To me, the solution to this is to add downsides. If you are undead, you shouldn't be able to just get all of the benefits of being undead with none of the drawbacks.
You do get the downsides, or at least some of them. Turn Undead, for instance, would affect you, and any other spell of effect which only affects undead.
What would you say? Would a Magic Circle spell prevent a Dhampir from entering.
I think that would be mildly humorous.
Honestly, I find this kind of thing to be flavorful and fun.
Obviously, the designers originally forced all player characters to only be the humanoid creature type, so as to avoid these kinds of shenanigans. But I feel that if a player is choosing to add a non-humanoid creature type, it is awesome flavor. I am delighted the UA is making it possible to be fey, undead, construct, and inferably other creature types as well.
Yes, according to the UA, anything which affects one of the creature types affects the character. So magic circle would affect a damphir.
A feat is two half-feats, each about four proficiencies.
I think you're kind of looking at this too hard, when it seems pretty clear to me that there's no standard, more just eyeballing.
I mean, look at Eldritch Adept. The feat that grants you a single extra Eldritch Invocation. You can get the Invocation that grants you advantage on Concentration checks. Meanwhile, Warcaster grants you advantage on Concentration AND something else. You can literally take a feat that's worth half a different feat.
Skilled grants three skill (or tool) proficiencies, but Weapon Master grants +1 attribute and four weapon proficiencies. Skilled nowhere fits into this "four proficiencies per +1 attribute" idea.
Things are all over the place.
--------------------------------------------
As for balancing out a vampire-based feat (which comes with its own problems*), I would do the same thing I would do for the Lineage. Add on Sunlight Sensitivity (vampire!!) and require the bite victim to be grappled, or have some other Condition making them immobile. I just find the idea of biting like you're some kind of wolf to be silly.
* I'm opposed to the idea of "dhampir as a feat" simply because feats only come once per four levels. If I get bit by a vampire at level 5, its going to be a long arse time til we get to level 8, potentially months of real life time. By the time we get there, all drama from the bite is gone. The change needs to be something potentially immediate and impactful.
The entire point, Gvarayi, is that nobody will ever play the damned aarakocra dhampir. Or centaur. Or tortle. Or whatever other jank-ass edge-case combination has people in a tizzy. The whole idea behind these Gothic lineages is that it doesn't matter what you were before. A horrible wrenching shift in your fundamental nature has made you Something Else; your former species no longer has any impact on you. Again - surviving a vampire bite means you're a vampire spawn, not a dhampir. Dhampirs, specifically, have to be created through bizarre and almost impossible circumstances. Hexblooded are the results of hags either ******* you over on a deal or being in your family tree somewhere, and in the latter case your apparent birth species well and truly doesn't matter because you were a demi-hag all along, and Reborn? Reborn are Lego people built from the corpse bits of other people, who may or may not all be of the same species.
This ridiculous push for 'Templates!' so somebody can play a dhampir aarakocra with the blood of angels, demons, dragons, and Legendary Heroes after being isekai'd from Warhammer 40K is obnoxious, unpleasant, and completely counter to the entire spirit of the UA. In the three total cases through the entire world where someone has an actual reason to play one of these whacky turbo-crossbreeds, the DM will make a ruling for that specific player and nobody else will know or care. For the rest of us, the 'Template' idea actively detracts from what these new options are supposed to represent. It makes them weak, weightless, and pointless - just a random bolt-on you can do whenever you feel like. No worse than changing your boots after they wear through.
I want my old species to fall off if one of these applies. There's stories to be told there, drama to be had. A being wrestling with such a wrenching shift in its fundamental nature is one of my favorite types of tale, and if a being is one of these things from inception? Well, then it was never 'another species' to start with, was it?
A feat is two half-feats, each about four proficiencies.
I think you're kind of looking at this too hard, when it seems pretty clear to me that there's no standard, more just eyeballing.
