lifespan: 5 years but most are cooked before reaching 2 years because they are delicious.
speed: 30ft
Amphibious- You can breath air or water
Magical Carapace- You have a +2 to your AC when you aren’t wearing armor. In addition when you are hit by a spell or fail a saving you you can use your reaction to give yourself immunity to any damage from that spell. You may use this feature to gain immunity once per long rest.
Impossible Movement- You can move in 3 dimensions without restrictions. If end your turn on not on a surface that you can stand or swim on you immediately fall.
Weaknesses- You are vulnerable to fire and weapons covered in butter. If butter is on you carapace you lose the +2 to AC and the ability to gain immunity to a spell. You regain those abilities when the butter is removed. If you ingest butter you gain the poisoned condition for 1 hour.
I think the point is more, we can’t know what would be covered in this lobster species until we actually have it in hand. Otherwise, you’re just kind of deciding what features it has, and they quite conveniently line up with those in the proposed feat. They may have new features that aren’t covered. I mean, you could have written one early in 5e, but then they release plasmoid or thri-kreen which have things that are completely foreign to early species. So, if you make a feat like this, you end up restricting options in future species. We can argue about whether or not that restriction is a good idea, but that’s a different conversation.
To be fair to Plasmoid and Thri-Kreen, neither are humanoids, so the compatibility of their traits with a hybrid feature like this is a non-issue. Same with Changeling or Autognome. So I expect there is some kind of race design guide at WotC that keeps humanoid traits bound within a possibility space of some kind.
I think therefore that it might be possible to create a "curated list of traits" feat that could be calibrated to said possibility space. But I still think "pick one trait from the other humanoid parent" accomplishes the same objective while taking up a lot less real estate, with the only real downside being that the player might spend their feat on something suboptimal. Which, for the reasons I stated earlier, I don't see as being much of a downside at all.
I think the point is more, we can’t know what would be covered in this lobster species until we actually have it in hand. Otherwise, you’re just kind of deciding what features it has, and they quite conveniently line up with those in the proposed feat. They may have new features that aren’t covered. I mean, you could have written one early in 5e, but then they release plasmoid or thri-kreen which have things that are completely foreign to early species. So, if you make a feat like this, you end up restricting options in future species. We can argue about whether or not that restriction is a good idea, but that’s a different conversation.
To be fair to Plasmoid and Thri-Kreen, neither are humanoids, so the compatibility of their traits with a hybrid feature like this is a non-issue. Same with Changeling or Autognome. So I expect there is some kind of race design guide at WotC that keeps humanoid traits bound within a possibility space of some kind.
I think therefore that it might be possible to create a "curated list of traits" feat that could be calibrated to said possibility space. But I still think "pick one trait from the other humanoid parent" accomplishes the same objective while taking up a lot less real estate, with the only real downside being that the player might spend their feat on something suboptimal. Which, for the reasons I stated earlier, I don't see as being much of a downside at all.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t noticed the 1D&D rules do specify both parents are humanoids. But I wonder if that will stay, or if people will want to have a satyr parent, and be told they can’t because they’re fey.
I still stand by my earlier comment that they could just let people mix-and match freely. Say you get x traits, most species have about 3, pick from among your parents. Probably there’s some really strong combos, but whatever. Powergamers gonna powergame. Why hold the rest of us hostage to the hypothetical actions of a subset of players? Let people, even powergamers, make what they want, enemies will still hurt them, they’ll still swing swords and cast spells like everyone else. The game will still be fun.
If you let anyone pick any combo you want, and some combos result in huge power differentials compared to others, how do you manage to write rules for CR and encounter building that are applicable and balanced for everyone? Do you publish modules with notes like 'If your players aren't optimized use monster A. If they optimized themselves and they all have flying, advantage on all saves, and a free feat use monster B'. Choices are great, but if the core of your system requires all players to fall within a specific tightly controlled power band to work you need to eliminate any paths that allow builds to fall below or above that band.
If you let anyone pick any combo you want, and some combos result in huge power differentials compared to others, how do you manage to write rules for CR and encounter building that are applicable and balanced for everyone? Do you publish modules with notes like 'If your players aren't optimized use monster A. If they optimized themselves and they all have flying, advantage on all saves, and a free feat use monster B'. Choices are great, but if the core of your system requires all players to fall within a specific tightly controlled power band to work you need to eliminate any paths that allow builds to fall below or above that band.
