Typically in Dungeons and Dragons an adventure consists of some easy encounters, some hard encounters, a deadly encounter, and then the final encounter. The way characters level up over a campaign echoes this progression.
Heck, this is even typical in most stories. The heroes may see a deadly monster early, but they don’t fight it until they are more powerful. Or, in the course of a D&D adventuring day, when they’ve used some amount of resources, thereby making the final monster more deadly.
Through a happy little accident of misreading some stat blocks, my last set of sessions inverted this process.
Rather than meet goblins, then hobgoblins, then an ogre climbing that ladder of difficulty, the group started their day with a CR 7.6 encounter, next was a CR 6.25 encounter, and then a CR 3.
That released some opportunities for the players. The happy little accident meant that during that tough encounter they used a bunch of powerful abilities rather than keep them in reserve. During the second encounter they used more.
Then, finally, when they met the “boss” (who was actually the boss of the various Dragon Sworn*) they only had a couple abilities left. That meant it felt deadly, but really wasn’t. They won easily.
* For this I used the Fizban’s Dragon Blessed, Dragon Chosen, and Dragon Speaker
Overall the group was tested, more so than typical in my sessions. Also, they got to use more of their potent features. If I better telegraphed the inversion, like if it was planned, then they would have used even more of their limited powers.
When a player invests in a character having certain abilities they need to be able to use them. This accident utilized more powers in one day then I’ve seen in some time.
In 2021 I rejoined the community that taught me how to write, that taught me how to believe, and that taught me how to be a better person every day. I started writing about soccer again, mostly about Tacoma Defiance, but also about the Seattle Sounders and OL Reign. Putting the polish back into my words gave me hope in a year when I needed it more than ever.
The past year was also the year that established my voice around D&D. More people read Full Moon Storytelling in 2021 than they did in every other year of its existence, combined. To throw yourself into a new endeavor is hard. To do it during a reboot and a pandemic has been a struggle. The journey has been worth it because the people who enjoy my writings about Dungeons & Dragons are the type of people who always have more stories to tell and who know — deep and fundamentally — that a diverse group is a strong group.
These are my favorite writings of 2021, only originals, no updates. Just the best of what was new this past year.
Seattle Sounders
Throughout the pandemic the Sounders continued to open new mini-pitches. These small, all-weather soccer fields help ensure that all youth have access to play. Brad Evans and the RAVE Foundation opened pitches in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima in 2021.
Covering matches gives me the platform to do more than just write about soccer — it gives me the opportunity to write about feelings. After the Sounders “lost” to Real Salt Lake I embraced the Wheel of Time.
Tacoma Defiance
More for myself than anyone else, I reviewed the Day that Sports Stopped. This gave me an opportunity to reconnect with Justin Dhillon and to think about just how much life changed from March 10, 2020 to the present day.
Centerback Taylor Mueller retired from soccer at the end of the 2021 USL Championship season. Mueller ends as one of the legends of the league, playing more than 20,000 minutes in career where he showed that there’s more to American soccer than MLS.
OL Reign
While Cheney Stadium is no longer home for OL Reign, it was where they ruled. Powered by their success in Tacoma, Reign are moving back to Seattle.
Dungeons & Dragons
The Black Dice Society burst on the scene, sharing a horror setting sharing new ways to do communal storytelling via livestreams. They do a wonderful job at creating the disquiet of the Domains of Dread and the use of cutscenes to Strahd and others makes them a must watch.
ShantyTok was fun for a bit. This story reminded that if you’re trying to ride the wave of a meme do so immediately, or do it because you love the themes of the meme and don’t care about going viral. Me? I love pirates and tall ships.
Flavor
When Will Bruin made a beer, who better to write about t than the former professional coffee taster and beer salesman? The Georgetown Brewing-Will Bruin collab was an easy drinking IPA.
Podcast and Livestreams
As part of YachtCon, I was the Dungeon Master for a D&D livestream that raised a few hundred dollars for the Red Box program at the Seattle Children’s Hospital Autism Center. That adventure was themed around the South Sound with numerous references to Tacoma, Defiance, and Reign.
