I have class World which manages creation of object... After creation it calls afterCreation method and I the created object is user-defined type derived from Entity (eg. MyEntity), I want to call addEntity. I the object was something else, I want to do nothing. addEntity must be called with appropriate T, because it generates unique IDs for every derived class etc. Here is my solution: template <int v> struct ToType { enum { value = v }; }; template <typename T> void World::afterCreation(T * t) { afterCreation(t, ToType<std::is_base_of<Entity, T>::value>()); } template <typename T> void World::afterCreation(T * t, ToType<true>) { addEntity(t); //here I cant pass Entity *, I need the real type, eg. MyEntity } template <typename T> void World::afterCreation(T * t, ToType<false>) { } My question is - Can in be done better way? How can I simulate following code without ToType or similar? template <typename T> void afterCreation(){/*generic impl*/} template <typename T where T is derived from Entity> void afterCreation(){/*some specific stuff*/} "specialize" in the title is only to describe my intention, no need to solve problem with template specialization