Because racial abilities don’t impact the math, proficiency bonus and ability scores will still be the same, no matter the racial abilities. I just don’t see flight+darkvision being game breaking. And for some species abilities that make some things easier, it’s really no different than now. When they calculate CR, they don’t know what types of characters will be in a given encounter, there are some spells that can trivialize an encounter, but the developers don’t know if anyone will have them, or have them prepared. Ditto magic items. And as it is, people can make characters well or poorly and be at the same table. Especially since the default for ability score generation is rolling. By RAW, there can easily be characters with wildly different numbers.
Also, and I don’t mean this in a combative way, I’m trying to understand. Can you give me an example of what a game-impacting power differential would be? What kinds of combos are going to just make you flat out superior in every context, or make it impossible to challenge the character.
Taking the pick any 3 approach if it was truly freeform:
Player one picks a skill proficiency in performance, powerful build, and a proficiency in elven weapons. In a combat you're maybe looking at someone who can use a d8 instead of a d6 weapon and can lift heavy items. Then play the group a song after.
Player two picks flight, lucky, and magic resistance to get advantage on every saving throw against spells and magical effects. That player rolls a 1 for a check 20x less often bumping up both their average DPR and their success chances on every other roll (impact is around +.5 on all rolls), can hover out of reach of any melee only creatures in complete safety and can bypass most traps and terrain threats, and if they face a spell caster or other magical effects get an extra +5 to saves on average on top of the bonus for lucky (meaning the character gets an advantage equivalent to having a 20 in all stats compared to someone having all 10s).
Edit: I'm not 100% against the pick a set of traits idea, but it would need to be point based so things like magic resistance took 80 points and powerful build was 10.
I’m really liking custom lineage over a feat. Also a true freedom based system of pick whatever you want is never going to work. It could break the numbers of the game especially if you allow 5e traits. If you stick to One dnd only it’s not as bad, but flight, tabaxi speed increase, and Orc dash, might be a broken combo. Using just one dnd Elven legacy, infernal legacy, and Goliath teleport is a broken magical combo. I prefer a list of traits that are similar to traits offered by the main species along with some original traits to offer good coverage for creating wholly new species or matching closely enough to species added at a later date to make multi species versions of them.
Taking the pick any 3 approach if it was truly freeform:
Player two picks flight, lucky, and magic resistance to get advantage on every saving throw against spells and magical effects. That player rolls a 1 for a check 20x less often bumping up both their average DPR and their success chances on every other roll (impact is around +.5 on all rolls), can hover out of reach of any melee only creatures in complete safety and can bypass most traps and terrain threats, and if they face a spell caster or other magical effects get an extra +5 to saves on average on top of the bonus for lucky (meaning the character gets an advantage equivalent to having a 20 in all stats compared to someone having all 10s).
Originally, I’d said pick from among your parents, not freely. And since neither halflings, nor yuan-to can fly, I’m not sure how someone gets those three. Though I guess once you open the door, it’s easy enough to say my father was a halfling/fairy so I get all the choices. But it’s just as easy to close that door and say you can’t, you can only pick 2.
Even then, I don’t see this as terribly destructive. Lucky is the only one that’s universally useful. The others are pretty situational. So, all these things put together still isn’t overpowering. Put them indoors in the dark, for example in a dungeon — those come up sometimes in this game — with a bunch of goblins, and this package of species abilities won’t matter too much. Yes, you could design a different pack that might do well in that goblin tunnel, but then it’s suffering somewhere else.
Thats the thing, the vast majority of species abilities are situational. So you allow mix and match, and maybe now a character gets an extra situation where they can use it, but that shouldn’t really break anything.
I’m an elf/tiefling with Elven Lineage high elf and Infernal legacy and dark vision . I have darkivision, any arcane cantrip and can swap it, detect magic, Misty step, resistance to fire damage, fire bolt, hellish rebuke, Darkness. That’s a lot of free spells. Or I’m a human/Dwarf. I have versatile to get the tough feat. I take my dwarven resilience and get more hp and then darkvision or stone cunning. Or tabaxi/arrakokra (know this guy really wants to min/max) I get flight, tabaxi speed jncrease and darkvision.
