As my copy of savage species is absent, I'll be using the variant race rules from Unearthed Arcana and some inspiration from Races of Destiny.
The first task is to find an urbanized elf. While they don't exist, the various guidelines from the terrain/environmental races is useful, and basically says "exchange abilities for equal value."
The Elf is:
+2 Dexterity, -2 Constitution.
Medium: As Medium creatures, elves have no special bonuses or penalties due to their size.
Elf base land speed is 30 feet.
Immunity to magic sleep effects, and a +2 racial saving throw bonus against enchantment spells or effects.
Low-Light Vision: An elf can see twice as far as a human in starlight, moonlight, torchlight, and similar conditions of poor illumination. She retains the ability to distinguish color and detail under these conditions.
Weapon Proficiency: Elves receive the Martial Weapon Proficiency feats for the longsword, rapier, longbow (including composite longbow), and shortbow (including composite shortbow) as bonus feats.
+2 racial bonus on Listen, Search, and Spot checks. An elf who merely passes within 5 feet of a secret or concealed door is entitled to a Search check to notice it as if she were actively looking for it.
Automatic Languages: Common and Elven. Bonus Languages: Draconic, Gnoll, Gnome, Goblin, Orc, and Sylvan.
Favored Class: Wizard. A multiclass elf’s wizard class does not count when determining whether she takes an experience point penalty for multiclassing.
A con penalty doesn't seem appropriate for a "poison resistant" race. So we'll swap out con for -2 strength.
Base speed is fine.
We'll trade immunity to magic sleep effects and +2 racial against enhancment for:
"Immunity to nonmagical poison and poison effects, and a +2 racial saving throw bonus against magic poison, and all kinds of disease."
Drop the weapon proficiency line, due to the scope of the posion versus sleep. (Force the player to take a class/burn a feat for that like everyone else)
And I think it's quite fair as a race. Useful for those who want to use poison, but not horribly broken unless designed that way, and certainly no more broken than most other elves.
Poison Elf:
+2 Dexterity, -2 Strength.
Medium: As Medium creatures, elves have no special bonuses or penalties due to their size.
Elf base land speed is 30 feet.
Immunity to nonmagical poison and poison effects, and a +2 racial saving throw bonus against magic poison, and all kinds of disease.
Low-Light Vision: An elf can see twice as far as a human in starlight, moonlight, torchlight, and similar conditions of poor illumination. She retains the ability to distinguish color and detail under these conditions.
+2 racial bonus on Listen, Search, and Spot checks. A poison elf who merely passes within 5 feet of a secret or concealed door is entitled to a Search check to notice it as if she were actively looking for it.
Automatic Languages: Common and Elven. Bonus Languages: Draconic, Gnoll, Gnome, Goblin, Orc, and Sylvan.
Favored Class: Any. When determining whether a multiclass posion elf takes an experience point penalty, his or her highest-level class does not count. The huge diversity of experience in cities have broadened the Poison Elves traditions relative to their more focused forest cousins.
This answer by gomad and the link to the wikipedia article it contains may be useful to you. While that question is about the diferences between Star Wars D20 and saga, the similarities between AD&D 3.5 and Star Wars D20 could make that a valid answer.
ok, I managed to find somebody with a rulebook from saga to borrow, so I'll try to adress your questions.
Force Points: Every character has a pool of force points with size equal to 5 plus has half his character level (rounded down), regardless of class. Certain feats and prestige classes increase the size of this pool. A level 1 character start with its pool full of points. When you gain a level, your pool refills, but if you have force points over your maximum, the excess points are lost. Force points can be used the following ways:
- You can spend a force point as a free action to gain 1D6 to a skill
check, ability check or attack roll. Going up in levels increase the
number of extra dice granted by force points(2D6 at 8, 3D6 at 15),
but you can keep only the one with the higher result when rolling
them.
- You can spend a force point a swift action when receiving damage that
could kill you. You instead end with 0 hit points and unconscious.
- You can spend a force point a swift action to lower your dark side
score by 1 permanently.
- Also, you need force points to activate or enhance certain force powers, if
you are a force user.
Usually, you can only spend a force point per round.
Destiny Points: Destiny points is part of a optional system in the game. If the DM allows it, you may choose a destiny for your character (or the DM chooses one, and he does not have to tell you which one). This does not have to happen at level one. A destiny is a long term goal for your character, and it gives you temporal but substantial benefits when your actions follows the path marked by your destiny, temporal but substantial penalties when your actions oppose your destiny, and a permanent benefit when it is finally fulfilled. Those benefits and penalties are the only clue that a character to discover his destiny if the DM choose to keep it secret. Also, having a destiny grants you the ability to gain and spend destiny points. Destiny points are gained at a one per level gain (including level 1, if the character starts with a destiny). Destiny points can be spent to gain benefits like: turn attack checks into automatic critical attacks,turn received attacks into missed attacks,change your initiative, shielding others from damage, partly refilling your force pool and empowering certain force powers.
Improving Skills:
Skill now are either trained or untrained. At first level You select any number of skills from you class list equal to your intelligence modifier plus class modifier, which become trained. Later in their career, the character must take the feat Skill training to be able to select a skill from his class list(or lists, if he has more than one class ) and make it a trained skill.
Note that a skill check is D20 + ability score modifier + training bonus if applicable (+5) + half your character level. So apart from taking the feat to gain new trained skills, you improve all your skills just by levelling.
Best Answer
This is the academic's approach to learning a new system. It is quite heavily theoretical and assumes that you're willing to take time and research sources. If you just want to jump right in, take the PHB and make a character by hand, then use the various resources on the net to check your math.
For websites to help you narrow down choices for character creation, I recommend the various handbook compliations out there. While these are not written for newbies, these are effectively the distilled wisdom of many years of play. By using the core books, yourself and by hand (it's the only way to learn character creation, I've found) the handbooks to narrow the design space for the specific class you've chosen, and asking questions here about the validity and utility of specific builds, these resources can help you build your system knowledge.
There are some things to stay away from as a newbie. While caster classes are excellent, the sheer scope of spells that you need to consider between produces analysis paralysis among the best of us. Avoid Tier 1 unless you have a very specific and compelling need to play one of them.
Identify the classes being played and try to choose a class that's in the average tier. That way, you will not be too far above or below the party "capability" leve, allowing you to express your agency without obvious inequalities between party members. The first character I had was a bland fighter in a party of casters... and it just wasn't much fun. His job was to stand around and occasionally intercept someone going for the casters.
Once you've done that, and built your character by hand, the most critical element of system-mastery is the checklist. Identify, before the game starts, your common strategies, and the mechanical activities needed for those strategies. This "study" is important to build your own, internal, mental map of possible actions and pre-anticipation of situations in which to use those actions. It will also help identify if the design you've built meets your requirements.
Always do your initial builds by hand until you understand the math behind the scenes. I made the mistake of using tools for my first 3.5 characters and that actually inhibited my system-mastery for a year or so.