I mean, look at Eldritch Adept. The feat that grants you a single extra Eldritch Invocation. You can get the Invocation that grants you advantage on Concentration checks. Meanwhile, Warcaster grants you advantage on Concentration AND something else. You can literally take a feat that's worth half a different feat.
The Warlock invocations are uneven. Some are more powerful, some are less.
The feat only grants one invocation, because Devils Sight might be closer to a full-feat. (Nevermind the higher level invocations.)
Likewise, the Eldritch Blast modifications create char-op amounts of damage.
Even so, the slot-2 Disguise Self spell at-will is probably a slightly overpowered half-feat, 4 or 5 proficiencies. It resembles a Changeling lineage trait.
The slot-1 Detect Magic at-will is more like a cantrip, about 1 proficiency. It is already a ritual, at-will. So the invocation, just allows it as an action during an encounter, which has its own opportunity costs.
I tend to be quiet when Yurei goes into their rants, but for once I want to come out an openly agree with them (usually I stay quiet because I don't XD)
These UA lineages should not be slapped onto any old race like a cars salesman telling you how many features said PC can fit under the hood (you know the meme). Frankly the Damphir should have some drawback on it and that should be it, You get all those bonuses and the drawback, not plus your old race stuff. This is because YOU ARE NOT your old race anymore. You might look like them, but this does not mean you ARE them.
Frankly this thread is turning back into the arguments made on another thread of Gvarayi wants Custom Lineages to also get racial feats. Gvarayi you have put your own "math" into calculating what a feat is and isn't worth, but frankly looking at ALL the feats you cannot say that math checks out AT ALL so please stop pushing it like it is the truth and the formula used by WoTC to decide what is and isn't a feat level feature.
Frankly this thread is turning back into the arguments made on another thread of Gvarayi wants Custom Lineages to also get racial feats. Gvarayi you have put your own "math" into calculating what a feat is and isn't worth, but frankly looking at ALL the feats you cannot say that math checks out AT ALL so please stop pushing it like it is the truth and the formula used by WoTC to decide what is and isn't a feat level feature.
Do the WotC designers make an effort to balance the mechanics, and do they have a sense of what the mechanics that they design are worth? Yes or no?
I don't mind when people disagree with me, Hollow. I mind when people disagree with me stupidly, for vapid reasons they haven't bothered thinking out and are unable to defend.
In this case, forcing "Templates" to accommodate the super-edge-case birb dhampir or horsebutt dhampir destroys the core idea behind the Gothic Lineage - that this horrific thing happened to you and now you're something else. You've lost an essential part of your being and unless you get very, very lucky (and the DM lets you), you'll never get it back. Unless, of course, you're just adding Free Vampiric Superpowers to whatever other species you already were without one single letter of lost species traits or any drawbacks or complications whatsoever from your brand shiny new superbite and ability to Spiderman your way up walls, at which point why not just add whatever fancy powers you like to your character? Let the DM go hog-wild, play some Marvel in your D&D.
No thanks. There's better systems for handling supers than D&D.
The Warlock invocations are uneven. Some are more powerful, some are less.
And the same is true of feats. They're uneven. Moving on.
-----------------------------------
Another thought on why I'm opposed to dhampir/changelings/risen as feats. 99.99% of the time, these lineages will be chosen at character creation. Technically speaking, there has to be a way to change into a dhampir/risen/changeling, since they're actually transformations and mutations, but realistically its going to be vanishingly rare to happen to an actual PC.
If you're bitten by a vampire, you can get rid of any lingering curse via the appropriate Restoration spell, or perhaps Remove Curse (same with being bitten by a werecritter). Most characters who die will come back to life through a resurrection type spell, and not as a zombie or flesh golem. And changeling? That's months to years of downtime living under a hag; who's going to pause their game for that?
I totally get that there's a weird dichotomy between going from an Aarakosha with the wings to fly, to suddenly a vampire bird that can't. And there should be some way of modeling that transition that doesn't remove the abiltity to fly.