Point being that you have to curate the list or you get some wild min/max builds. Especially with human. Honestly everyone should just be human/x for versatile and the best traits from x.
In the end I would prefer a more narrative solution than a crunchy mechanical one. Letting a diverse heritage be something that is lore for a character rather than the subject of mechanical dickering would be more to my liking. I think the UA playtest accomplishes this decently enough and none of these alternate solutions of making feat lists sounds as good to me.
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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!
Do you publish modules with notes like 'If your players aren't optimized use monster A. If they optimized themselves and they all have flying, advantage on all saves, and a free feat use monster B'.
Here's an excerpt from Durlag's Tower, a module developed for Adventurer's League, with whatever collaboration with the Wizards team that might imply.
Adjusting the Adventure Throughout this adventure, sidebars provide information to assist you in making adjustments for smaller or larger groups and characters of higher or lower levels than the adventure is optimized for. This is typically used exclusively for combat encounters. These adjustments are not required, nor are you bound to the suggestions made by the adventure—they are recommendations provided for guidance and convenience.
And here's one such sidebar:
Here are recommendations for adjusting this combat encounter. These are not cumulative. - Very weak or weak party: no adjustments - Strong party: Add a third tanarukk - Very strong party: as strong party, and all the tanarukk begin the encounter hiding amongst the debris (Passive Perception 17 to spot) and will begin combat with surprise on the characters.
In the end I would prefer a more narrative solution than a crunchy mechanical one. Letting a diverse heritage be something that is lore for a character rather than the subject of mechanical dickering would be more to my liking. I think the UA playtest accomplishes this decently enough and none of these alternate solutions of making feat lists sounds as good to me.
If all we ever get is the fluff-only sidebar I'll live. But I feel like they don't have far to go to arrive at something that will appeal to more people than that, without going all the way to half-elves being a separate entry again (much less half-everythingelse.)
"Half-elf". Half an elf. Only half of a person. Their very name describes them negatively, in terms of what they are not - an elf or a human. That is frankly yet another way Eberron is vastly and categorically superior to Faerun and the Forgotten Realms; there, half-elves have their own specific name - 'Khoravar' - and are considered a people unto themselves rather than the mongrel by-blows of actuial for-real peoples.
I did not read the whole thread but I saw people suggest some kind of racial feats, and I wand to drop this in the mix :
Maybe there would be feats that improve on your species starting ability for example :
Improved dark vision : Prerequisite: you have 60 feet dark vision from your species, or you are a child of 2 different species where one of the species gets 60 feet darkvision but you currently do not have this feature.
Benefit: If your of mixed species and currently don't have dark vision you gain 60 feet dark vision as a feature of your species, if you have 60 feet dark vision as a feature of your species it increases to 120 feet.
I wouldn't mind a feat where +60 to your darkvision is one of the options it can grant, but that being the entire feat is pretty lame.
Wow! Speaking as a decades long DM, I believe that having TWICE the vision capability of nearly anyone else at the table, would be amazing. I suppose you also want twice the hit points of red dragon also??
Darkvision is severely overrated by you then imo. It's nice, but I wouldnt spend a feat on it.
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Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Darkvision is severely overrated by you then imo. It's nice, but I wouldnt spend a feat on it.
Eh, darkvision is actually incredibly powerful, it's just massively devalued by the fact that it's given away basically for free. However, upgrading from 60' to 120' is way less significant that going from zero to 60'.
I wouldn't mind a feat where +60 to your darkvision is one of the options it can grant, but that being the entire feat is pretty lame.
Wow! Speaking as a decades long DM, I believe that having TWICE the vision capability of nearly anyone else at the table, would be amazing. I suppose you also want twice the hit points of red dragon also??
120ft vs 60ft Darkvision is nice but hardly worth a feat. Even Darkvision itself I'd be hard-pressed to spend a feat on for a non-darkvision race when you can just tough it out with a torch for the first few levels until you get the spell, depending on the build, which lasts all day long without concentration from a single cast.
