Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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This question bothers me. Why can't creatures have multiple creature types ? Why a dracoliche doesn't have the dragon and undead creature type, or the hellish fire giant in the Bigby book isn't a giant and fiend (devil) ? I believe it was released in an Unearthed Arcana about playable races (for ravenloft) but I can't find any example for monsters.
I assume this is a complexity issue, it could make designing future features that involve creature type harder, or constraint the wording of features too much.
My question is, is there a thing I am missing about creatures with multiple types that makes it impossible to do (if I were to homebrew such a monster, would it break the game ?).
And additionally, is this a design principle ? D&D use a "typal" system (there are types with no rules associated, and rules that refer to those types) where most things (monsters, feats, damage) have only one type. By opposition MtG uses a similar system but with combination of types
It keeps things simpler and avoids arguments. The first example I can think of is a spell like hold person. It only affects humanoids. If you have some kind of elf-tiger hybrid and give it both the humanoid and beast types, does hold person work because of the humanoid or does it not work because of the beast? Can a spores Druid turn them into one of their little followers?
Or your dragon/undead example, can a cleric turn because it’s undead, or not because it’s a dragon? Would a paladin smite get the extra damage vs undead or no? Does a dragon’s bane weapon do extra damage? Does a paladin smiting with a dragon’s bane weapon get all the bonuses or none or just one or the other? And how to you apply something like that consistently?
So I don’t know if making one would necessarily be game breaking, but it would create some edge cases. And it could actually make some creatures weaker or stronger as they’d be subject to multiple sets effects, depending on how you run it.
I don't think there's any particular reason, it's just how they've decided to design the game. The type is sort of part of a creature's identity -- it's how they are categorized. Like, in real life we have the system of Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc. As far as I know there is no living thing that is officially categorized as both a Plant and an Animal, for example. One or the other is chosen and that's just how that thing becomes categorized.
In addition to creature type, a creature can also have descriptive tags, of which there could be more than one.
From the Monster Manual:
A side note about Hold Person that also applies to multiple other spells: The text is inclusive, not exclusive.
If a creature was, say, Humanoid/Celestial or Humanoid/Fiend, they're still Humanoid. It would work against them. So if you give a monster an ability that grants a second creature type (something I've done in the past, such as Dragon/Fiend for an abyssal dragon) then abilities that work against either will work against it. So that monster was vulnerable to both Dragon Slayer weapons and Divine Smite's extra damage die, for instance.
If a spell or ability is written exclusively (for instance, stating the ability does NOT work on a particular creature type) then it wouldn't work against a creature that has that as one of its types.
If multityped creatures were a thing, the rules would support them, so this argument doesn't really do anything.
But they aren’t so they don’t. Which is what the question was about. Not hypotheticals of what would happen if they did exist.
Well, this is kind of my point. We don’t know if it is or not. There are no multi type creatures, so we have no RAW on how to handle them. At present, we only have humanoid or not, but there are no cases where it’s both. So you are just speculating on how the rules would apply to that situation. It’s a reasonable speculation, but speculation nonetheless.
DND rules do not support multiple inheritances of class types to avoid the "diamond of death" issue of which one applies in ambuguous situations with multiple interpretations
As Athanar90 pointed above, there isn't any actual ambiguity in how the rules would handle a creature with multiple creature types. This isn't a "multiple inheritance" situation because the types themselves do not have any rules that would conflict with each other.
pronouns: he/she/they
Yeah... Like I said, it's about how the abilities that look at creature types are written. If something says "this affects X type" then it affects that type, even if it has another type. If something says "this doesn't affect Y type" then it doesn't affect Y type, even if it has another type. Just read the ability and it tells you how it would be handled.
It's not about needing special rules to cover the blind spots, it's about reading comprehension. Basic stuff.
If this were back in 3.5e era, this could be different, you'd have to compare the traits of various creature types.
I get that, but there are no creatures with multiple types in this edition (that I know of, I could always be wrong). What you're suggesting would be a very reasonable take on how to deal with such hypothetical situations. But it's still hypothetical. But since they don't exist, there is no RAW. And this is the Rules and Game mechanics forum. So, my post was just trying to help the OP figure out potential repercussions for making such creatures.
The issue is this: That there aren't any such monsters officially is actually irrelevant. You still follow the text of spells and abilities.
For an example... What happens when a Paladin uses Divine Sense when the following creatures are around:
The text:
The ability senses creatures of those types. It does not specifically exclude creatures not of those types, so long as those types are detected. The fact that there aren't officially multi-type creatures may have had some influence in deciding the way it was written, but that isn't actually important here. So the Fiend and the Fey/Undead would be detected here.
And yes, D&D 5e/5.5e has exclusionary clauses in its text naturally. See Awaken:
The "natural plant that isn't a creature" excludes two different categories: Magical plants (as they aren't natural) and plants that have already been turned into creatures, either by another Awaken spell or by a different effect. So being a natural plant isn't enough.