However, I'm of the opinion that it really, really should be modeled more like, oh, tieflings or half-elves with their alternative racial features from SCAG. Or like with Custom Lineage, being able to swap skills for darkvision, etc. There has to be a happy medium somewhere, and I don't really think its in the form of making it a feat. That just makes it a different kind of problem.
The Warlock invocations are uneven. Some are more powerful, some are less.
And the same is true of feats. They're uneven. Moving on.
-----------------------------------
Another thought on why I'm opposed to dhampir/changelings/risen as feats. 99.99% of the time, these lineages will be chosen at character creation. Technically speaking, there has to be a way to change into a dhampir/risen/changeling, since they're actually transformations and mutations, but realistically its going to be vanishingly rare to happen to an actual PC.
If you're bitten by a vampire, you can get rid of any lingering curse via the appropriate Restoration spell, or perhaps Remove Curse (same with being bitten by a werecritter). Most characters who die will come back to life through a resurrection type spell, and not as a zombie or flesh golem. And changeling? That's months to years of downtime living under a hag; who's going to pause their game for that?
I think that they are all very well balanced as a starting character choice of race but not as a transformation into something else except for the Reborn. Reborn makes a sense because having your brain transplanted into a new body works well at explaining the changes. Hexblood and Dhamphir works far better as a starting Lineage like Aasimar, Tiefling and Genasi. You are simply born different because a Hag cursed your bloodline or a Vampire attacked your mother while you were in the womb. They just don't translate well as transformations of existing characters.
Either way, it should never be the Player's choice to suddenly under go a transformation of this kind. It should only occur if the events of the game naturally go in that direction.
I totally get that there's a weird dichotomy between going from an Aarakosha with the wings to fly, to suddenly a vampire bird that can't. And there should be some way of modeling that transition that doesn't remove the abiltity to fly.
However, I'm of the opinion that it really, really should be modeled more like, oh, tieflings or half-elves with their alternative racial features from SCAG. Or like with Custom Lineage, being able to swap skills for darkvision, etc. There has to be a happy medium somewhere, and I don't really think its in the form of making it a feat. That just makes it a different kind of problem.
It would also be great if there was a sub-lineage or variant Dhampir that could have bat wings. It could replace the Spider Climb and the 35 feet walking speed for this variant could be 30 or 25 feet. That would at least "make sense" in a way the current version doesn't.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spider climbing is as much of a classic vampire ability as having bat powers, no reflections, mystic eyes or blood magic.
After a point, we have to model the full suite of vampire abilities as a class - or a series of subclasses depending on the angle you run. Like, I would make some vampires into an Enchanter Wizard so that you can have the whole mesmerizing eyes that you can use to hypnotize people to feed on, while others I'd make into a Shadow Sorcerer, and a third as a Moon Druid. I lean towards Hexblades for necromancer types (level 6 ability, we have three spells for animating dead, if limited to once/day for animate dead), and Conquest/Oathbreaker paladins have some neat synergy as well.
Honestly, the only thing I think we realistically need for a vampire lineage is the bite and heal/blood buffing ability. That's really the core of what it means to be a vampire, at least in my opinion. The rest we can have lineage feats, subclasses and backgrounds for.
EDIT - I also personally think that darkvision and sunlight sensitivity should also both be qualities, but ymmv.
Could you imagine showing up to a game and being like "Hey! Since we hit 4th level after last weeks game, I decided I am a Flesh Golem now!"
Well, naturaly, the dm would have some say in that. lf my player just came into the session and said they were suddenly a dampire, l would object, but lf they came to me the week before and said they wanted to become a dampire at lv 4, l would make a encounter which could end with the player becomeing a dampire, such as a vampire attack, or a strange potion shop along the road.
I don't mind when people disagree with me, Hollow. I mind when people disagree with me stupidly, for vapid reasons they haven't bothered thinking out and are unable to defend.
