Hey, I'm working out homebrew races for my campaign, mostly because I had like seven stored on a drive that I wanted to add as available to players. And for at least one, I wanted to give it a negative Constitution modifier to balance some of the strengths of the race but I couldn't figure out how.

To balance out a race you could create a copy of the Kobald or Orc to see how they modified the bonuses. Under the race features and ability score increases you can scroll down to Modifiers.

Inside Modifiers there is a Bonus - Ability Score  section where you can put a fixed amount change a score.

Bonus;Constitution Score;Fixed Value (-2)

Huh. This is interesting. Negative modifiers. Well for starters, just the image of such a creature conjures all sorts of backstory/history for the race. Several ideas come to mind to support the reason why the character race continues to remain sickly, or at the very least restricted.

> The race was magically created for labor. Size isn't an issue. A master race would devise brutal laws enforced at will to crush even a whisper of an uprise. 

> The race was magically created/altered from an existing race and enslaved. Gnomes make a good candidate for this. As do goblinoids and wood elves, perhaps even moon elves. Heck, any race really. The dark magic that alters this race isn't some source of energy the master race needs for survival. Although it could. You decide. Perhaps the master race drains slaves of their magic to create magical items.

> The race lived in a savage, hostile environment (the Elemental Plane of Fire, for example, or a demi-plane of lava) in which the race is part of a larger species. Each race has different Ability penalties. Character Creation imposes a reduction on one or two traits indicative of the race's rank in the social caste system. The lower-caste races have the greatest reductions.

> The race isn't native to Toril; it was dragged here (insert motive/reason) and as a result the creature suffers. The elemental nature of magic, the Weave, a mythal, whatever you decide, affects the creature on a fundamental evolutionary and inexplicable level. The Hidden One Ao permits the migration. No explanation.

The roleplaying opportunities for such a creature is vast. Thanks for dropping the seed.

Happy adventuring!

Hey everyone, I hope I can revive this topic briefly to ask for help. I've been trying to set negative ability scores for my Homebrew race using Bonus;Ability Score;Fixed Value (-1) in this case, for both Wisdom and Intelligence respectively, using a separate Modifier for each.

My positive ability score changes work fine, appearing as racial bonuses. My negative ones do not appear at all in the builder.
I am using the main keyboard - and there are no spaces. 

Re-save the whole homebrew. That’s what triggers the system to pick up the changes. It may take up to 15 minutes for the character sheet to catch up.

I'll try this, thanks.

So I was wondering how I would use die to deduct something, for instance im doing something where it subtracts 1d4 of max hit points per level. How would I do that?

With plain text and clear instructions for the player.