I’m copy pasting my ideas on subspecies here, which may help address potential species bloat while allowing for more variety that is purely visual without requiring unique mechanics:
On the topic of subspecies:
- they would need some hard requirements as well, more than “minor difference” or we will get a ton of PRs adding bloat species (elf ears for example)
- I would suggest something like “a unique (visual) identity”. Sharks for example are different enough from lizards that they should be their own thing, and the two should not share markings to prevent player characters from losing visual coherence. A good test for that could be: Can this species be identified even with a hardsuit and helmet on? Moths/Bees, Lizards/Sharks, and Humans/Dwarfs can be distinguished in these cases due to different shapes or markings that show on the outside
- In that regard I’m not sure if the echo fighters from smash bros are a good comparison, as these are usually recoloured versions, but have the same character shape (let’s be honest, daisy as a character is bloat, waluigi on the other hand would have been great)
- Dwarfs being turned either into a subspecies (if we think the alcohol healing is unique enough) or two traits (small size and accent) is a good way to go and logical consequence of the doc
For full species:
- We need better guidelines on what unique features should be allowed and what not. For the resomi PR we denied we had less health and higher speed, which both were bad for combat balance, and having a brigher flash shader effect, which was bad for accessibility.
- In general, do we want species to be combat balanced? Or do we allow species that are objectively worse from a metagaming perspective? For example vox can be quite handicapped in some scenarios due to constantly requiring nitrogen, and they were temporarily disabled from certain ghostrole spawns and nukies for that reason.