You can also find me as a regular on the Sounder at Heart podcast.
Over the years mainstream media has shifted from acting as if Dungeons & Dragons was connected to Satan and murder, to acting as if players were just nerds in basements to be ignored, to being nerds in apartments to be mocked (Big Bang Theory), to superpowered nerds to save the world (Stranger Things), to now just people who like something that other people don’t like (Ghosts) without any judgment of the game.
Seeing this shift, which I’ve lived through every moment of, still amazes me. Yes, there were times when genre shows featured D&D. Stranger Things made sense. The game fit and was featured in the story.
Ghosts did something different. One of the main characters mocked the game, but the way D&D was featured wasn’t a mockery. Instead, Dungeons & Dragons was a way to further establish fellowship between the diverse cast of ghosts and the one living who shares their space and cannot see them. Also, the d20s helped solve the other plot of the episode. Lead writer Joe Wiseman addressed this on Dragon Talk recently.
Every time I encounter the featuring of D&D as normal continues to astound me. Once forced to hide my passion for the game or get the books knocked out of my lap as if real life was a crappy teen comedy, now D&D is popular and mainstream enough that it is on my resume, talked about during job interviews, played in public, and can raise money for charity as celebs play.
Much of the mainstreaming of the game is because many of us nerds that hid in our basements are now of the age that we are in positions of influence. While it is Zoomers and Millenials that are the fuel spreading the game, GenX leadership is normalizing it.
Writers rooms throughout Hollywood played as kids and are playing again, as are the actors, cinematographers, set designers, etc. Video game designers (and all of the support staff) played with pen and paper, then translated that to big screen.
D&D’s tropes are mentioned in genre fiction (Onward!) and regularly trend on social media. There’s not a day that goes by that an Alignment Chart meme doesn’t show up.
Now that we’re mainstream there’s always that worry among us olds that things will change in ways that we don’t understand. But at it’s core D&D has always espoused that a “diverse group is a strong group.” And all of the current changes lean into that trope that started with the Fighting-Man, Magic User, Thief, and Cleric that were also a Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Elf.
Leaning into that means more players, more games, more chances to “roll for initiative.” That’s all I want.
Story is modern roleplay gaming. But, character creation per the Player’s Handbook is mechanical. It doesn’t have to be. It can follow a narrative; this is how.
The character creation order changes a little bit with this method. Now it’s almost as if your character is going through childhood and adolescence while you and the DM (ideally together) go through this process. Kind of like filming a documentary, together you discover the journey from birth to hero. Take notes and get the feeling of the story that created the personality that will exist at the table later. If the player talks about history or backstory that doesn’t yet exist in your world, they are there creating it with you. This empowers the player to help with worldbuilding and creates bonds between the character and the past.
I’ve done this with two players so far. The following has the steps of process and a practical example.
Tell me about your parents
This is the first lead. The DM is trying to figure out a bit about the homeland and race of the parents. They don’t need to be known (orphans are common in our base literature), but at the least get a few words describing origin country and race. Write those down. Get their given name now. Maybe their adventuring name is different, but when they are born, they are named.
My first player said his parents were a merchant family from Southern Kirtin. They’d lost their lands when Daoud took over. They are halflings that abhor Azsel.
Race: Halfling
Are you strong, intelligent, wise, a leader, nimble, healthy?
As the DM I generated a random point buy array and asked for the player to describe their character traits that they exhibited as a youth. Were they the type that led groups or shy? Did they throw rocks, or work in the mill? Maybe they were sick, or never got sick when others were? Some people read a lot, or read people. Distribute the six scores based on the answers given.
This player said that they were a bit of a leader playing with the kids, generally healthy, tended to know and understand people. They were a bit weak (halflings in Everflow have minuses to strength).
Your parents did what? Did you follow in footsteps?
