Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse is arriving on May 16 and with it comes over 30 playable races! These races have been collected from across the multiverse—from the Feywild's harengon to Theros' satyr—and have been tweaked to make them setting-agnostic.
In this article, we're going to examine a few of the all-time greats when it comes to monstrous races: the goblin, hobgoblin, and kobold. We'll discuss what's changed for these races since their original appearance in Volo's Guide to Monsters and show how to build characters around them.
Ability score Increases and Languages
Newer Dungeons & Dragons races don't come with set ability score increases. Instead, players will get to choose one of the following options at character creation:
- Increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1
- Increase three different scores by 1
Instead of preset language proficiencies, you'll learn Common and one other language of your choice (with your DM's approval).
Goblin
To enable more diversified goblin characters, the updates in Monsters of the Multiverse present goblins in a more positive light than previous sources. As made apparent by adding the Fey Ancestry trait, Monsters of the Multiverse focuses on how goblins originated in the Feywild and were later conquered by the god Maglubiyet when they crossed into the Material Plane.
Goblin Traits
In Monsters of the Multiverse, goblins retain all of the traits from their previous version, with slight tweaks. They are still Small creatures that are exceptionally good at hiding, escaping danger, and taking down foes that are larger than them. Their trademark ability, Fury of the Small, is slightly changed to deal damage equal to your proficiency modifier and can be used a number of times equal to your proficiency modifier per long rest. They are also granted the Fey Ancestry trait, which provides them advantage on saving throws made to avoid and end the charmed condition.
The most significant change comes from the ability to choose your ability score array, rather than having to work with a set +2 Dexterity, +1 Constitution. While this previous array was incredible for stealthy rogues, Charisma-focused bards or Intelligence-focused wizards would overlook the goblin as a viable race. Now, you could easily make a Strength-focused goblin Battle Master who wears heavy armor for defense and can use their Nimble Escape to move around the battlefield while using Fury of the Small to pump up damage.
Hobgoblin
Hobgoblins receive quite the glow-up from their grim depiction in Volo's Guide to Monsters. In Monsters of the Multiverse, hobgoblins are described as charismatic leaders who form deep bonds with their comrades. Like the treatment goblins received, Monsters of the Multiverse focuses on the hobgoblin's origins in the Feywild and ties that into their new racial features.
Hobgoblin Traits
In exchange for their martial weapon and light armor proficiencies, hobgoblins now receive an interesting racial feature called Fey Gift in Monsters of the Multiverse. It allows them to take the Help action as a bonus action a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest. Starting at 3rd level, when you take the Help action in this way, you also benefit in other ways:
- You and the creature you help gain temporary hit points.
- You and the creature you help temporarily increase your walking speeds.
- When the creature you help hits a target with an attack roll, that target gets disadvantage on the next attack roll it makes within the next minute.
Being able to take the Help action as a bonus action is already a strong ability because it grants a party member advantage on their next attack or ability check. Getting to also debuff an enemy or gain some temporary hit points make this an even more stellar resource in combat.
Previously, hobgoblins came with a set +2 Constitution, +1 Intelligence array, which provided a solid base for a tank wizard when combined with the race's light armor proficiency. The addition of the Fey Gift feature from Monsters of the Multiverse opens up the door for new builds. Combine Fey Gift with the Fortune from the Many trait—a reskinned Saving Face feature from the hobgoblin's previous appearance—and you have a solid support-focused martial class that works excellently with other martial party members. But while Fey Gift makes good use of an empty bonus action slot, builds that already have a use for their bonus action, like bards, rogues, and two-weapon fighters, might want to look elsewhere in order to maximize their action economy.
Kobold
The kobolds of Volo's Guide to Monsters is the only race to receive two ability score increases instead of the typical three. They also have Sunlight Sensitivity, which can be a challenging setback in campaigns that tend to spend more time above ground than not. In Monsters of the Multiverse, the kobold's racial traits offer a more level playing field plus abilities from their draconic ancestors.
