Welcome, adventurerers, to the always expanding world of playable races! I don't know about you, but my favorite thing about D&D is being able to stop being human for a little bit. It's stupid! Earth humans are full of things like lattes, pizza, and hubris. And while that sounds fun at first, I tried it for a few decades, and let me tell you, I blame every late night stubbed toe on a lack of Darkvision.

The answer, of course, is as many playable races as possible. Just while writing this piece, I cringed at my inability to write it from the point of view of a humanoid narwhal. I think we can all agree that the life of a sea unicorn with little legs would be pretty amazing, and that they'd make excellent writers for D&D Beyond, full of metaphors that reference arctic ocean life forms. Metaphors as beautiful as a tardigrade basking in an undersea volcanic vent. 

Can you tell that I should perhaps not be trusted with something as balanced as a player race? Maybe I'm a little too weird and whimsical for something as important as officially licensed fantasy lore. I mean I know, that's what a lot of people tell me all the time. But I went ahead and write some up anyway, despite the desperate pleas of my friends and coworkers. Please feel free to integrate these into your own adventures, if for no reason than to declare yourself a member of a weird and whimsical tribe of folks who care nothing for the concerns of their loved ones.

Tarrasque

 Playing as a tarrasque means you have all the traits and abilities of the classic monster! There's just a few tweaks we needed to make for balance.

You automatically fail all dialogue checks given your lack of speech or functioning ears.

Each time you approach a building, and if you plan to stop within 100 feet of it, roll 1d6. If you roll under a 4 you accidentally crush the building and set its remains on fire.

Friendly creatures must roll a DC 30 Charisma (Persuasion) check once an hour or they will be impulsively swallowed by you.

You impulsively swallow anything immobile and small enough to go down without some chewing. You chew everything else.

You are constantly screaming and roaring.

All NPCs are automatically frightened by you and run, screaming uncontrollably, until you are 5 miles away. This includes everything other than titans and gods.

Your parents are disappointed in you for not destroying the entire Material Plane by now. You're almost 30. Are you even planning to settle down and get married with another world-destroyer or are you some kind of artist now?

You're always hungry, like really hungry, like if you work a late shift and see a Taco Bell drive thru open and think about stopping there. That bad.

Swarm of Bats

 Everyone wishes they could play as the stuff in the Monster Manual, so we're just flipping through it and landing on stuff. How about a swarm of bats? Yeah, you guys will love this one.

The base stat block for you is pretty weak, so go ahead and roll up a new one. Except for Charisma, that stays a 4 (-3). You are gross bats.

To replenish HP you must rest in a cave and recruit other bats to join your swarm with a DC 10 Charisma (Persuasion) check. Really roleplay this out by talking about how delicious locusts are, and how your swarm's guano barely even smells like ammonia.

Because you are a collective, you are partially immune to polymorph. Instead, on a successful polymorph cast against you, one of the individual bats in your swarm drops out of the sky, hits the ground, turns into a vampire, and the vampire says, "Sorry! Just pretending to be one of you cool bats!" before sheepishly running away.

Pink Eye

 You are the disease pink eye. That's right, we're not just doing the Monster Manual. We're very creative and thinking outside the box!

There are two subraces: Viral Conjunctivitis, and Bacterial Conjunctivitis. Both known more commonly in filthy taverns as "oh no, pink eye."

Players must choose if they are a single virus or a bacteria. Bacteria can only be damaged by healing magic, but have a movement speed of 0.00002. Players who are viruses get a +10 to their Constitution as they are immune to antibiotics, I mean, magic. Viruses have a movement speed of 0.00001.

Both function as an undead zombie, only they are too small to have a size class, impossible to see, and roll disadvantage on everything except for feasting on the eye cells of other creatures, which of course they have advantage on.

Pink Eye characters can only travel by handshakes, and can regenerate HP by infecting eyes.

Though it doesn't really make sense scientifically speaking, they take no penalties to other stats and can understand and speak all languages. This is because it's fantasy and they're so slow so we had to give them something else.

Also, not to be weird about it, but unless a quest involves giving you to an enemy, everyone feels pretty creeped out by the talking disease and tries to pour alcohol on you.

Chaz

Chaz is a sub-race of human that asks if you can Venmo him $5 for tacos once a day. That's the only difference.

Okay, that will do it for this installment of New Playable Races We Already Regret! Because if regret is built into the premise, you can't possibly fail.

Dan Telfer is the Dungeons Humorist aka Comedy Archmage for D&D Beyond (a fun way they are letting him say "writer"), dungeon master for the Nerd Poker podcast, a stand-up comedian, a TV writer who also helped win some Emmys over at Comedy Central, and a former editor of MAD Magazine and The Onion. He can be found riding his bike around Los Angeles from gig to gig to gaming store, though the best way to find out what he's up to is to follow him on Twitter via @dantelfer.