Giving goblinkins the fey ancestry trait explicitly states something about your world lore the moment you put that in your game.
Literally anything in a racial writeup that can't be attributed to genetics says something about your world lore. But leaving out everything other than genetics makes for pretty drab stuff, and even genetic info can at least imply some things about the world.
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You know, interestingly enough giving goblinoids Fey Ancestry makes them seem more rounded out and able to be a people unto themselves rather than just antagonistic cannon fodder. I think there's a difference between setting agnostic and genre agnostic going on here. Adding a few more folk to the fey umbrella, especially those that seem Unseelie, completes that whole family tree in a way that makes it more whole, in my opinion. And I think having a balanced Fey family tree is something that IS setting agnostic, but it is not GENRE agnostic. I think it is fully within the parameters of vaguely fantasy to have a fully fleshed out Fey family tree just as it is to have a fully fleshed out Fiend family tree or Draconic family tree.
They already were able to be people unto themselves, just because your perception of them didn't evolve past the encounter table doesn't mean they weren't able to be peoples in their own right. If to you they were always only cannon fodder, then that is the fault of you never using them as anything else or never thinking about them past their monster stats or your DM doing these things.
Spicy take. So yeah, I get that you don't like this new direction, but honestly that's no reason to start finding "fault" in any of this. That implies that I was or am somehow doing something wrong when it's just a matter of taste. I like this new direction, you don't. Simple as that. No need to take it personal.
Apologies, but also this one wasn't specifically about the new direction. This one was about how if someone didn't see the goblins as people before, then that's more the person's own perception than the fault of the PC abilities. Giving them fey ancestry doesn't somehow make them more able to be people, it's just that when someone is only treated as mooks to be killed it's no wonder folks only treat them as mooks to be killed.
I didn't mean to degrade you, but I'm sorry anyway.
Apologies, but also this one wasn't specifically about the new direction. This one was about how if someone didn't see the goblins as people before, then that's more the person's own perception than the fault of the PC abilities. Giving them fey ancestry doesn't somehow make them more able to be people, it's just that when someone is only treated as mooks to be killed it's no wonder folks only treat them as mooks to be killed.
I didn't mean to degrade you, but I'm sorry anyway.
So if you'll notice, I didn't say that I didn't see them as people before, I just said that this adds and aspect to round them out as people. You don't like it, so you don't think it adds very much at all. I like it, I think it is a worthwhile addition. We can disagree, but again this is a matter of taste not a matter of objective truth.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Honestly, Ophidimancer kinda has a point. I hadn't thought about the Unseelie bit before, and had previously been kinda ambivalent about the whole 'all goblinoids are fey' thing. But thinking of them as the leavings/descendents of the Unseelie fey, the way elves and gnomes and the like are descendants of the Seelie fey? That's a neat idea, and sets up some natural rivalries and oppositions I can honestly approve of for future worldbuilding. Also gives a reason even beyond the critters' history why they're often viewed as Bad Influences - the original critters, way back in the mists of history, were Unseelie and nobody fux with Unseelie. That original antagonism yielded millenia of bad blood, even when any real traces of ther Unseelie attitude had long since faded away into nothing more than an ordinary mortal's ability to spite the world.
I can vibe on goblinoids as descendants of the Unseelie. Neat idea. Thanks, Ophidimancer.
Ultimately I'm not really bothered -- I still have my bullied-by-an-evil-war-god goblinoids, if I decide I like them better. Just thought it was an unexpected shift. As far as I know (which isn't very far, to be fair) goblinoids have never had fey ancestry in either the Realms, Greyhawk, or Dragonlance -- which have been the various "default" settings over the years. So basically it's saying that all of their flagship worlds are using goblinoids with a twist. None of them are using standard goblinoids. There's nothing wrong with that decision, it's just not what I expected, I guess? I'd think that they'd want to define the most commonly used ones as the default ones.
Really? Care to quote anyone from WotC about that? Because never in all of its marketing has it said "we are making the races in this book more setting agnostic". Instead, they just said "the races that will be included in this book are the ones that aren't setting-specific". They just chose the ones that they didn't think were setting specific (including the races that primarily appeared in one setting over the others that conceptually should be setting agnostic) and put them in the book, with some revisions. Not all the revisions were about them being setting agnostic or making them more setting agnostic, most of them were about having them be more in line with the more modern design space and their current approach of the races.