Kobold Traits
The new version of the kobold introduces the Draconic Cry feature, which replaces the previous version's Pact Tactics. This new feature functions fairly similar in that it is a reliable source of advantage on attacks. However, it is an expendable resource, costing a bonus action and only being usable a number of times equal to your proficiency modifier per long rest. In exchange, Draconic Cry also offers allies advantage on their attacks and doesn't require an ally to be within 5 feet of you to activate it.
In place of the Grovel, Cower, and Beg racial trait, kobolds are given a new feature called Kobold Legacy. This new trait allows you to choose between a skill proficiency in Arcana, Investigation, Medicine, Sleight of Hand, or Survival, getting advantage on saving throws against the frightened condition, or a sorcerer cantrip.
Like Pack Tactics, the Draconic Cry racial trait lends itself to a martial build as it can give you advantage on attacks against enemies within melee range. This can be an excellent way to ensure you can reliably sneak attack as a rogue or when you just need to land that smite as a paladin. These martial builds will be able to make good use of either the advantage against being frightened or the sorcerer cantrip granted through Kobold Legacy. The frightened condition can be a tough one to overcome for builds lacking proficiency in Wisdom saves, and the sorcerer cantrip could be a great way to snag green-flame blade or booming blade.
A Multiverse Worth of Options Awaits
Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse allows players to choose from over 30 races, each of which can be viable in any number of new and exciting builds. Players will have to be careful, however. The book also contains over 250 monster stat blocks that Dungeon Masters will undoubtedly use to put your new characters to the test!
Mike Bernier (@arcane_eye) is the founder of Arcane Eye, a site focused on providing useful tips and tricks to all those involved in the world of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time playing games, hiking with his girlfriend, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants that have invaded his house.
Fey Wild, everything is from the Fey Wild now. Crawford says so..... as if he has been involved in D&D from the beginning, try 4e (the garbage version) and 5e. Goblins have been in D&D for decades likely longer than JC has even known about D&D. Lets just keep changing history guys, Pathfinder/Paizo can always use more customers/players.
You sit on HUNDREDS of books, details, lore, etc. from various campaign settings, stories, and versions of D&D, all you have to do is update it to 5e rules, and you are so greedy you don't want to because you will have to pay credit and some cash to the originators, whose backs you walk on, as if you created this game. So tired of the race, class, ability, etc. changes in one version of a game!
FYI WoTC, you guys suck at this, you just capitalized on failing brand due to Card Crack sales and pretty much delivered trash for a decade before getting something better than 4e, but not better than 3.5.
Sorry, life is tough at time and I never see anyone speaking honest with you guys on these threads with any detail or reference. If it wasn't for COVID and VTT's Hasbro would have sold off D&D and likely you too. So figure it out!
Nobody was denying anyone's enjoyment of anything before. I guarantee you plenty of people played goblin barbarians and kobold bards and had a blast doing so. The choice was impactful and interesting. The best part? If you really were too weak-willed to put up with the extremely minor barrier of non-optimized stats, Tasha's had the optional rule, or you could just homebrew something. Now those choices are forced to be meaningless. You can't just homebrew that the choice is suddenly interesting or impactful again, because you aren't making a choice to overcome adversity. Do you think it would be interesting, impressive, or inspiring for me to cripple myself just so I could show that I, as a (self-inflicted for this purpose) handicapped person can be as good as I would have been had I not crippled myself? No, it would be weird at best. These official rules don't make it more fun for anyone. They make the obstacle course an option for people who refuse to walk anywhere that isn't a flat, level surface by making the "obstacle course" a flat, level surface. That doesn't make it more fun for the people who only walk on flat, level surfaces. They were going to walk on flat, level surfaces regardless. It only ruined the fun of people who liked the variety of the obstacle course. Because now their only option is a flat, level surface. You had your flat level surfaces. You just didn't like seeing people have fun in ways you didn't understand, so you assumed the people having fun on the obstacle courses were making fun of you for being too scared to play on the obstacle courses, called the obstacle courses ableist, and had them removed. Good job.
