Author: Joshua Macy

You want to know what manner of man is Joshua, What manner of man, you want to know.... A man of the moment is Joshua, and when the moment leads, there do I go! I live to love, I love to live!
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Realism in RPGs Redux

When people badmouth realism in RPGs, they’re usually complaining about one of two things: unwarranted complexity or endless arguments over the facts of the matter.  Sometimes both, tossing in nobody actually wants it anyway, or it’s pointless to discuss realism in games where there are things like dragons and magic.  Reality, though, is the bedrock on which all RPGs lie, because the world and scope of action in RPGs is radically under-determined by the rules.  Players have complete freedom of action in a wide-open world, and in order to function they (and the GM) need some starting point: reality is what we’ve got.  It’s the jumping off point for making those decisions and interpreting the rules, even if it’s often filtered through the lens of genre1 or what would be playable and fun before a final determination is made.

Board games no matter how simple (Snakes & Ladders, Parcheesi), or complex (Advanced Squad Leader, or Drang Nach Osten) completely detail all the legal moves and all the relevant details at every point in the game.  In Monopoly there is no “Can I bribe the cop so I don’t go to jail?”  There is no cop, there’s just a square that you land on and the rules detail the consequences for landing on it.  You can’t elect to just stop for the night in the hotel you own at Marvin Gardens, and continue your trip next turn.  In an RPG those things are possible, and more.  Anything the players can conceive can be tried, and no RPG can possibly detail rules that cover every circumstance.  None of them even try, relying instead on the mutual ability of the players and GM to appeal to reality to either interpret the circumstances in light of the rules or come up with a ruling on the spot to determine the outcome in the case.

This process is so fundamental to the very nature of RPGs that a lot of people don’t seem to notice that it’s going on.  The people who scoff that it’s ridiculous to look to reality in a game where there are wizards casting fireballs don’t stop to think that if an alien who knew nothing about humans saw that happen in a game, it would be justified in assuming that’s something all human characters can do, until it found evidence to the contrary.  We humans see the same thing and know that there has to be magic (or the equivalent) at work because we implicitly compare it to the baseline of reality.  Even in a fantasy setting, we understand it to be Reality+, in this case + magic that follows certain rules; it does not follow that just because there’s magic in the setting anything goes.  A player in the setting would justifiably believe that if a fireball was cast, it was a wizard not a peasant or a cow what done it.

So What?

You might say, ok, so we perforce use reality as our yardstick of what’s possible where the rules are silent, but what about realism and the rules themselves?  Sure, we can assume that normal humans don’t throw fireballs, and elephants can’t fit in sock drawers even if the rules don’t explicitly spell that out, but is realism at all relevant where there are rules?  Can’t you say here are the rules and leave it at that?

Not really. First, rules require interpretation. They’re not self-executing, and the more they try to cover every edge case to avoid wiggle-room and misinterpretation the denser and more complex they get. Almost all problems from “rules-lawyering” arise from trying to force a favorable interpretation based on ambiguous language or over-literal reading. Almost every exhortation to “use common sense” and remember Rule 0 to prevent abuse is essentially advice to bear in mind you should use your reality yardstick in judging how to interpret a rule2. On the other hand rules that are very general and don’t try to tie down all the interactions with other rules often require a good deal of interpretation just to use them, in the form of judging the exact circumstances and how that changes the difficulty, or working out the consequences. Say you succeed on your Diplomacy check, what then? These sorts of rulings aren’t necessarily hard, but they almost always use your judgement, and that’s going to be based on what seems realistic given the circumstances. Because you can’t believe it would happen in the real world that a perfect stranger walks up to a king and skilfully persuades him to abdicate in the stranger’s favor, in a game you rule it doesn’t happen no matter how well the player rolled.

Second, where rules contradict reality it presents a problem for players. It makes the outcome almost impossible to predict unless the player knows and can remember the rule in advance (which greatly limits the complexity of the rules unless you’re prepared to spend a lot of time looking them up during the game). Without foreknowledge no player is going to realize that a house-cat could prove a deadly threat to a first-level D&D character, or that a hand-grenade cannot kill an average civilian in Champions. Those are just two examples extreme enough that I hope everybody agrees are unrealistic, but even arguably plausible rules can trip players up if it doesn’t match what they know or think they know.

Finally, there is a large aesthetic component to the rules of an RPG. A rule may be perfectly serviceable in terms of being understood by the players, giving them enough to go on to make informed decisions, even fun in practice… and still rub them the wrong way because it portrays a world the rules of which don’t line up with how they think it ought to work. This is particularly bad when the rules make things impossible that the player has actually experienced (e.g. rules that make it impossible for characters to be as educated and skilled as the players themselves are, because of the prohibitive costs of being good a multiple musical instruments or languages). Dismissing these player concerns with the straw-man argument that they don’t really want realism because if they did they’d want every single aspect of the game to be completely accurate to the point of mind-numbing tedium is silly.

But, but…

So what about the twin specters of over-complication and endless argument over what the facts really are?