Or, are you just making stuff up because your argument is weak and you can't find anything to back up what you're saying?
The framing that I've seen was the other way, such as joe saying about how this book opens up DnD lore and such for more agnostic use. And all the other customers I've seen have expressed this framing. But it's my own fault for not reading the marketplace page, so good on you. No, I didn't make anything up. Just didn't give myself the full picture and so I posted something that was incorrect. Oh my, someone was incorrect, they must be dumb and lying oh shit /s
I primarily play in Eberron, Exandria, and my homebrew world, all of which have a unique take of goblinoids and give them more in-depth and interesting cultures than "they're just evil little people with big noses and ears that you can kill without feeling bad about it" that the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and much of the D&D Multiverse has chosen to treat them.
From "evil green mooks" to....."evil green mooks, but remove curse makes them nice". Oh boy, better hold on to my chair cuz I can't handle this whiplash. /s
Eberron and your homebrew world. Eberron is 1 setting that is vastly different from basically every other DnD setting. Man, an outlier? Being different? Couldn't be. It's almost as if that's the point. Now all the goblinkin are militaristic instead of just the hobgoblins, wowie.
Eberron goblins having a different game-feel and presentation than the rest of the DnD settings doesn't do much for your point other than "I like it better so......you're wrong". Of course an outlier setting is going to give you outlier results.
As for your homebrew world you described. Same as with the Eberron point.
You have clearly never read a product about or played/run a campaign in Eberron, Exandria, Ravnica, or Mystara if that's your view on all goblin(oid)s in the D&D Multiverse. That's certainly a type of goblinoids in some D&D settings, but they're not the only one, or even the majority one in 5e settings. "Goblin Slayer"-style goblins are easily the minority of goblins in official 5e D&D settings.
Nope, I've actually read the Eberron and Exandria stuff on goblins before. I was searching before for more stuff about the goblin language and found a forum post about the creator's postings of sample words from the goblin language in his world. As well as obviously reading the lore in the 5e book. The most of seen of Mystara goblins nothing than a questionable wiki entry.
Is goblin slayer not just a show that also just simply treats them as "evil green mooks"? Never seen it cuz I don't watch much anime. Cuz if "evil green mook" is the minority, then your previous statements of "much of the multiverse" come into question. But you know, I've never seen goblin slayer so I don't know what you're talking about.
However, the game-feel....here let me give an example of game-feel just for a sec.
Say you wanna play a boxer character in 5e. You only do damage through your punches. What are punches expressed as in 5e? Unarmed Strikes. So you want to try and fully express your character concept and so you think that the class who's whole thing is making unarmed strikes should be the class you pick. So monk class we go.
But it doesn't feel like a pugilist. None of the subclasses and none of the base class makes you feel like a gruff and tumble, tobacco chewing, bloody-knuckled boxer in a stained wife-beater shirt. The class itself makes you feel like some animu protagonist who has all their chakras lined up perfectly and jumps around like they're in a jackie chan movie. The name of the class' main resource is literally called Ki, and everything around the class is made around how you've achieved nirvana and have a perfect body, and move around at the speed of sound. Does a mechanic like "slow fall" make sense on a boxer? Or Stillness of Mind? Purity of Body? Deflect Missiles? Unarmored Movement? Step of the Wind? No. Not really. Because the monk class wasn't made to give you the boxer game-feel. It was made for the animu, jackie chan game-feel. Astral Self, Drunken Master, Ascendant Dragon, Kensei, Four Elements. You can see the aesthetic the class is going for and that it brings to you.
It's less about the lore specifically (obviously tho lore contributes a bunch to game-feel too) in this instance and more of how you play a goblinkin. The mechanics of the goblinkin races give them a specific game-feel. Giving them fey ancestry changes the game-feel. You're not the DnD goblin anymore, you're just yet another tiny, magical screwball race that the gnomes, fairies, and verdan already filled a niche for.
No, it does not. It literally doesn't. They aren't "Fey" (creature type), and instead have "Fey Ancestry", like Elves and Half-Elves. Do Elves having "Fey Ancestry" make them be trickster house spirits like many folklore elves? No, it doesn't, so this ridiculous slippery slope fallacy doesn't apply to Goblinoids.