In this case, forcing "Templates" to accommodate the super-edge-case birb dhampir or horsebutt dhampir destroys the core idea behind the Gothic Lineage - that this horrific thing happened to you and now you're something else. You've lost an essential part of your being and unless you get very, very lucky (and the DM lets you), you'll never get it back. Unless, of course, you're just adding Free Vampiric Superpowers to whatever other species you already were without one single letter of lost species traits or any drawbacks or complications whatsoever from your brand shiny new superbite and ability to Spiderman your way up walls, at which point why not just add whatever fancy powers you like to your character? Let the DM go hog-wild, play some Marvel in your D&D.
No thanks. There's better systems for handling supers than D&D.
How many half-dragon birb horsebutts have you seen? The offspring of polymorphed draconic one night stands have been around since the launch of 5E, so they should be all over the place by now, since you get 2 senses, a language, a resistance, and a breath weapon, all free. Or the supernatural gifts from Theros, more buffs being thrown around like cars from Oprah. And your parents should be from Eberron so you can be Dragonmarked for extra spells on your list, and then shortly after your birth, your family moved to Ravnica, and promptly joined a Guild which you dutifully trained with as any good child would (even more extra spells from your background). If a table is looking to go the munchkin distance with all that, adding on a Gothic Lineage while keeping some or all of your birth race attributes is just icing on the power-gamer cake. "Templates" are already a thing, but from my experience (YMMV) they aren't the harbinger of end times for 5E, because tables have a inherent, internal, sense of acceptable balance. If you show up at most games with a halfdragonmarkednyxborngolgari, convoluted back story or not, you'll get told no before you can sit down.
Even without all that, you don't need exotic races, settings, or a quick trip thru the Monster Manual to have lineages create wierd effects for no logical or in-game reason. Why does a formerly High Elf Bladesinger that is now a Dhampir forget how to use a long sword that they have trained with since birth (racial ability), but not the rapier they started using a few years ago (subclass ability)? If you're a Dwarven Sorcerer who slighted a druid & got cursed as a result? Your scale mail doesn't fit quite right now that you're a Hexblood. But your younger brother who joined in covering that grove in toilet paper, and was also cursed? His fighter training lets him continue on with nary a concern. The fact that you've been proficiently wearing scale mail for years (or decades) longer than him matters not. And don't even try to pick up that axe, because Reasons™. Hope you didn't choose the Heavily Armored feat before getting hexed, because you no longer meet the prerequisites! Okay, no one takes Heavily Armored, but you get the idea. Deleting these skills and abilities, bot not those, all because a vampire bit you & now you stick to the ceiling... it often makes no narrative sense. Birbs & butts are just two of the more blatant examples.
I think the Gothic Lineages are better off as Campaign-related systems or templates for the DM and players to fiddle with, but not limited to the respective settings, similar to the Piety System of Theros. Being able to play a Dragonborn lineage with a Dhampyr curse would be awesome, but I wouldn't want anyone to have to replace all their race features just for the sake of taking the lineage. The Hexblood would be even better off with a similar idea bc you are effectively changing species, so having a Grim Hollow take on the Hexblood would be fun and imaginative, and the Reborn in my opinion doesn't need to exist when you can just be a Warforged that's flavored to have a "reborn in a construct body" backstory. One idea a friend and I came up with when filling out the Gothic Lineage survey was having theses be set as mere suggestions with some mechanical additions or replacements in the process of character creation through a series of tables, similar to how the DM's Guide has the creation of Sentient Weapons laid out for a DM, but made far more extensively to cover the features of a Dhampyr, Hexblood, or Reborn, but not limited to those. An example we thought of was a Dragonborn who was cursed as a Dhampyr and thus he could have the Vampiric Bite feature but also choose to have one of the following through a table: your speed increases by 5 feet, Sunlight Sensitivity, Spider climb feature, and so on.
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Yes, according to the UA, anything which affects one of the creature types affects the character. So magic circle would affect a damphir.
I think you're kind of looking at this too hard, when it seems pretty clear to me that there's no standard, more just eyeballing.