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Yea, but they have a vulnerability to fire and butter to make up for it.
Lobsterfolk
size: small or medium
lifespan: 5 years but most are cooked before reaching 2 years because they are delicious.
speed: 30ft
Amphibious- You can breath air or water
Magical Carapace- You have a +2 to your AC when you aren’t wearing armor. In addition when you are hit by a spell or fail a saving you you can use your reaction to give yourself immunity to any damage from that spell. You may use this feature to gain immunity once per long rest.
Impossible Movement- You can move in 3 dimensions without restrictions. If end your turn on not on a surface that you can stand or swim on you immediately fall.
Weaknesses- You are vulnerable to fire and weapons covered in butter. If butter is on you carapace you lose the +2 to AC and the ability to gain immunity to a spell. You regain those abilities when the butter is removed. If you ingest butter you gain the poisoned condition for 1 hour.
To be fair to Plasmoid and Thri-Kreen, neither are humanoids, so the compatibility of their traits with a hybrid feature like this is a non-issue. Same with Changeling or Autognome. So I expect there is some kind of race design guide at WotC that keeps humanoid traits bound within a possibility space of some kind.
I think therefore that it might be possible to create a "curated list of traits" feat that could be calibrated to said possibility space. But I still think "pick one trait from the other humanoid parent" accomplishes the same objective while taking up a lot less real estate, with the only real downside being that the player might spend their feat on something suboptimal. Which, for the reasons I stated earlier, I don't see as being much of a downside at all.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t noticed the 1D&D rules do specify both parents are humanoids. But I wonder if that will stay, or if people will want to have a satyr parent, and be told they can’t because they’re fey.
I still stand by my earlier comment that they could just let people mix-and match freely. Say you get x traits, most species have about 3, pick from among your parents. Probably there’s some really strong combos, but whatever. Powergamers gonna powergame. Why hold the rest of us hostage to the hypothetical actions of a subset of players? Let people, even powergamers, make what they want, enemies will still hurt them, they’ll still swing swords and cast spells like everyone else. The game will still be fun.
If you let anyone pick any combo you want, and some combos result in huge power differentials compared to others, how do you manage to write rules for CR and encounter building that are applicable and balanced for everyone? Do you publish modules with notes like 'If your players aren't optimized use monster A. If they optimized themselves and they all have flying, advantage on all saves, and a free feat use monster B'. Choices are great, but if the core of your system requires all players to fall within a specific tightly controlled power band to work you need to eliminate any paths that allow builds to fall below or above that band.
Because racial abilities don’t impact the math, proficiency bonus and ability scores will still be the same, no matter the racial abilities. I just don’t see flight+darkvision being game breaking.
And for some species abilities that make some things easier, it’s really no different than now. When they calculate CR, they don’t know what types of characters will be in a given encounter, there are some spells that can trivialize an encounter, but the developers don’t know if anyone will have them, or have them prepared. Ditto magic items. And as it is, people can make characters well or poorly and be at the same table. Especially since the default for ability score generation is rolling. By RAW, there can easily be characters with wildly different numbers.
Also, and I don’t mean this in a combative way, I’m trying to understand. Can you give me an example of what a game-impacting power differential would be? What kinds of combos are going to just make you flat out superior in every context, or make it impossible to challenge the character.
Taking the pick any 3 approach if it was truly freeform:
Player one picks a skill proficiency in performance, powerful build, and a proficiency in elven weapons. In a combat you're maybe looking at someone who can use a d8 instead of a d6 weapon and can lift heavy items. Then play the group a song after.
Player two picks flight, lucky, and magic resistance to get advantage on every saving throw against spells and magical effects. That player rolls a 1 for a check 20x less often bumping up both their average DPR and their success chances on every other roll (impact is around +.5 on all rolls), can hover out of reach of any melee only creatures in complete safety and can bypass most traps and terrain threats, and if they face a spell caster or other magical effects get an extra +5 to saves on average on top of the bonus for lucky (meaning the character gets an advantage equivalent to having a 20 in all stats compared to someone having all 10s).
Edit: I'm not 100% against the pick a set of traits idea, but it would need to be point based so things like magic resistance took 80 points and powerful build was 10.