Arguing over the semantics of me saying they're making them fey (giving them fey ancestry literally makes them fey in that sense) and them not literally changing their creature type is a red harring. To go for your more valuable point, what makes elves less trickster house spirits than the goblins is that the DnD elves are based on tolkien, and so stuff like elf weapon training, the extra language, keen senses, and obviously the lore make them not feel like little obnoxious tricksters.
I have literally only ever seen one do that for D&D goblins, and that's JoCat, and his version of goblins (which are adorable) do not represent the overall attitude of people that change goblinoids in their D&D campaigns/settings. And even if they were . . . that would change absolutely nothing about the discussion we're having. It's a red herring, and not even that accurate of one.
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(Also, "some people make goblins cute" and "goblins are now descended from fey" are not a cause-effect scenario. They're barely even correlated, and only because they're both on the vague topic of "goblins". "Fey" does not mean "cute". Most fey from folklore and from official D&D books are genuinely terrifying. Especially the Unseelie Court, but the Seelie Court is scary, too.)
I didn't say that "people making goblins cute are causing WotC to make them fey!!" or that it represents the "overall attitude of people that change goblinoids in their settings". ??? Don't know how you drew such a wild conclusion, but alright then. That's just foolish and I think you should reread my post as it seems you didn't get it.
I stated some folks make them cute simply to address the online, memey use of goblins that can permeate some online spaces. Surprised you haven't seen the Boblin the goblin meme yet, it's like ******* everywhere when you look for dnd memes (which is a foolish effort tbh, cuz most of the dnd memes suck, honestly. but that's just a personal tangent). Since I anticipated it being brought up as some counterpoint and I wanted to state that it was a mostly online thing but that still held a core trait with my aforementioned goblin (short one) game-feel to show the similarity.
But here, I'll raise you this so you know what I mean when I say "goblin (short one) game-feel".
the tag has been invaded by farmcore and such folks recently, but even so you'll still see stuff about dirt, trinkets, dead stuff, gross stuff, etc that you just wanna keep.
...
Oh, seriously? You throw up arms about that? The usage of a word you don't happen to like in a nuanced explanation of why taking creatures out of context isn't generally a good thing? Maybe you should do some introspection as to why the use of that one word made you freak out.
Being annoyed at a terrible notion that cultures shouldn't intermix =/= being freaked out. I'm not going to derail the thread with political discussion. But simply put the whole thing about cultural appropriation stuff is dumb, and I stated my opinion on it as such and that's why I gave you that response. However a DnD forum isn't the place for such things.
...
I don't see how making them fey somehow makes them "fit better into the multiverse". They could've simply just scrubbed all the FR lore about them and just kept the statblock and racial abilities the same and they'd would literally fit into any other setting. For Hobgoblins just remove the martial training and it fits wherever. The bugbear fits wherever. The fey stuff doesn't somehow make that easier or better. In your setting how does that make them fit better? Or Eberron? Or Ravnica? Or Exandria? Or any of the other settings you mentioned, or just any setting at all? It doesn't add anything to their ability to be dropped in, if anything it makes it harder by the extent that now you not only have fey in your setting but now some races are descended from them and are on your normal people plane being adventurers.
This new addition of making them fey doesn't do anything better for me and my goblinkin pirate country. It doesn't do anything for the goblinkin in my homebrew world who's evil god has been killed by the werewolf deity and now the long-dead trickster god they had has been revived to rule them instead as they transition towards an alliance with the werewolf country. How does this make them "fit better into the multiverse" if the multiverse then has to change itself to accommodate the new fey goblins or take the fey away from the goblins? Because now if you drop a fey goblin into the world, you're saying they come from the fey. Regardless of if that was true previously. That's why the feature is literally called "Fey Ancestry". As far as I can tell, this doesn't make them slot in better in any setting, though I guess you can say that the Dranassar in Exandria were fairies if you had to find an excuse for that setting. I couldn't find much on Mystara from a quick google search, tho. No good wiki for that setting at first glance.
Just because you like the new goblinkin races instead of the old ones doesn't mean that somehow this makes them fit better into the multiverse. Because it honestly doesn't, it makes them harder to fit into the settings, in fact.
All power to you if you like the fey goblins, but don't disregard how it objectively changes the feel of them they've had in all their previous editions and act like this somehow makes them more compatible with the setting-agnostic goal. Like them as much as you want, I like goblins and goblins deserve love.