The answers to these questions determine Background, and help guide you towards Class. They aren’t the answer to class, but do influence it. A lot of personality gets built out here. The Personality Trait, Ideal, Bond, and Flaw should be apparent from this conversation. If it isn’t offered, the DM can probe a bit more.
In our example the character was raised by a merchant family that wanted to do everything right, that as a family wanted to regain their lost market in Kirtin-on-the-Lake and as the youngest of the trade family he’d been swindled once or twice, so he’s a bit suspicious of that.
Background: Merchant with skills in Appraiser’s Tools because he doesn’t trust and Vehicle’s (Land) because he was the youngest son.
What makes you special?
Ask about the time that the character discovered that they aren’t common, but instead began to know that they are a hero. Have them describe it. Did they fight with arms, pick up a bow? Maybe they stole something? There should be indications towards class here. The experience may be a bit like a tree where the branches are melee or magic. After that the split might be sneaky (Rogue), hefty (Fighter, Barbarian), ranged (Fighter, Rogue, Ranger) or divine (Cleric, Druid), arcane (Wizard), discovered (Sorcerer), pledged (Warlock, Paladin). Are they principled (Monks, Paladins, Clerics)? This is likely the longest conversation you have during narrative character creation. Throw them some experience for wonderful ideas that surprise and entertain you.
But during this section you’ll come away with their Class, their options like Fighting Styles, or Faith, or Wizard school, etc.
Our example character was someone who had a caravan raided. He wasn’t a fighter, and didn’t know magic, instead he helped. He distracted the opponents, or warned his guards. Throughout the fight he was helpful. After the fight he repaired the cart, and returned the goods.
Class: Uncommoner (this is a homebrew that may be public soon)
Altogether it isn’t a major shift. Maybe some tables already do similar. For me it created a process shift from “this is what I am” to “this is how I came to be.” That adds some depth.
Four rules answers are shared, all about spells. The biggest impact on my games would be the clarification that spell attacks are not spells. This means Counterspell and similar are not effective against the consolidated stat blocks for monsters in the latest and upcoming releases. Also, Silvery Barbs is ineffective against Legendary Resistance, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The other two questions seemed to have obvious answers, but the clarification helps.
There is a significant change to Drow, and that connects to most of the player-facing Errata updates.
This new text replaces a description that confused the culture of Menzoberranzan—a city in the grip of Lolth’s cult in the Forgotten Realms—with drow themselves. The new text more accurately describes the place of drow in the D&D multiverse and correctly situates them among the other branches of the elf family, each of which was shaped by an environment in the earliest days of the multiverse: forests (wood elves), places of ancient magic on the Material Plane (high elves), oceans (sea elves), the Feywild (eladrin), the Shadowfell (shadar-kai), and the Underdark (drow). Drow are united by an ancestral connection to the Underdark, not by worship of Lolth—a god some of them have never heard of.
Within the nine books that have Errata updates that theme is extended.
The Player’s Handbook sees 15 of 22 new changes being related to Alignment. The most common change is “The “Alignment” section has been removed.” No longer are characters going to be directed towards certain behaviors. They are, instead, the heroes and anti-heroes of the story — unique and special.
“The “Alignment” section has been removed.”
Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (which is not only still in print, but still getting updates!) have similar changes to their PC-facing content. Volo’s also notes that Volo himself is an unreliable narrator with almost all of his experiences being confined to the Forgotten Realms.
“The lore in this chapter represents the perspective of Volo and is mostly limited to the Forgotten Realms. In the Realms and elsewhere in the D&D multiverse, reality is more varied than the idiosyncratic views presented here. DM, use the material that inspires you and leave the rest.”
SCAG has some changes to the Sun Soul Monk and the Swashbuckler that bring them in line with these subclass’s appearances in other books.
Overall the Errata focuses on the concept that only canon that matters is what’s at your table, and that your character is yours. All nine books with Errata in the last year are linked at the Sage Advice update.
