Q:

Passive skill for balanced race / faction

I'm currently working on an RPG game project. I’m out of ideas on how to properly set race skills in the RPG. In the game, three different races exist:

Human – Balanced starting stats, active skills are focused on crowd control, debuffs, and average damage
Dwarf – starting stats has huge amount of HP but at the cost of damage and speed. Active skills are focused on defense.
Elf – starting stats has boost to damage and speed, but at the cost of low HP/MP. Active skills are focused on Damage

Currently I’m in the phase when I want to implement race skills. Race skills should be a passive skill which your character automatically earns after creation. This skill is another way of diversification, so if you compare a dwarf warrior with an elf warrior, there will be a difference in active skills, in starting stats, and also with a race skill.
I'm thinking about race skill for Dwarfs and Elves, but I'm out of ideas for a race skill for humans, which are characterized as a balanced race.

Dwarfs – 10% damage reduction on each hit by the enemy
Elfs –  +5% critical hit chance
Humans – ???

Any suggestions are welcome.

A:

Sort of two part answer...
First, I'd make humans "normal" myself - nothing special.  We are a kind of bland race.  But that's totally a subjective thing.
Second, I would create a combat simulator that is driven off your rules and character classes.  The simulator is not a visual, game-type environment.  It's purely a program that spits out statistics of simulated combat.  This is a classic Monte Carlo simulation setup.
With a system like this, you can let it fight thousands and thousands of random matchups and see what the results are overall.  Ideally with 3 races, you want a nice 1/3 1/3 1/3 split showing that all in all the 3 races are statistically even when it comes to victory.
Once you have that simulator working, start tweaking and adjusting your race specs, and re-run the simulation.  This will let you get a better idea of how well balanced (or not) your design is.  It lets you for example answer the question, "What is the impact of changing the Elf critical chance from 5% to 4%?"
This also gives you full freedom to experiment with different skills for humans to see what the impact is.  What happens if humans heal faster?  Do a double attack every 10th round?  You can test and find out with the simulator.