I mean, look at Eldritch Adept. The feat that grants you a single extra Eldritch Invocation. You can get the Invocation that grants you advantage on Concentration checks. Meanwhile, Warcaster grants you advantage on Concentration AND something else. You can literally take a feat that's worth half a different feat.
Skilled grants three skill (or tool) proficiencies, but Weapon Master grants +1 attribute and four weapon proficiencies. Skilled nowhere fits into this "four proficiencies per +1 attribute" idea.
Things are all over the place.
--------------------------------------------
As for balancing out a vampire-based feat (which comes with its own problems*), I would do the same thing I would do for the Lineage. Add on Sunlight Sensitivity (vampire!!) and require the bite victim to be grappled, or have some other Condition making them immobile. I just find the idea of biting like you're some kind of wolf to be silly.
* I'm opposed to the idea of "dhampir as a feat" simply because feats only come once per four levels. If I get bit by a vampire at level 5, its going to be a long arse time til we get to level 8, potentially months of real life time. By the time we get there, all drama from the bite is gone. The change needs to be something potentially immediate and impactful.
The entire point, Gvarayi, is that nobody will ever play the damned aarakocra dhampir. Or centaur. Or tortle. Or whatever other jank-ass edge-case combination has people in a tizzy. The whole idea behind these Gothic lineages is that it doesn't matter what you were before. A horrible wrenching shift in your fundamental nature has made you Something Else; your former species no longer has any impact on you. Again - surviving a vampire bite means you're a vampire spawn, not a dhampir. Dhampirs, specifically, have to be created through bizarre and almost impossible circumstances. Hexblooded are the results of hags either ******* you over on a deal or being in your family tree somewhere, and in the latter case your apparent birth species well and truly doesn't matter because you were a demi-hag all along, and Reborn? Reborn are Lego people built from the corpse bits of other people, who may or may not all be of the same species.
This ridiculous push for 'Templates!' so somebody can play a dhampir aarakocra with the blood of angels, demons, dragons, and Legendary Heroes after being isekai'd from Warhammer 40K is obnoxious, unpleasant, and completely counter to the entire spirit of the UA. In the three total cases through the entire world where someone has an actual reason to play one of these whacky turbo-crossbreeds, the DM will make a ruling for that specific player and nobody else will know or care. For the rest of us, the 'Template' idea actively detracts from what these new options are supposed to represent. It makes them weak, weightless, and pointless - just a random bolt-on you can do whenever you feel like. No worse than changing your boots after they wear through.
I want my old species to fall off if one of these applies. There's stories to be told there, drama to be had. A being wrestling with such a wrenching shift in its fundamental nature is one of my favorite types of tale, and if a being is one of these things from inception? Well, then it was never 'another species' to start with, was it?
Please do not contact or message me.
The Warlock invocations are uneven. Some are more powerful, some are less.
The feat only grants one invocation, because Devils Sight might be closer to a full-feat. (Nevermind the higher level invocations.)
Likewise, the Eldritch Blast modifications create char-op amounts of damage.
Even so, the slot-2 Disguise Self spell at-will is probably a slightly overpowered half-feat, 4 or 5 proficiencies. It resembles a Changeling lineage trait.
The slot-1 Detect Magic at-will is more like a cantrip, about 1 proficiency. It is already a ritual, at-will. So the invocation, just allows it as an action during an encounter, which has its own opportunity costs.
he / him
I tend to be quiet when Yurei goes into their rants, but for once I want to come out an openly agree with them (usually I stay quiet because I don't XD)
These UA lineages should not be slapped onto any old race like a cars salesman telling you how many features said PC can fit under the hood (you know the meme). Frankly the Damphir should have some drawback on it and that should be it, You get all those bonuses and the drawback, not plus your old race stuff. This is because YOU ARE NOT your old race anymore. You might look like them, but this does not mean you ARE them.