So if you'll notice, I didn't say that I didn't see them as people before, I just said that this adds and aspect to round them out as people. You don't like it, so you don't think it adds very much at all. I like it, I think it is a worthwhile addition. We can disagree, but again this is a matter of taste not a matter of objective truth.
No I think it adds a lot, just that what it adds isn't that which I like.
There is waaaaay too much here for me to respond to, so I'm not going to. However, my main points still stand:
This change doesn't have to be about making goblinoids fit better into the D&D multiverse, and you're characterizing it in a manner that is a non-sequitur and post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because this book has setting-agnostic creatures and races in it does not mean that the changes that they make to races in this book are due to making them more setting agnostic. Correlation does not equal causation. You're conflating "this is a setting-agnostic book" and leaping to conclusions that this must be why they're changing goblinoids to have a fey background.
Goblinoids already had lore that supports the change to have Fey Ancestry (Nilbogs, their dead pantheon that Maglubiyet conquered, 4e Goblin cities in the Feywild), and adding it to the races can help tell different stories with them (the "goblinoids are actually victims of a tragedy and the oppression of a dictator god that killed their previous pantheon" thing), so while it may not add anything to your games, it does to mine and other peoples'.
All of the goblinoids were fey in the folklore, and removing the cultural context for the creatures taken from folklore/mythology is generally not a good thing. It's a good thing when cultures combine and influence one another, I'm 100% for this, but stealing a name of a creature from a real world culture and not using it in a way that resembles the source material . . . is a problem.
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The adjustments on goblins feels a bit like the shift on the kobold to be more draconic rather than the more dog/rat like creature from second edition. By giving that fey link to the goblins mechanically reinforces a bit of a shift in perception. Asides from the player race aspects I can see from a DM view the need to help further separate the concepts of the creature as without that there isn't too much difference from small monsterous humanoids.
Ok reading the changes and getting a general feel of comments I am not really seeing any mechanical reason why the changes break the game. The general comments against seem to be based off the idea, this is how it had always been and therefore change is bad.
Personally ever since I started DMing 5E, long before Tasha’s, I have operated floating ASIs at creation, it just seemed to make sense to me. So to my mind this is simply making RAW a houserule I have always implemented. As an aside I really really hope they see sense and implement another house rule I have always run as raw and make taking a potion a bonus action.
Anyway, the main question that needs to be asked first and foremost have the changes WOTC made created a better game, and the general concensous is yes. Now those against these changes, there is nothing stopping you as a DM houseruling that the original PHB rules will be enforced. But you also need to realize that many many many new players are coming into the game and want to play a Charismatic Orc, or a Clumsy elf. In the past I have had a player who played a 4 foot tall elf, born with a height defect, we kept the elf rules except his movement became 25 foot and he was able to stand in the same square as another character. All these new rules do is get closer to making characters like this RAW.
Another thing that old time players need to understand is that with more players coming into the game wider and wider viewpoints are coming into the game which is a good thing.
A friends teenage son asked me why orcs and goblins are always evil, I answered that they don’t have to be, in fact in my worlds there are plenty of neutral and good greenskins. They attack those who come into there lands because they have had generations of being treated as the other, attacked and killed simply for being. Taking alignment away from the monster manual is I think a long needed thing, again, nothing to stop you using goblins as canon fodder for a bunch of murder hobos who don’t want to play a nuanced game, that is a very valid game style to play. But by making this RAW it helps new DMs and players think about a more nuanced game. Removing allignment also allows in future for this monster manual to become a generic rule set that covers, for instance, a universe where goblins and orcs are the major races and humans, elves etc either don’t exist or are in the minority and are the “canon fodder”, it allows a lot more flexibility to say “in this universe Goblins are all lawful good, while in the other one they are chaotic evil”.
Ultimatley if you don’t like the changes that have been made, then don’t apply them, every rule in DND is optional, I know DMs who forgo rolling initiative and instead go in order round the table starting with a random player. I know DMs who reroll initiative every round of combat. I know DMs who stick to the rules for magic item availability, and DMs like me who have magic shops and hand out magic items all the time, the game doesn’t break, the world isn’t over and we are having fun. You will find players who want to play the game the same way as you which is great but, as with all the ways we play DND it does not mean your version is better or worse because you ignore the new rules, it just makes it different.
