Todd Kenreck: You have a new Unearthed Arcana with a few new playable races. What are those and why?

Jeremy Crawford: So, this month in Unearthed Arcana the theme — and it just sort of emerged naturally as we were tinkering around with some things — was Greek mythology, and specifically two species from Greek myth, centaurs and minotaurs. Now, we had toyed around with minotaurs before in Unearthed Arcana, specifically exploring the minotaurs of Krynn. And we got feedback from that, and I believe that was back in 2015, so it's been a few years. We were looking at that feedback, and then we, for a while, had been wanting to play around with a playable version of the centaur, and we thought, "Well, since we're doing one, why not then tinker with the other?" And so this month's Unearthed Arcana was born.

One of the things that we went back and forth on, especially regarding the centaur, was its size. And it's funny: our department, for over a decade now, has at various times talked about toying with centaurs as a playable race, but the wall we always slam into is them being large. And I say that's a wall because as soon as a player character is large all the time, this introduces a number of issues for the system. Not unsolvable, but some real issues. For instance, there are a number of paladin abilities and spells that radiate out from somebody. As soon as you are large or larger, the effective scope of those abilities just got bigger. You're able to block wide corridors on your own, and so on and so forth. So there are a number of consequences of making somebody large all the time. We are fine with making you large part of the time. It's like we have spells, like Enlarge, that for a little bit of time you get to be bigger and enjoy the benefits and sometimes the downsides of being larger than small or medium, but we're like ... We've always been hesitant to have a species that is that big 100% of the time.

We realized working on the centaur that in many ways this was a false problem, because — and this is how nerdy we are — we were studying some images that we've done in the past of centaurs. We looked at descriptions of horses, but then also considered what would the back portion of a horse be like in proportion to a humanoid-like upper body, and we realized it's not crazy to conceive of centaurs who would actually fit within a five-foot square. And so we've said, "We'll make them medium." Because even though our monster centaurs in the Monster Manual are large, whenever we make the playable version of something, we're always making the version that is archetypal for a player character. We're not saying every member of this species is exactly like this. So really all we're saying in this Unearthed Arcana is even though yes, there are centaurs who are large, if you're playing one, you're playing one who's medium.

So you're a little smaller for a centaur, but you get to gallop around with a speed of 40 feet. That is also related to an interesting problem that we pondered when coming up with the centaur, and that is how the heck does a centaur climb a ladder? And we went through various versions of rules for a person with that anatomy trying to make their way up and down something like a ladder. We settled on a pretty simple rule expanding upon how climbing already works in the game, where for any character climbing costs you one extra foot of movement for each foot you climb. Well, for the four-horsed centaur, each foot you climb costs you four extra feet of movement. And so we just assume you will somehow make it work. The DMs, of course, might decide there are certain climbs that are just impossible for a centaur.

Centaurs also have sort of a charge ability. They have a natural knack for survival, so they have proficiency in the survival skill, and that's there partly because their story is that they have a strong connection with nature, and that's something we also talk about them in the Monster Manual.

Now, the minotaur ... That's in many ways kind of the bonus bit. Revision of what we did before. They're similar to the centaur in not only being from Greek myth but also their Monster Manual cousins are large, whereas the playable versions are medium. Now, we also had done that originally because that was appropriate for Krynn minotaurs. This time, the minotaurs we're presenting are not specifically tied to Krynn, although they certainly work for Krynn minotaurs. We decided we wanted to broaden them a little bit so it would work really for any world where you want to play a minotaur who has not been warped by the demonic influence of the demon lord Baphomet, because the story for monstrous minotaurs is they are really the product of the demon lord Baphomet, and they have a savagery because of that demonic connection. The minotaurs that we're presenting here are a people like any other who they can make their own moral decisions and whatnot. They are not in the shadow of Baphomet.

People will see we've tweaked some things in the minotaur since the last time, most of it really various refinements. One thing that readers will notice is that in both the minotaur and in the centaur we're experimenting with a new racial trait called Hybrid Nature, and for the first time ever we are introducing these people who have two creature types. Up 'til now, all of the peoples whom you can play in the game are of one creature type, and we decided, well, we could start experimenting with peoples who have more than one. And so in these cases, centaur and the minotaur, they are both monstrosities and humanoids. And then the rule associated with that is if an effect in the game can effect either of your creature types, then it can effect you. So what that means is if someone casts Charm Person on a centaur, a playable centaur, it can work because the centaur is part humanoid.

This was ... 'Cause we went back and forth because in the Monster Manual centaurs are monstrosities. They're not humanoids, although of course they actually have a humanoid upper body. And so we not only wanted to solve this from a storytelling perspective but also from a game mechanics perspective. Because there is this hidden thing where if we made playable option non-humanoid, you would actually under the surface be getting all sorts of immunities to various things, because there are a lot of spells and other effects in the game that only work on humanoids or only work on humanoids and beasts. So if a person wandered in [inaudible 00:08:23], "Hey, I'm a monstrosity," then you essentially are then, bam, you're immune to all sorts of things. So we also needed to solve that, because that could end up being a disruptive bit of power for a player character.

Todd Kenreck: Thank you, Jeremy Crawford, for being on the show. You can play test both the centaur and the minotaur on dndbeyond.com. I'm Todd Kenreck. Thank you for watching.