Frankly this thread is turning back into the arguments made on another thread of Gvarayi wants Custom Lineages to also get racial feats. Gvarayi you have put your own "math" into calculating what a feat is and isn't worth, but frankly looking at ALL the feats you cannot say that math checks out AT ALL so please stop pushing it like it is the truth and the formula used by WoTC to decide what is and isn't a feat level feature.
Do the WotC designers make an effort to balance the mechanics, and do they have a sense of what the mechanics that they design are worth? Yes or no?
he / him
I don't mind when people disagree with me, Hollow. I mind when people disagree with me stupidly, for vapid reasons they haven't bothered thinking out and are unable to defend.
In this case, forcing "Templates" to accommodate the super-edge-case birb dhampir or horsebutt dhampir destroys the core idea behind the Gothic Lineage - that this horrific thing happened to you and now you're something else. You've lost an essential part of your being and unless you get very, very lucky (and the DM lets you), you'll never get it back. Unless, of course, you're just adding Free Vampiric Superpowers to whatever other species you already were without one single letter of lost species traits or any drawbacks or complications whatsoever from your brand shiny new superbite and ability to Spiderman your way up walls, at which point why not just add whatever fancy powers you like to your character? Let the DM go hog-wild, play some Marvel in your D&D.
No thanks. There's better systems for handling supers than D&D.
Please do not contact or message me.
And the same is true of feats. They're uneven. Moving on.
-----------------------------------
Another thought on why I'm opposed to dhampir/changelings/risen as feats. 99.99% of the time, these lineages will be chosen at character creation. Technically speaking, there has to be a way to change into a dhampir/risen/changeling, since they're actually transformations and mutations, but realistically its going to be vanishingly rare to happen to an actual PC.
If you're bitten by a vampire, you can get rid of any lingering curse via the appropriate Restoration spell, or perhaps Remove Curse (same with being bitten by a werecritter). Most characters who die will come back to life through a resurrection type spell, and not as a zombie or flesh golem. And changeling? That's months to years of downtime living under a hag; who's going to pause their game for that?
I totally get that there's a weird dichotomy between going from an Aarakosha with the wings to fly, to suddenly a vampire bird that can't. And there should be some way of modeling that transition that doesn't remove the abiltity to fly.
However, I'm of the opinion that it really, really should be modeled more like, oh, tieflings or half-elves with their alternative racial features from SCAG. Or like with Custom Lineage, being able to swap skills for darkvision, etc. There has to be a happy medium somewhere, and I don't really think its in the form of making it a feat. That just makes it a different kind of problem.
I think that they are all very well balanced as a starting character choice of race but not as a transformation into something else except for the Reborn. Reborn makes a sense because having your brain transplanted into a new body works well at explaining the changes. Hexblood and Dhamphir works far better as a starting Lineage like Aasimar, Tiefling and Genasi. You are simply born different because a Hag cursed your bloodline or a Vampire attacked your mother while you were in the womb. They just don't translate well as transformations of existing characters.
Either way, it should never be the Player's choice to suddenly under go a transformation of this kind. It should only occur if the events of the game naturally go in that direction.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Replacing ANYTHING is going to be funky. Replacing class or subclass is funky, but it exists. Even changing out spells is weird, but it happens.
Honestly, the best answer in this case is just "work with your DMs"
Could you imagine showing up to a game and being like "Hey! Since we hit 4th level after last weeks game, I decided I am a Flesh Golem now!"
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
It would also be great if there was a sub-lineage or variant Dhampir that could have bat wings. It could replace the Spider Climb and the 35 feet walking speed for this variant could be 30 or 25 feet. That would at least "make sense" in a way the current version doesn't.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Spider climbing is as much of a classic vampire ability as having bat powers, no reflections, mystic eyes or blood magic.
After a point, we have to model the full suite of vampire abilities as a class - or a series of subclasses depending on the angle you run. Like, I would make some vampires into an Enchanter Wizard so that you can have the whole mesmerizing eyes that you can use to hypnotize people to feed on, while others I'd make into a Shadow Sorcerer, and a third as a Moon Druid. I lean towards Hexblades for necromancer types (level 6 ability, we have three spells for animating dead, if limited to once/day for animate dead), and Conquest/Oathbreaker paladins have some neat synergy as well.