I guess I don’t really understand the arguing that is going on here. Could someone explain it to me? What I am hearing is: The removal of Dedicated ASI is ruining the individuality of the races and the ‘removal of lore’ is ruining the history of the races.
Let me put my opinions in here (not trying to pick a fight). I do not see how removing dedicated ASI ruins the individuality of races. Dwarves are not hardy because of a +1 modifier to Con. It is their resistance to poison. Halflings are not Halflings because of a +1 modifier to dex (which is the most common ASI anyway), it is their bountiful luck. Races are defined by their individual traits, not by their ASI modifiers that even were confirmed by WOTC to not be genetics. Your rolled stats are your genetics.
The lore being ‘removed’ and thus ruining races uniqueness I just do not see. Saying all Drow are evil because of Lolth and the reason that Drizzt is unique is because he fought against it isn’t good story writing. You are basing an entire races perception on ONE culture in the world. To me this is the same as seeing Jaws and reading about how White Sharks are prone to attack humans and calling ALL sharks ‘evil’.
Again, I am not trying to start a fight. I just want to understand what is going on while putting my thoughts in as well.
That's the point. Stats have no value. So now we pick the cool skill that goes with a race with no cost. Playing a goblin wizard came with cool challenges. You lose half of what the race is about when you open stats to what ever you want.
I did just that ...
https://www.worldanvil.com/w/land-of-the-fallen-7Blandfall7D-masterwitch/a/racial-bonuses-article
I would agree with you; the ASI tells the player what play style works best for the race for example; races with a bonuses to strength and constitution and have racial features that reward you for being in melee you going to see a lot of melee characters with that race, and a race with bonuses to intelligence, wisdom, or charisma you are going to see a casters with that race. On the other hand ASI could be seen as racial stereotyping by some people, and Wizards wants to move away from that, and wants the races to fit into every class (which I find rather redundant, because people are going to find want races work with what classes).
That last part tings pretty true. RPGBOT has already been working on a revised race-class guide, incorporating the floating racial ASI's of Tasha's and MotM.
Sure enough, some races' traits still complement some classes much better than others.
I've been allowing switching ASIs even before Tasha's came out, and I still like the Default ASIs. Not because it determines what the race should or could do, but because it gives new players a general idea of what the race can do without having to know what all of the other racial features are able to do. Removing these completely and just giving a +1, +2, it could easily give new players choice paralysis and not have any idea what combinations to do with the race. I know that "There shouldn't be pigeonholes for races!", but these 'pigeonholes' can be helpful for new players who don't have much of an idea for what kind of character they want.
What I want is not for the Tasha's ASI to be removed, far from it. What I want is for there to be a list of suggestions for default scores, that parties could use as a baseline to see what skills the race is adept at.
I'm not some old player from 3.5 or 2nd edition whining about them changing things. I started in 5e, and loved it, and don't want them to remove something that was extremely helpful to me as a new player, especially since I often play with new players. I realize that I can just not use the content coming out, but they're not selling the old content anymore! And websites are only allowing you to use the old ASIs if you've bought the books through their services. And guess what? This is forcing the new content on DMs who have new players, and DMs who like using old content but aren't able to for online games any more.
Again, let me clarify. I like the Tasha's ASIs, especially since I've been using a modified version of them for over a year and half at this point. I just don't want Wizards to make them necessary with no other options.
(I'm not looking for a fight btw. If you come in mocking me, I'm just going to ignore you. I am happy to discuss things, however.)
I completely agree with the rest of what you said, but I'm in a complaining mood, so I'm singling this part out. If you don't want "pigeonholes for races," then you shouldn't have races. Every race is a human. If you want to make your character look like a different race, maybe add them as aesthetic options with no historic differences. There can be no discrimination. No villains either, because then (some) people would naturally associate that villain with some physical characteristics or race, and that would be unfair to players who like the way that race looks.