DnD is on the first steps of a long journey to becoming a more modern system, personally I am really excited to see the changes that are coming as we build to the anniversary release of new PHB and DM guide hopefully more of the houserule i and others I know have implemented over the years will slowly become RAW options. But ultimately it is a game with no winners, as long as everyone is happy and having fun ignore or implement as many of the changes as you want but accept that just as 5E is very different to the first DND game, in 30 years time the game will be so so different to what it is now.
Is Fey Ancestry becoming the new Darkvision, where the list of player races that don't have it is shorter than the list of races that do?
Well, you've got elves, half elves, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, centaurs, fairies, and satyrs. That's 8 unless I'm forgetting some. There are by my reckoning 39 races in total, and I'm counting "Exandria orc" as the same thing as "orc," "feral tiefling" as "tiefling," etc.
The numbers might get closer if you account for subraces (elves have a lot), but I doubt it'll reach parity.
As an aside, ignoring what's in MMM because I don't have it, the number of races with darkvision seems to be 19 out of 39. So it's just barely under half. I doubt anyone's losing darkvision in MMM, but I know genasi are gaining it, so then it'll actually be true that the list of races without it is shorter than with.
Is Fey Ancestry becoming the new Darkvision, where the list of player races that don't have it is shorter than the list of races that do?
Well, you've got elves, half elves, goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, centaurs, fairies, and satyrs. That's 85 unless I'm forgetting some. There are by my reckoning 39 races in total, and I'm counting "Exandria orc" as the same thing as "orc," "feral tiefling" as "tiefling," etc.
The numbers might get closer if you account for subraces (elves have a lot), but I doubt it'll reach parity.
As an aside, ignoring what's in MMM because I don't have it, the number of races with darkvision seems to be 19 out of 39. So it's just barely under half. I doubt anyone's losing darkvision in MMM, but I know genasi are gaining it, so then it'll actually be true that the list of races without it is shorter than with.
Fixed that for you.
Centaurs, Fairies, and Satyrs, while they are the "Fey creature type", do not have the "Fey Ancestry" racial trait. There are only 5 races in the game that have Fey Ancestry (unless you count the Shadar-Kai, Eladrin, and Sea Elf as separate races from Elves), and there are nearly 50 official races in the game.
So, no, Fey Ancestry is not the "new Darkvision". That's ridiculous. People complaining about this . . . what do you think of Powerful Build? There's a ton of races that have Powerful Build, or some variant of it (Centaurs have Equine Build, Giff have Hippo Build, Goliaths have Little Giant), and I don't see you complaining about that. That's not even mentioning certain Damage Resistances, Innate Spellcasting, Telepathy, and other racial features that are shared by different races/subraces.
This overblown hyperbole and strawmen are really not constructive or accurate in any way.
Literally anything in a racial writeup that can't be attributed to genetics says something about your world lore. But leaving out everything other than genetics makes for pretty drab stuff, and even genetic info can at least imply some things about the world.
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Apologies, but also this one wasn't specifically about the new direction. This one was about how if someone didn't see the goblins as people before, then that's more the person's own perception than the fault of the PC abilities. Giving them fey ancestry doesn't somehow make them more able to be people, it's just that when someone is only treated as mooks to be killed it's no wonder folks only treat them as mooks to be killed.
I didn't mean to degrade you, but I'm sorry anyway.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU
So if you'll notice, I didn't say that I didn't see them as people before, I just said that this adds and aspect to round them out as people. You don't like it, so you don't think it adds very much at all. I like it, I think it is a worthwhile addition. We can disagree, but again this is a matter of taste not a matter of objective truth.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Honestly, Ophidimancer kinda has a point. I hadn't thought about the Unseelie bit before, and had previously been kinda ambivalent about the whole 'all goblinoids are fey' thing. But thinking of them as the leavings/descendents of the Unseelie fey, the way elves and gnomes and the like are descendants of the Seelie fey? That's a neat idea, and sets up some natural rivalries and oppositions I can honestly approve of for future worldbuilding. Also gives a reason even beyond the critters' history why they're often viewed as Bad Influences - the original critters, way back in the mists of history, were Unseelie and nobody fux with Unseelie. That original antagonism yielded millenia of bad blood, even when any real traces of ther Unseelie attitude had long since faded away into nothing more than an ordinary mortal's ability to spite the world.
I can vibe on goblinoids as descendants of the Unseelie. Neat idea. Thanks, Ophidimancer.
Please do not contact or message me.