There are certain DMs (me) who aren’t good at drawing and or mapping. For us, a few dollars a month towards various map makers helps us create our worlds. Even if you don’t commission specific works, the services of Dyson Logos (my favorite dungeons), Two Minute Tabletop (my favorite battlemaps), Deven Rue (my favorite regional maps), and Watabou (my favorite procedural maps) can add depth to your gaming sessions — even when you don’t use miniatures.
This is vital for me. Uprising & Rebellion takes place in large city. Having maps of districts and neighborhoods within that is important for the game. Being able to create one on the fly as my players head off script is vital. Players will always go off script. Just because you think they’re going to have a battle in the Docks doesn’t mean they won’t visit North Shore, the Ward of Mighty Trees, the University or Silk Row.
Will I have two or three of these printed out just for the flavor of the next neighborhood over? Yes.
Here are three other ways you can use the Neighborhood maps.
Stitch together an assembly of several of them to create a city. The unnatural gaps make perfect sense as mountains, lakes, rivers, etc. A whole city at this level of detail would be interesting. Make certain to use the same color set for each.
Some of the generations for the neighborhood map make sense as compact villages. Yes, Dolya has a village creator, but those don’t have wells, fountains, and ponds in them. The neighborhoods can.
The map can be an underground cavern in the Dwarven city trope. First shift the colors using the ‘0’ key to one that has some darkness to it. Pretend that the trees are mushrooms, and that the streets are the passageways and tunnels to the rest of the world. Bone Wharf is now a Mountain Dwarf city.
The key to using a procedural map is that you aren’t going to get exactly what you want, or even close to what you want. You are going to get a usable map, fast. Let the oddities of the creation guide you towards creating the people and the space. That long road running from lower-left to upper-right on Silk Row? That’s obviously the Silk Row itself. The fountain is where the various traders and merchants gather to discus their deals. The light smattering of trees are for the very richest of households, those that raise silkworms in the climate that isn’t proper for them. There are some roads that run parallel to the Silk Row, those are for supporting businesses, not the wealthy traders. The non-enclosed squares like the large one up-and-right are areas that are pack animal friendly. You are the DM (or when you use as a player to describe a hometown the creator). Let the algorithm take you to answers you could never find on your own.
What else do you see in Silk Row? Why is the dwarven city called Bone Wharf? What makes Bone Wharf unique?
Myth, legend and story energize Dungeons & Dragons. The game, especially in its 5th edition circles back and amplifies itself. So many of the tales which helped create the game are those of the zero who becomes a hero. A small town X becomes greater than life, saving kingdoms and worlds.
These zeroes have so many professions. In 5th edition these preheroic roles are captured in Backgrounds. The game does a decent job of offering several. But some are missing — like the Hunter. A Hunter may be chasing a stag and stumble upon a sleeping woman. Or they set traps for furs, travelling to the city later.
Currently you could use an Outlander or a Folk Hero. But you aren’t a hero yet. That’s going to happen at the table. The Outlander ignores many of the stories of a hunter who is part of the community from which the tale starts. That’s why you need a Hunter. So here it is.
Whether for your lone homestead or for a large city you hunt for your people’s food. You may do this with a bow, or a sling, or traps. You do this swiftly and effectively, honoring the prey for what they provide your family, friends, and neighbors. You may be a pseudo-noble authorized to hunt on the Queen’s lands or a trapper out in the wilds.
Some hunters are expert trackers, others can stalk their prey for miles, while others still use snares. A hunter may focus on specific beasts, or not. No matter their preferred protein when they are on the trail they are completely dedicated to success.
Skill Proficiencies: Survival, Stealth Tool Proficiencies: Leatherworker’s or Woodcarver’s Tools Languages: None Equipment: A non-magical ranged (w/ 10 pieces of ammunition) or 3 thrown weapons or 2 hunting traps, traveler’s clothes, waterskin, knife, whetstone
Feature: Provider
During a long rest you are able to find enough food for yourself and your proficiency bonus number of people for a day. You can do so and still gain the benefits of a rest, but still must sleep or trance as appropriate to your race or lineage. Additionally, you have twice your proficiency bonus for your Stealth or Survival skill gained from this Background when in natural surroundings. This bonus does not stack with Expertise or similar rules at any time.