Plus, not to mention, it would be a bit boring if there were a bunch of people that looked really different and then were functionally identical. Not having encouraged class-race combinations wouldn't really feel like D&D to me. I like that the pigeonholes exist, because then it feels a lot cooler when someone breaks it. If you want to break the stereotypical combination, go for it! It's going to be hard, but it's going to feel so much better when you succeed. Having things not be in your favor is something I really like about game systems. I like it when the game is a little unfair, because then when you beat it, it's not something you expected. It's something you strived to accomplish, even when not everything was a benefit.
(I know I kinda went on a tangent at the end there feel free to ignore it.)
By the way for anyone looking at my previous post, the first part was referring to the version of D&D that LegendOfZub proposed without any mechanical differences whatsoever. I do realize that there are differences to races even without the default ASIs, and that post was divergent from what I mentioned in the post before it.
I disagree with which which genetics and which should be your environment. Genetics don't change that much. If your parents were both the best body builders in the world and didn't push you to be as well, so you sat around all day every day, you wouldn't have 18 strength. The genetics would make it so you would be a little stronger than those who did everything else the same. So if you trained your whole life before becoming a limit-breaking adventurer with someone who did not have the genetics, they could have 18 strength (rolled) while you got to 20. Meanwhile if you sat around and played video games with the same person all day every day, not even getting up to get food, they could have 3 (rolled) strength while you have 5. If WotC decided it was the way you described, fine. I disagree with them too.
Like you said, the +2 and +1 stat adjustments aren't an impenetrable wall. They are an inconvenience that can be relatively easily overcome as a heroic individual, and doing so represents you breaking the mold.
Regarding lore stating "all of x race is evil." It doesn't. It says they tend to be evil for various reasons (gods exist and created them is a pretty big one). Being a character from a typically evil race does not mean you are evil. You mentioned Drizz't. He wouldn't have been nearly as interesting and memorable a character if all drow liked running around above ground and helping people. He proved that you are your own person.
The thing for me is that I don't enjoy is that they're removing content from future buyers. I wish they'd just make the old ones listed as "Faerun-inspired variants", since both Mord and Volos are Faerun themed books. More options is never a bad thing, and it's always been up to your DM on variants or options, which this doesn't change either.
But this whole process to replace books feels too forced, including loosing alot of lore that was available to those that only delve into the books or newer players. At leastthey could've sold their 'Legacy content' package for others to buy after.
Exactly! It feels really weird, especially since even with keeping those books they'd probably to continue to profit even with the new books coming out. They will likely actually lose potential money by removing those books.
1. No you can't. Those are no longer in any published material, and it completely eliminates the reason to take those suboptimal stats. I'm not going to cut off my feet to show that people born without feet can still be good runners, and I'm not going to take +2 in strength just to show that orcs (who now can put that +2 in anything else) can be good wizards.
2. No it doesn't and that's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard anyone ever say.
3. Yes, they are still unique. That wasn't anyone's argument. But you seem to think that one species being better than another is racist, so why are you okay with racial feats (which are far more powerful and can't be easily overcome) but not a little natural boost to ability scores?
4. They already had suggestions, but they removed them. That's the problem. That's why people are upset. You could always just override your racial ASI if you had a reason. Tasha's even gave an OPTIONAL rule to say "hey, it's not always the same for every setting."
5. Then don't comment. You're taking away from the interesting and insightful comments people are leaving with your drivel. "Why did you remove your suggested combinations from the menu?" "Stop being racist." Incredibly interesting and insightful addition.
“I disagree with which which genetics and which should be your environment. Genetics don't change that much. If your parents were both the best body builders in the world and didn't push you to be as well, so you sat around all day every day, you wouldn't have 18 strength. The genetics would make it so you would be a little stronger than those who did everything else the same. So if you trained your whole life before becoming a limit-breaking adventurer with someone who did not have the genetics, they could have 18 strength (rolled) while you got to 20. Meanwhile if you sat around and played video games with the same person all day every day, not even getting up to get food, they could have 3 (rolled) strength while you have 5. If WotC decided it was the way you described, fine. I disagree with them too.”
