wheel re-invented, really, but I'm still excited to try it out.

Every non-human race is a class now, whose template A you can only take at character creation. Some races will only consist of template A, some may have more templates with more powers and abilities. Multiclassing is the heart of GLOG anyway, so every character can now take up to five templates and starts with two. If you want to be a dwarf cleric, take the templates Dwarf A and Cleric A.

And humans? They are the assumed race for anyone with no racial templates. They literally have no abilities at all, yet they could (hopefully) be quite desirable with their "ability" to start with two class templates, and to finish a whole class and then take one more template from another one.

We shall see if this actually works as intended.