You are not proficient with the weapons that are starting equipment.
For personality use the Folk Hero or Outlander, for now. When the Before We Were Heroes project is available for purchase every Background will have their own traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws.
The Hunter can also be played as a Trapper without any changes beyond the name. Just choose the hunting traps for your equipment.
Hunter Design Goals
As usual this design started with the massive hole in the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook not having many mundane backgrounds and trying to shoehorn them into the Folk Hero. But being a hero is what playing the game is about, not the story in your past.
With the Hunter I wanted to explore a way to grant Expertise, under a different name, to any character at 1st level. But, this is as pricey as the cantrip granted by the Drudge. There must be a cost. That cost isn’t just dropping a single skill, but dropping a skill and one language/tool/etc. That didn’t seem to be enough though. So, the rule is that a Hunter must choose one of two skills and cannot have the other at 1st level. Our mundane hunter is either good at tracking/trapping or good at sneaking — not both.
Picking herbs from a backyard garden, a hot house, or a forest outside of town the herbalist collects natural items that aid and harm. An herbalist can heal, poison, invigorate. They know the powers of plants and fungi to change how humanoids and beasts experience the world.
You are a naturalist. You use the art and science of foods and other natural goods to change the way people experience the world. Maybe your favorite tisane helps awaken the weary, or heal the hurt, or cure a disease, or puts people to sleep. A poultice could stop blood flow, or cool the overheating.
There’s power in the natural world and your various recipes. Clerics count on gods. Druids channel the magic of nature. An herbalist knows that life interacts with itself in interesting ways. There’s a magic to that, it’s just not ‘magic.’
Skill Proficiencies: Nature, Survival Tool Proficiencies: Herbalist Kit Languages: Druidic Equipment: Sickle, 2 candles, Scroll case with 5 pieces parchment or a notebook, common clothes, component pouch, herbalism kit, 2 vials (1 w/ either antitoxin or healing potion)
Feature: A Dash of This; a Dollop of That
Using a short rest, you can always find the various fungus, plants, and whatnot needed to make antitoxin, healing potions, poison, or coffee-like substances. Your recipes manifest as salves, poultices, potions, pills, or any other way to deliver the ingredients. Any of your recipes take just a Bonus Action to use as they are more potent than typical.
The personality traits, ideals, bonds of flaws of the Acolyte, Folk Hero, Hermit, Outlander, and Sage all make sense to borrow from during the playtest of this Background. When published all Backgrounds will have unique character traits.
Herbalist Design Goals
Again, this design exists because the Guild Artisan puts most Backgrounds that are related to Tools into a Guild. That’s fine for some stories, but it ignores so many others.
A rural or farm community Herbalist is common in the lore upon which D&D is based. These can become Druids, Rangers, Clerics, Sorcerers, Wizards, and Warlocks most commonly. There’s also a fit with certain Barbarians, Monks, and Paladins. Frankly, a Rogue (Assassin) and Paladin (Devotion, Ancients), and even a Fighter (Eldritch Knight). Because frankly every background should have a story with every core class.
There was also a desire to have access to Druidic, my least favorite D&D language, at a Background level. A couple Backgrounds grant access to Thieves Cant, and it makes sense to have at least one grant Druidic. Shortly, there will be a post about a new take on Druidic that expands it to cover at least one more class and a couple more Backgrounds soon.
Nynaeve al’Meara from the Wheel of Time is a foundational character for this Background.
Custom Backgrounds for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons
As Wizards of the Coast makes changes to how race & lineage impact character creation there is some pushback towards removing Ability Score Increases from race and having that instead be a floating adjustment. There are many proposed adjustments and several games or third-party products include adjustments to this part of the system, to varying degrees.