I agree with this and see your point. Maybe, instead of implying the way a race plays by giving them ASI’s they could use wording like in older editions (or pathfinder I don’t really remember), by using favored classes. Like “Dwarves, with their hardy bodies, used to mining and general tough labor, are more likely to be X or Y for classes, but other dwarves become historians and can be A or B classes.”
This would imply things and guide players in decisions, but won’t have the players caught up in the numbers so much. Just a thought.
They are not just removing the ASIs, they are radically changing the Features and gimmicks of certain races that completely change the race from what it was before. They don't make this a sub race or a variant version of the race, instead they say this is just the race now. Then they go the extra step to make it so no one in the future can decide for themselves if they prefer the old or revamped version by discontinuing the old books while not even moving all the monsters and races to the new book that's supposed to replace it (bye bye Tiefling subraces!). They don't remake new or better lore, instead where before there were pages of detail on a given race from their history, to their daily life, to their cultures, to even common names it's now just 2-3 paragraphs just saying where the race is from and their basic appearance. And Default ASIs are as much a part of teh race's genetics as the features, like imagine a bear, you probably think it's going to have a lot of muscle right? Same thing with the Orc, that is just the physiology of their race. No different than a Bulldog being stronger than a chihuahua or a Dachshund being more flexible than a Boxer or a Bloodhound having better senses than a Pug. Exceptions may exist, but that's what they are exceptions.
And honestly if breaking stereotypes and customization is what's supposed to be the most important thing then imagine if Wizards decided to just nix races entirely and said to use the Customize your lineage option going forward? I mean, they already think the racial features are problematic and how is a positive leaning racial feature any different from "Positive" racist assumptions like Asians being good at math? How is Wood Elf getting an extra 5 feet of ground speed any different from thinking a black man can run faster because he's black? Default ASIs are no more or less discriminatory than racial features as a concept and no more or less hampering to "optimizing" for a specific class/race combo. So what if they decide Races as a whole are too problematic a concept to continue with and then decide to just make a new and improved "Customize your origin" race in some remake of the PHB then discontinued the books and content that had Races in them? Do those arguments still hold?
Exactly! I'm a forever DM, and I always want to play "unusual" combinations because I find them interesting, great for RP, and I like the slight challenge they propose because like you said, it feels like an accomplishment to overcome that. Now you can have two orc wizards in the same party. One starts with 18 Int who got that through lifelong dedication to the arcane after fleeing from his tribe because he hated the way they were and wanted to show that not all orcs are the same, while the other one picked up his first book on magic last week was raised by the orcs who run the capital of the largest metropolis on the continent and has an int score of 20. It really just destroys the entire first character.
For that reason, I have always liked the races having default ASIs. And people are saying "then just make your players use them." And how do you propose I do that if they aren't listed anywhere? For me, I'm hoping they will still be available in the character builder with players I share it with, but what about people who haven't already bought the books with them officially listed? Do you want me to make a list of all of the default racial options that the players need to go back and forth to while making their characters? Players don't even read their spells. I spent all of this money for convenience. They are destroying that.
After buying literally every book on D&D Beyond, I'm genuinely thinking about dropping the system entirely because I hate how the books are becoming deliberately unhelpful with the intention of being more inclusive... It's just such a financial commitment that I don't want to leave...
Maybe good player options, but may be sticking with the old stat blocks for monsters.
I feel like they already solved this with Tasha's (well, honestly they solved it with rule 0, but apparently that isn't good enough anymore). Tasha's introduced the optional rule saying that exceptions exist. Maybe you ARE an orc that was born with great int and wisdom for some reason. Discus it with your DM to see if this would be possible.
Now they're saying "your DM's world isn't important. You can be whatever you want with whatever ability score increases you want. Why are we even including the ASI then? Just to make you a little bit stronger because your DM is a mean person who will put you up against scary enemies and you need to feel safe." If they still included them as suggested ASIs (like the suggested ability score assignments given in class descriptions), I wouldn't have liked it, but it would have been acceptable.