I love Neverwinter Nights and I like the class selection, but the race selection is lackluster and could really use some more races to play with, i have only found Shayan's Subrace Engine so far as it is a bit hard to find mods for this game and it didnt seem to work. If anyone knows a good mod for this you'd be a hero.

I've spent thousands of hours playing fan made modules for NWN. On occasion someone will alter a character to fit a role, vampire for example but 99% of the time the default races are used.

The only exception I'm aware of is the CEP Community Expansion Pack. And while it has a large variety of stuff to add to the game, new races could be included, its more of a modders resource for the Toolset then a plug and play mod.

Well, there is the Player's Resource Consortium, which adds dozens of custom races and scores of prestige classes, as well as a few base classes. Also spells, feats, etc. Oh, and I believe there's a custom epic spell system. And psionics. There's a cubic ton of content.

However, actually adding all this stuff to the modules you want to play has to be done by hand, unless you're playing on a persistent world that has integrated the PRC. (No single player modules that I know of use it.)

Also, the quality of the content is debatable.

Don't get me wrong: the people who made this put in humongous amounts of effort to produce this much stuff. However, they came up against the many, many hard-coded limits of NWN early and fast. For example: all the custom classes have to use spellbooks through dialogue menus, since you can't add new spellbooks. If you want to use the new races, you have to make your character with an external 3rd party client, because the normal game engine can't handle it. And when I tried it, it caused so much lag it made my game essentially unplayable. This was some years ago, though, on a much weaker PC than I have now, so your mileage may vary.

If you want to give it a try, by all means download it. It does seem to offer what you are looking for. But it's not clean, and it's not easy.

What do you think is missing?

I agree on debatable merits of PRC.

IMO this type of fan made content always ends up being over the top and unbalanced, and completely uninteresting to me because of that.

But it probably has just about any race you can imagine, there must be over 100.

Click on races to see what is available:
http://www.athasreborn.com/prc/manual/

Well, in this case the vast majority of the content it adds is taken from the tabletop version of the game, rather than being created by the makers of the PRC. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't contain some content which is more powerful than others - dnd 3.5 is known for some options being significantly more powerful than others - but it helps to limit it. And they don't just include the most powerful options from 3.5; there's a variety of classes of different power levels, even down to the infamously rubbish Truenamer.

So yes, there are powerful options added, although possibly not too much more powerful than the vanilla wizard (considered one of the most powerful and flexible classes in pnp; it loses some flexibility in nwn because of engine limitations, but can rest and switch out spells far more often than you reasonably can in pnp). On the other hand, there are also new options at all the other power levels, so you can pick something suitable for the game you want to play.

The PnP game has the discretion of the DM to keep things from getting out of hand.

PRC has ridiculously overpowered content that will essentially eliminate the challenge of most modules.

The OP was asking about races. Here are some PRC examples:

DragonKin:
Dragonkin Ability Adjustments: +8 Str, +2 Dex, +2 Con, +4 Wis, +2 Cha

- Darkvision: Allows them to see farther in the dark.
- Natural Armor Bonus: Racial natural armor bonus of 7.
- Natural Weapon: Can make natural claw attacks(1d6 each).
- Dive: +2 attack while suffering -2 to armor class. A successful attack does double damage if using a piercing weapon.[/i]

Troll:
Troll Ability Adjustments: +12 Str, +4 Dex, +12 Con, -4 Int, -4 Cha, -2 Wis.
Natural Armor Bonus: Racial natural armor bonus of 5.
- Regeneration: Innate ability to regenerate 5 hit points per round.

Compare with the strongest race in the standard game. The Half-Orc:

Orcish Ability Adjustments: +2 Str, -2 Int, -2 Cha.

The Dragonkin/Troll and countless others are completely unbalanced. You may as well just turn on God Mode.

On the race front at least, effort was made to balance the original game.

Ah, it appears that for some reason level adjustment and racial hit dice are off by default. I'd suggest turning them on, which should help to balance out the bonuses a bit and keeps the balance at the same level it is in the pnp game, although I grant that even with LA those two are some of the more broken ones. Still, though, you aren't required to use the most powerful race possible if you don't want to; as far as I know it won't be implemented into any of the NPCs in a module unless the module maker deliberately does so, and balances accordingly? The pack gives you more options for how to make your PC, including very powerful options, very weak options (eg goblins, who are statistically weaker than halflings in all regards, except for getting darkvision), and options between those two extremes. You can pick a really powerful option if you want an easier time; or you can install the pack and ignore their existence if you want more of a challenge. It's at the player's discretion which they pick; unless you're playing multiplayer there's no need for a DM to give a ruling on which options you're allowed to use for a given module, since it only affects the one player.

Indeed, I don't think the balance is the issue here, in single player. Players can set their own stats to maximum if they want to.

For me it's more that it's a big hassle to have to work with 3rd party character creation apps and try to set up custom spellbooks through dialogue, as well as the lag and loading times that result from the system being active on slower PCs.

Even the races don't work that well, since if I recall correctly they implement various bonuses as hidden properties on the creature skins, which means they won't stack with magical buffs and the like.

Similar, if less ambitious, projects exist for NWN2 and there they work much better. That game more easily allows for modding on this level.

Nwn 1 has something called nwncx and nwnx that allow custom race/classes without using third party app.
Just the problem with PRC is it is so outdated... it would need to be completely redone.

if its easier, search it on youtoube, there are vid on there that show you step by step how to make your own races and inport them and make hak files and other such things. I'm kinda glad its easier to make mods for newer games these days because the tool set is a REAL headach to tweek and program but at the same time annoyingly simple to tweek as well, even the scripting is more simple then you would think.

At one point nwn had more mods than skyrim and morrowind put together that was before bioware/EA tried to
kill off the game... by shutting down all the mod hosting pages and "losing" all the content.

It isn't that hard to edit a couple text files...
Only thing that isn't text file is tlk tables but all you need is 2da/tlk editor.

I built special backgrounds into my PW from ages ago (Legends of Leefe) and I put the special powers into the Player Tools section (those came out in v1.69) via chat (if you start a chat command with "!", it would load the chamber for the Player Tool 1 button) and attributes were added to the hidden Skin item.

Those sorts of things would require some scripting and some module editing.

However, if you want to adjust your stats, you could just go into debug mode.

~Debug Mode 1
~Set
~givefeat # (may use these numbers, I haven't actually tested this one: http://www.nwnlexicon.com/index.php?title=Feat )
~givexp
~givespell # (may use these numbers: [url=http://www.nwnlexicon.com/index.php?title=Spell_(constant_group]http://www.nwnlexicon.com/index.php?title=Spell_(constant_group[/url]) )
~setSTR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS/CHA

Here's a mostly full list: http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/650330-dungeons-and-dragons-neverwinter-nights-complete/cheats


I would recommend playing a level 5 bovine farmer from the 9 Planes. Your special power is ~dm_cowsfromhell

Right. If only there wasn't so many hardcoded parts there...

which is exactly what the community patch with nwncx fixes in first one.