Honestly, the only thing I think we realistically need for a vampire lineage is the bite and heal/blood buffing ability. That's really the core of what it means to be a vampire, at least in my opinion. The rest we can have lineage feats, subclasses and backgrounds for.
EDIT - I also personally think that darkvision and sunlight sensitivity should also both be qualities, but ymmv.
Well, naturaly, the dm would have some say in that. lf my player just came into the session and said they were suddenly a dampire, l would object, but lf they came to me the week before and said they wanted to become a dampire at lv 4, l would make a encounter which could end with the player becomeing a dampire, such as a vampire attack, or a strange potion shop along the road.
How many half-dragon birb horsebutts have you seen? The offspring of polymorphed draconic one night stands have been around since the launch of 5E, so they should be all over the place by now, since you get 2 senses, a language, a resistance, and a breath weapon, all free. Or the supernatural gifts from Theros, more buffs being thrown around like cars from Oprah. And your parents should be from Eberron so you can be Dragonmarked for extra spells on your list, and then shortly after your birth, your family moved to Ravnica, and promptly joined a Guild which you dutifully trained with as any good child would (even more extra spells from your background). If a table is looking to go the munchkin distance with all that, adding on a Gothic Lineage while keeping some or all of your birth race attributes is just icing on the power-gamer cake. "Templates" are already a thing, but from my experience (YMMV) they aren't the harbinger of end times for 5E, because tables have a inherent, internal, sense of acceptable balance. If you show up at most games with a halfdragonmarkednyxborngolgari, convoluted back story or not, you'll get told no before you can sit down.
Even without all that, you don't need exotic races, settings, or a quick trip thru the Monster Manual to have lineages create wierd effects for no logical or in-game reason. Why does a formerly High Elf Bladesinger that is now a Dhampir forget how to use a long sword that they have trained with since birth (racial ability), but not the rapier they started using a few years ago (subclass ability)? If you're a Dwarven Sorcerer who slighted a druid & got cursed as a result? Your scale mail doesn't fit quite right now that you're a Hexblood. But your younger brother who joined in covering that grove in toilet paper, and was also cursed? His fighter training lets him continue on with nary a concern. The fact that you've been proficiently wearing scale mail for years (or decades) longer than him matters not. And don't even try to pick up that axe, because Reasons™. Hope you didn't choose the Heavily Armored feat before getting hexed, because you no longer meet the prerequisites! Okay, no one takes Heavily Armored, but you get the idea. Deleting these skills and abilities, bot not those, all because a vampire bit you & now you stick to the ceiling... it often makes no narrative sense. Birbs & butts are just two of the more blatant examples.
I think the Gothic Lineages are better off as Campaign-related systems or templates for the DM and players to fiddle with, but not limited to the respective settings, similar to the Piety System of Theros. Being able to play a Dragonborn lineage with a Dhampyr curse would be awesome, but I wouldn't want anyone to have to replace all their race features just for the sake of taking the lineage. The Hexblood would be even better off with a similar idea bc you are effectively changing species, so having a Grim Hollow take on the Hexblood would be fun and imaginative, and the Reborn in my opinion doesn't need to exist when you can just be a Warforged that's flavored to have a "reborn in a construct body" backstory. One idea a friend and I came up with when filling out the Gothic Lineage survey was having theses be set as mere suggestions with some mechanical additions or replacements in the process of character creation through a series of tables, similar to how the DM's Guide has the creation of Sentient Weapons laid out for a DM, but made far more extensively to cover the features of a Dhampyr, Hexblood, or Reborn, but not limited to those. An example we thought of was a Dragonborn who was cursed as a Dhampyr and thus he could have the Vampiric Bite feature but also choose to have one of the following through a table: your speed increases by 5 feet, Sunlight Sensitivity, Spider climb feature, and so on.