Ancestry & Culture and Level Up are the two that I’ve been most intrigued with to this point. My home game just uses floating ASI for simplicity’s sake. Another movement tries to connect the ASI to Backgrounds. One such proposal on reddit suggests this because;
The backgrounds we have in basic 5e are fairly lackluster. Here’s some tools and a little feature. It’s kinda meh. You can almost skip them in character creation. What I’d like to see are dozens of backgrounds that provide: tools, languages, equipment, more substantial features, as well as appropriate ASIs. They could provide so many more variations with every published book as well as allow for plenty of homebrew.
There are a few reasons this suggestion would not work at my table, and isn’t recommended.
You can already suggest that your Floating ASI connects to your character’s Background. As well as writing your character’s story as if the Floating ASI connects to your racial/species/lineage origin, or to Class, or whatever element you want. This empowers players to tell the widest variety of tales possible.
Assumptions about weak/strong, or unintelligent/smart people in specific roles aren’t as bad as those connected to race, but they’re still not great. Being a weak Farmer is a good story, whether or not the character is a Remarkable Drudge.
Backgrounds already do a lot of mechanical work. Embrace those mechanics. Their design tells your table so much about who you are and why you do the things you do. The Background rules do not need to change. They need to be used.
To review every Background in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition as written includes two skills (roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of the skills your character begins with), two languages/tools/games/instruments/kits (closer to half of the beginning amount), and a social or exploration themed feature. A removal of Backgrounds further reduces the social and exploration pillars bringing the game back to its wargaming roots, which ignores current desires of most gamers.
This change also ignores the Traits, Ideal, Bond, and Flaw system. These few short sentences are guidance towards personality, more so than the archaic use of Alignment. They tell you about the who of your character. They are not a complete personality, but a snapshot. This system also adds mechanics to roleplay. When a character plays their Traits, Ideal, Bond, and/or Flaw they are granted an Inspiration Die. This d20 is consumed when a player wants to grant their character advantage (a handy house rule is that players can grant each other an Inspiration Die based on roleplay too). Having advantage is powerful. The math shifts.
Together there are ten mechanics attached to Backgrounds. TEN.
Plus those mechanics attach themselves to something else that race and calls do not — the story of what you did Before. Your zero to hero journey is fundamentally intertwined with Backgrounds.
Backgrounds Empower Story
What were you before you picked up a sword or spell to fight a bandit? How did that upbringing and background inform who you are becoming? Real world ‘adventurers’ are not the same, even if they are from the same ethnic group and took the same adventuring job. A studious nerd from the ‘burbs who became a linguist with the Special Forces has a different story from the hunter from rough rural lands who became a linguist with the Special Forces.
Tools aren’t ‘meh.’ They are powerful ways to talk about what your character is outside of combat. Tools are one of the best ways to explain your character’s hobbies. And your character must have a hobby. People in the times that inspire our game had hobbies. Tools are also ways to tell cultural stories about a region. The existence of an expert coffee roaster or athlete carries worldbuilding implications. Knowing more languages than typical speaks to a character’s education (either by book or by street or by silk road)
Those social and exploration features are some of the only ways that a Fighter will have social and exploration mechanics. The class is so blank slate that without Backgrounds that hole is massive. They also augment the ways that the rest of the Classes interact with those pillars of the game.
Backgrounds help D&D players differentiate their characters by adding another layer of story from Before as they begin to tell the story of Now.
Custom Backgrounds for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons
With the announced pace of products picking up, we should also expect Unearthed Arcana’s pace to pick up. Today, Wizards of the Coast sent out the latest Dungeons & Dragons playtest document with six new races to play n the game. They have strong flavors of my favorite settings from the days of yore — Spelljammer.
Unlike the foundational settings of D&D Spelljammer has no relationship to the real world or literature. The concept is D&D in space, but an odd kind of space with ships that look like dragonflies and mind flayer heads, all powered by hooking up a magic user to a chair/helm/etc that sucks magic from them. Each “solar system” exists within a crystal sphere, and outside of that is a highly flammable sea of a Phlogiston.