To be fair, it was actually Third Sundering who made that connection first! I like it, too! :D
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
If people ever want inspiration for Unseelie Goblins I can highly recommend Brian Frouds': Goblins! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100593.Goblins_A_Survival_Guide_and_Fiasco_in_Four_Parts
Ultimately I'm not really bothered -- I still have my bullied-by-an-evil-war-god goblinoids, if I decide I like them better. Just thought it was an unexpected shift. As far as I know (which isn't very far, to be fair) goblinoids have never had fey ancestry in either the Realms, Greyhawk, or Dragonlance -- which have been the various "default" settings over the years. So basically it's saying that all of their flagship worlds are using goblinoids with a twist. None of them are using standard goblinoids. There's nothing wrong with that decision, it's just not what I expected, I guess? I'd think that they'd want to define the most commonly used ones as the default ones.
Anywho.
The framing that I've seen was the other way, such as joe saying about how this book opens up DnD lore and such for more agnostic use. And all the other customers I've seen have expressed this framing. But it's my own fault for not reading the marketplace page, so good on you. No, I didn't make anything up. Just didn't give myself the full picture and so I posted something that was incorrect. Oh my, someone was incorrect, they must be dumb and lying oh shit /s
From "evil green mooks" to....."evil green mooks, but remove curse makes them nice". Oh boy, better hold on to my chair cuz I can't handle this whiplash. /s
Eberron and your homebrew world. Eberron is 1 setting that is vastly different from basically every other DnD setting. Man, an outlier? Being different? Couldn't be. It's almost as if that's the point. Now all the goblinkin are militaristic instead of just the hobgoblins, wowie.
Eberron goblins having a different game-feel and presentation than the rest of the DnD settings doesn't do much for your point other than "I like it better so......you're wrong". Of course an outlier setting is going to give you outlier results.
As for your homebrew world you described. Same as with the Eberron point.
Nope, I've actually read the Eberron and Exandria stuff on goblins before. I was searching before for more stuff about the goblin language and found a forum post about the creator's postings of sample words from the goblin language in his world. As well as obviously reading the lore in the 5e book. The most of seen of Mystara goblins nothing than a questionable wiki entry.
Is goblin slayer not just a show that also just simply treats them as "evil green mooks"? Never seen it cuz I don't watch much anime. Cuz if "evil green mook" is the minority, then your previous statements of "much of the multiverse" come into question. But you know, I've never seen goblin slayer so I don't know what you're talking about.
However, the game-feel....here let me give an example of game-feel just for a sec.
Say you wanna play a boxer character in 5e. You only do damage through your punches. What are punches expressed as in 5e? Unarmed Strikes. So you want to try and fully express your character concept and so you think that the class who's whole thing is making unarmed strikes should be the class you pick. So monk class we go.
But it doesn't feel like a pugilist. None of the subclasses and none of the base class makes you feel like a gruff and tumble, tobacco chewing, bloody-knuckled boxer in a stained wife-beater shirt. The class itself makes you feel like some animu protagonist who has all their chakras lined up perfectly and jumps around like they're in a jackie chan movie. The name of the class' main resource is literally called Ki, and everything around the class is made around how you've achieved nirvana and have a perfect body, and move around at the speed of sound. Does a mechanic like "slow fall" make sense on a boxer? Or Stillness of Mind? Purity of Body? Deflect Missiles? Unarmored Movement? Step of the Wind? No. Not really. Because the monk class wasn't made to give you the boxer game-feel. It was made for the animu, jackie chan game-feel. Astral Self, Drunken Master, Ascendant Dragon, Kensei, Four Elements. You can see the aesthetic the class is going for and that it brings to you.
It's less about the lore specifically (obviously tho lore contributes a bunch to game-feel too) in this instance and more of how you play a goblinkin. The mechanics of the goblinkin races give them a specific game-feel. Giving them fey ancestry changes the game-feel. You're not the DnD goblin anymore, you're just yet another tiny, magical screwball race that the gnomes, fairies, and verdan already filled a niche for.
Mechanical Aesthetic
Arguing over the semantics of me saying they're making them fey (giving them fey ancestry literally makes them fey in that sense) and them not literally changing their creature type is a red harring. To go for your more valuable point, what makes elves less trickster house spirits than the goblins is that the DnD elves are based on tolkien, and so stuff like elf weapon training, the extra language, keen senses, and obviously the lore make them not feel like little obnoxious tricksters.
