Something that I've been pondering for a while now is why don't we have racial movement speeds in the game.
I know that this was brought up during beta and answered that having characters that were slower than the rest of the party would be too big of a (perceived) disadvantage. However, it's 3 years later and we have 30% striders, barbarians speed increase, sprint boosts, monk speed increases, perma-haste, and et cetera, so I think the time has come to revisit this topic.
From the SRD, the base movement speeds of the races in DDO are:
- Human base land speed is 30 feet
- Dwarf base land speed is 20 feet. However, dwarves can move at this speed even when wearing medium or heavy armor or when carrying a medium or heavy load (unlike other creatures, whose speed is reduced in such situations).
- Elf base land speed is 30 feet.
- Elf base land speed is 30 feet. (Implied by their elven heritage)
- Halfling base land speed is 20 feet.
- Warforged base land speed is 30 feet. (Eberron Campaign Setting)
On the surface, this should be pretty straight-forward to implement and given the plethora of speed-increasing abilities in the game, it wouldn't unbalance anything -- sure, human monks will be faster than halfling clerics, but realistically, now is that any different than today?
My suggestion would be to use 30 as the base -- so a character race with 30ft/turn would have a 100% speed (i.e. no change from today), while characters with 20ft/turn would have a movement speed of 90% of that given to them (30ft vs. 20ft would mathematically be a 33% speed difference, but that's HUGE and probably wouldn't be very well recieved)