I’m really liking custom lineage over a feat. Also a true freedom based system of pick whatever you want is never going to work. It could break the numbers of the game especially if you allow 5e traits. If you stick to One dnd only it’s not as bad, but flight, tabaxi speed increase, and Orc dash, might be a broken combo. Using just one dnd Elven legacy, infernal legacy, and Goliath teleport is a broken magical combo. I prefer a list of traits that are similar to traits offered by the main species along with some original traits to offer good coverage for creating wholly new species or matching closely enough to species added at a later date to make multi species versions of them.
Originally, I’d said pick from among your parents, not freely. And since neither halflings, nor yuan-to can fly, I’m not sure how someone gets those three. Though I guess once you open the door, it’s easy enough to say my father was a halfling/fairy so I get all the choices. But it’s just as easy to close that door and say you can’t, you can only pick 2.
Even then, I don’t see this as terribly destructive. Lucky is the only one that’s universally useful. The others are pretty situational. So, all these things put together still isn’t overpowering. Put them indoors in the dark, for example in a dungeon — those come up sometimes in this game — with a bunch of goblins, and this package of species abilities won’t matter too much. Yes, you could design a different pack that might do well in that goblin tunnel, but then it’s suffering somewhere else.
Thats the thing, the vast majority of species abilities are situational. So you allow mix and match, and maybe now a character gets an extra situation where they can use it, but that shouldn’t really break anything.
I’m an elf/tiefling with Elven Lineage high elf and Infernal legacy and dark vision . I have darkivision, any arcane cantrip and can swap it, detect magic, Misty step, resistance to fire damage, fire bolt, hellish rebuke, Darkness. That’s a lot of free spells.
Or I’m a human/Dwarf. I have versatile to get the tough feat. I take my dwarven resilience and get more hp and then darkvision or stone cunning.
Or tabaxi/arrakokra (know this guy really wants to min/max) I get flight, tabaxi speed jncrease and darkvision.
Point being that you have to curate the list or you get some wild min/max builds. Especially with human. Honestly everyone should just be human/x for versatile and the best traits from x.
In the end I would prefer a more narrative solution than a crunchy mechanical one. Letting a diverse heritage be something that is lore for a character rather than the subject of mechanical dickering would be more to my liking. I think the UA playtest accomplishes this decently enough and none of these alternate solutions of making feat lists sounds as good to me.
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!
Here's an excerpt from Durlag's Tower, a module developed for Adventurer's League, with whatever collaboration with the Wizards team that might imply.
And here's one such sidebar:
So, in short: Yes.
If all we ever get is the fluff-only sidebar I'll live. But I feel like they don't have far to go to arrive at something that will appeal to more people than that, without going all the way to half-elves being a separate entry again (much less half-everythingelse.)
I beg to differ. This was posted back in Oct:
I did not read the whole thread but I saw people suggest some kind of racial feats, and I wand to drop this in the mix :
Maybe there would be feats that improve on your species starting ability for example :
Improved dark vision :
Prerequisite: you have 60 feet dark vision from your species, or you are a child of 2 different species where one of the species gets 60 feet darkvision but you currently do not have this feature.
Benefit: If your of mixed species and currently don't have dark vision you gain 60 feet dark vision as a feature of your species, if you have 60 feet dark vision as a feature of your species it increases to 120 feet.
I wouldn't mind a feat where +60 to your darkvision is one of the options it can grant, but that being the entire feat is pretty lame.
Wow! Speaking as a decades long DM, I believe that having TWICE the vision capability of nearly anyone else at the table, would be amazing. I suppose you also want twice the hit points of red dragon also??
Darkvision is severely overrated by you then imo. It's nice, but I wouldnt spend a feat on it.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Eh, darkvision is actually incredibly powerful, it's just massively devalued by the fact that it's given away basically for free. However, upgrading from 60' to 120' is way less significant that going from zero to 60'.
120ft vs 60ft Darkvision is nice but hardly worth a feat. Even Darkvision itself I'd be hard-pressed to spend a feat on for a non-darkvision race when you can just tough it out with a torch for the first few levels until you get the spell, depending on the build, which lasts all day long without concentration from a single cast.