I didn't say that "people making goblins cute are causing WotC to make them fey!!" or that it represents the "overall attitude of people that change goblinoids in their settings". ??? Don't know how you drew such a wild conclusion, but alright then. That's just foolish and I think you should reread my post as it seems you didn't get it.
I stated some folks make them cute simply to address the online, memey use of goblins that can permeate some online spaces. Surprised you haven't seen the Boblin the goblin meme yet, it's like ******* everywhere when you look for dnd memes (which is a foolish effort tbh, cuz most of the dnd memes suck, honestly. but that's just a personal tangent). Since I anticipated it being brought up as some counterpoint and I wanted to state that it was a mostly online thing but that still held a core trait with my aforementioned goblin (short one) game-feel to show the similarity.
But here, I'll raise you this so you know what I mean when I say "goblin (short one) game-feel".
Goblincore
the tag has been invaded by farmcore and such folks recently, but even so you'll still see stuff about dirt, trinkets, dead stuff, gross stuff, etc that you just wanna keep.
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Being annoyed at a terrible notion that cultures shouldn't intermix =/= being freaked out. I'm not going to derail the thread with political discussion. But simply put the whole thing about cultural appropriation stuff is dumb, and I stated my opinion on it as such and that's why I gave you that response. However a DnD forum isn't the place for such things.
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I don't see how making them fey somehow makes them "fit better into the multiverse". They could've simply just scrubbed all the FR lore about them and just kept the statblock and racial abilities the same and they'd would literally fit into any other setting. For Hobgoblins just remove the martial training and it fits wherever. The bugbear fits wherever. The fey stuff doesn't somehow make that easier or better. In your setting how does that make them fit better? Or Eberron? Or Ravnica? Or Exandria? Or any of the other settings you mentioned, or just any setting at all? It doesn't add anything to their ability to be dropped in, if anything it makes it harder by the extent that now you not only have fey in your setting but now some races are descended from them and are on your normal people plane being adventurers.
This new addition of making them fey doesn't do anything better for me and my goblinkin pirate country. It doesn't do anything for the goblinkin in my homebrew world who's evil god has been killed by the werewolf deity and now the long-dead trickster god they had has been revived to rule them instead as they transition towards an alliance with the werewolf country. How does this make them "fit better into the multiverse" if the multiverse then has to change itself to accommodate the new fey goblins or take the fey away from the goblins? Because now if you drop a fey goblin into the world, you're saying they come from the fey. Regardless of if that was true previously. That's why the feature is literally called "Fey Ancestry". As far as I can tell, this doesn't make them slot in better in any setting, though I guess you can say that the Dranassar in Exandria were fairies if you had to find an excuse for that setting. I couldn't find much on Mystara from a quick google search, tho. No good wiki for that setting at first glance.
Just because you like the new goblinkin races instead of the old ones doesn't mean that somehow this makes them fit better into the multiverse. Because it honestly doesn't, it makes them harder to fit into the settings, in fact.
All power to you if you like the fey goblins, but don't disregard how it objectively changes the feel of them they've had in all their previous editions and act like this somehow makes them more compatible with the setting-agnostic goal. Like them as much as you want, I like goblins and goblins deserve love.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU
No I think it adds a lot, just that what it adds isn't that which I like.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU
There is waaaaay too much here for me to respond to, so I'm not going to. However, my main points still stand:
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The adjustments on goblins feels a bit like the shift on the kobold to be more draconic rather than the more dog/rat like creature from second edition. By giving that fey link to the goblins mechanically reinforces a bit of a shift in perception. Asides from the player race aspects I can see from a DM view the need to help further separate the concepts of the creature as without that there isn't too much difference from small monsterous humanoids.
So if Goblins, hobgoblins and Bugbears have Fey Ancestry, do Orcs have it? Or are Orcs not part of the Goblinoid races any more?
Orcs haven't been part of the goblinoid races in a long time, if they ever were.
They were in 2nd. But do you know when they stopped being part of it?
In third edition Orcs were Humanoid (Orc), a different subtype than Humanoid (Goblinoid).
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Cool! Thanks that's were they diverged then. Some systems still count them as part of the same species, like everything GW.
Ok reading the changes and getting a general feel of comments I am not really seeing any mechanical reason why the changes break the game. The general comments against seem to be based off the idea, this is how it had always been and therefore change is bad.