There are prates, even crafter gnomes, space monkeys that can glide, Victorian hippo-people, asteroid trading posts run by beholders, fleets of mind flayers. The whole of the setting is comc book/cartoon joy with themes of exploration similar to Star Trek.
Some of the new races are also part of the Planescape realm and the thri-keen are one of the signature elements of Dark Sun.
Astral Elf
An elf denizen of the Astral Plane who is likely thousands of years old.
What I like
Radiant Soul is a cool way to bounce back from death’s door once per day. That you must be down and making death saves in order to use it connects the mechanics to Astral Elf’s planar nature.
Trance Tools are a non-cultural way to gain proficiency, nifty little mechanic. Maybe my favorite from this drop, which is funny because…
What I don’t like
Don’t know why the world needs another elf, ever. There are a lot in D&D these days, with more to come for every new setting. The Astral Elf, if the feedback is strong, will be the 14th elf within official D&D worlds for Fifth Edition.
Also, just after so many reminders that each playable races is supposed to have a human-like age spectrum, the Astral Elf is even older than normal elves.
Will I play one?
Probably not. Elves and all their permutations are my least played race. The idea of an ancient people viewed as the ideal of sapience has little appeal to me.
Autognome
A mechanical gnome gifted with free will.
What I like
True Life is a brilliant way to empower healing for living constructs. The Warforged need this in the expected minor racial reworks coming with the three-book gift set.
Built for Success strongly connects the rules of the race to why the race exists. Gnomes created these automatons to be better than gnomes are, at least at certain tasks.
What I don’t like
Sentry’s Rest is another variant on Trances. Having a party with a creature that needs 4 hours, and another that needs 6 hours, and most that need 8 hours adds unnecessary complexity to organizing watches.
Will I play one?
Yep, I love the little people. Also, I enjoy tool users and specialists. These would make strong Rogues.
Giff
A hippo-headed being of impressive size.
What I like
They’re big, really big. Playing a super-sized race that doesn’t have to smush itself through most passages is a great way to feel more powerful than you are in real ife. Hippo Build embraces this.
What I don’t like
Damage Dealer connects more strongly to Rogues and Paladins than the Giff’s traditional role as a Fighter. Also, that’s it. They only have two traits. The Astral Elf, embracing their racial superiority have seven.
Will I play one?
Yep. Absolutely. Anthropomorphic races are cool. The Giff’s traditional Victorian military culture can be fun. There will be a search for another trait that connects to their build, maybe something as boring as Tough Hide which gives them an extra hit point every level.
Hadozee
A highly adaptive simian being who uses winglike membranes to glide.
What I like
The climbing speed and Glide are both great ways to capture their tree glider meets monkey vibe.
Dexterous Feet allowing a bonus action to Use an Object is good, but it doesn’t go quite far enough.
What I don’t like
Dexterous Feet should include the tail, and to enable more fun, should allow the activity via a Reaction too. Yes, that break the standard for Reactions, but it’s cool.
Will I play one?
Maybe. Kinda want to be an Artificer or Wizard, who manipulates their magic components with their feet and tail.
Plasmoid
An amoeba-like being.
What I like
These things are bizarre, the oddest playable concept in the game. You have no standard form, as you are an Ooze. Shape Self enables you to look kind of like a person and also lets you grow an ‘arm’ up to ten feet long.
What I don’t like
The mechanics are great, the ability to be one the creatures mentally needs a lot of explanation.
Will I play one?
Not until the lore is revealed. My head needs help wrapping around this concept even more than it does for Lizard Folk.
Thri-kreen
A six-limbed, telepathic insectoid.
What I like
Secondary Arms is a good solve for how these six-limbed peoples work with the D&D action economy. There is a fun synergy with Two-Weapon Fighting and with light thrown weapons when you have multi-attack or related abilities.
What I don’t like
Sleepless Revitalization reveals another Long Rest variant to confuse the party.
With five racial traits, most with power, they are insectoid elves.
Will I play one?
No, but they are absolutely necessary for the world of Dark Sun, and maybe in my own world (spoiler?).