Personally ever since I started DMing 5E, long before Tasha’s, I have operated floating ASIs at creation, it just seemed to make sense to me. So to my mind this is simply making RAW a houserule I have always implemented. As an aside I really really hope they see sense and implement another house rule I have always run as raw and make taking a potion a bonus action.
Anyway, the main question that needs to be asked first and foremost have the changes WOTC made created a better game, and the general concensous is yes. Now those against these changes, there is nothing stopping you as a DM houseruling that the original PHB rules will be enforced. But you also need to realize that many many many new players are coming into the game and want to play a Charismatic Orc, or a Clumsy elf. In the past I have had a player who played a 4 foot tall elf, born with a height defect, we kept the elf rules except his movement became 25 foot and he was able to stand in the same square as another character. All these new rules do is get closer to making characters like this RAW.
Another thing that old time players need to understand is that with more players coming into the game wider and wider viewpoints are coming into the game which is a good thing.
A friends teenage son asked me why orcs and goblins are always evil, I answered that they don’t have to be, in fact in my worlds there are plenty of neutral and good greenskins. They attack those who come into there lands because they have had generations of being treated as the other, attacked and killed simply for being. Taking alignment away from the monster manual is I think a long needed thing, again, nothing to stop you using goblins as canon fodder for a bunch of murder hobos who don’t want to play a nuanced game, that is a very valid game style to play. But by making this RAW it helps new DMs and players think about a more nuanced game. Removing allignment also allows in future for this monster manual to become a generic rule set that covers, for instance, a universe where goblins and orcs are the major races and humans, elves etc either don’t exist or are in the minority and are the “canon fodder”, it allows a lot more flexibility to say “in this universe Goblins are all lawful good, while in the other one they are chaotic evil”.
Ultimatley if you don’t like the changes that have been made, then don’t apply them, every rule in DND is optional, I know DMs who forgo rolling initiative and instead go in order round the table starting with a random player. I know DMs who reroll initiative every round of combat. I know DMs who stick to the rules for magic item availability, and DMs like me who have magic shops and hand out magic items all the time, the game doesn’t break, the world isn’t over and we are having fun. You will find players who want to play the game the same way as you which is great but, as with all the ways we play DND it does not mean your version is better or worse because you ignore the new rules, it just makes it different.
DnD is on the first steps of a long journey to becoming a more modern system, personally I am really excited to see the changes that are coming as we build to the anniversary release of new PHB and DM guide hopefully more of the houserule i and others I know have implemented over the years will slowly become RAW options. But ultimately it is a game with no winners, as long as everyone is happy and having fun ignore or implement as many of the changes as you want but accept that just as 5E is very different to the first DND game, in 30 years time the game will be so so different to what it is now.
Is Fey Ancestry becoming the new Darkvision, where the list of player races that don't have it is shorter than the list of races that do?
Well, you've got elves, half elves, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, centaurs, fairies, and satyrs. That's 8 unless I'm forgetting some. There are by my reckoning 39 races in total, and I'm counting "Exandria orc" as the same thing as "orc," "feral tiefling" as "tiefling," etc.
The numbers might get closer if you account for subraces (elves have a lot), but I doubt it'll reach parity.
As an aside, ignoring what's in MMM because I don't have it, the number of races with darkvision seems to be 19 out of 39. So it's just barely under half. I doubt anyone's losing darkvision in MMM, but I know genasi are gaining it, so then it'll actually be true that the list of races without it is shorter than with.
Fixed that for you.
Centaurs, Fairies, and Satyrs, while they are the "Fey creature type", do not have the "Fey Ancestry" racial trait. There are only 5 races in the game that have Fey Ancestry (unless you count the Shadar-Kai, Eladrin, and Sea Elf as separate races from Elves), and there are nearly 50 official races in the game.
So, no, Fey Ancestry is not the "new Darkvision". That's ridiculous. People complaining about this . . . what do you think of Powerful Build? There's a ton of races that have Powerful Build, or some variant of it (Centaurs have Equine Build, Giff have Hippo Build, Goliaths have Little Giant), and I don't see you complaining about that. That's not even mentioning certain Damage Resistances, Innate Spellcasting, Telepathy, and other racial features that are shared by different races/subraces.
This overblown hyperbole and strawmen are really not constructive or accurate in any way.
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