As far as over-complication: Don’t. Realism can often be enhanced without additional complication (such as picking reasonable scales that your abstract measures of time and distance represent without changing the actual rules about table-top units moved per turn), but supposing you have a situation where there’s a genuine trade-off of complexity vs. being able to reason from what would really happen? Pick a point where you get the best bang for your buck. That may differ for different players or even the same player at different times, but you should pick the level of detail and fidelity to the real world that represents the best compromise between letting players reason about the game world based on real-world knowledge and being simple enough to be fun to play at the table. It’s a balancing act, but you don’t get better rules by completely ignoring the weight on the side of reality any more than completely ignoring the weight on the side of simplicity.

As far as endless argument: If the player is making a bad-faith argument to try to secure a momentary advantage in the game and happens to be using realism as a handy stick, you have a problem player, not a problem with realism. Deal with that by dealing with the player, not telling all the players that facts and common sense aren’t welcome at your table. Similarly if the player is overly-enthusiastic about details and fidelity at a level that you and the rest of the players just don’t care about, deal with the player; you can admit that his interpretation might be more realistic3 while sticking to your guns that nevertheless for game purposes the rest of you agree what you’re doing is realistic enough. Maybe you’ll reconsider later, if you can see a way to accomplish it without bogging the game down, but for now it’s time to move on. But if the player has a point, then I think it’s only fair to consider it… if that would require too much time to hash it out then and there, pick a ruling and move on (personally I try and go with the player’s interpretation if I can, or at the very least let them have a do-over if they relied on something about how the real world works that’s not true according to the rules or genre). You can consider the evidence and what if anything to do about it should the situation come up in the future some time when you aren’t interrupting the game.

The Principle of Least Surprise

Basically what it comes down to is that without being able to piggyback your game play on what you know about the real world, how people and animals and tools and the whole shebang behave, you can’t possibly play something as open-ended as an RPG. Nor would there be any reason to. Unless you can fill in the blanks with reality, RPGs are just under-specified, ambiguous, frustrating board games where going off the menu of responses or trying to learn about or interact with details of the setting that haven’t been flagged as relevant leads to random contradictory results. RPGs have to start from the position that real-world knowledge and reasoning work except in certain specified areas, where they conform to the genre or idiosyncratic details about the setting or rules instead. Realism in RPGs consists of reducing the friction between the way the game behaves and the way the world behaves to manageable, comprehensible amounts. Deviations from the default of “The player tries to do X? What would happen in the real world if you tried that?” need to be deliberate, and preferably well thought out. If you sweep everything under the rug of, “Well it’s a game, you can’t expect it to make any sense! Just have fun with it!”, don’t be surprised if many players don’t find it fun at all.

  1. Genre almost always trumps reality, since that’s the point of playing a particular genre, but is even more under-determined than the rules.  Rules are at least written to cover general cases; all examples from genre works do is offer specific instances of how the creator resolved things, often for dramatic reasons . Reasoning from genre almost always requires an extra step of analogizing to the current situation.  In any case, genre fiction itself starts from a baseline of reality, so it only really comes up where it differs from prosaic reality.  Nobody has to cite scenes from a James Bond film to convince anybody of the existence of taxicabs, only of the feasibility of equipping an Aston Martin with machine guns and bullet-proof shields.  When I say “real world” or “reality” in this, I’m going to mean “real world + the stuff that genre trumps” but I’m not going to say it every time. ↩
  2. Theoretically issues of interpretation could also hinge on things like how tedious or complex one interpretation could be compared to another, but in practice those tend to be resolved trivially, without even need to discuss the pros and cons. ↩
  3. If it is. If it’s not, you can say you disagree. ↩
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Heroes & Other Worlds

Long, long ago, some time after the oceans drank Atlantis and before the rise of the world wide web, there were a pair of delightful little games of fantasy gladiatorial combat: Melee and, a bit later, Wizard.   They were written by Steve Jackson, and put out by a company called Metagaming.  We enjoyed them so much, they quickly replaced the  combat system we were using for Dungeons & Dragons (which was itself the “alternate combat system” described in Men & Magic, since the “real” combat system was Chainmail and we didn’t have a copy of that.)  Eventually Metagaming released The Fantasy Trip, also by Jackson, and I enthusiastically glommed onto that, while my brother continued using the homebrew that grew out of that original grafting of Melee/Wizard onto D&D.  Some time later, Metagaming went belly-up, and Steve Jackson tried to buy the rights to TFT back from Howard Thompson; Thompson wanted some ridiculous amount of money for it, so the deal never happened, and Thompson wandered off and that’s pretty much the last anybody ever heard of him.   Jackson went on to do a new, unconstrained version of his vision and what emerged was GURPS, but that’s another story.

I played TFT for years. That and the Arduin Grimoire were my fantasy jam. Eventually I drifted away because of slight dissatisfaction with some elements of the system, particularly at higher power levels, and the thrill of chasing something new.   (I gave GURPS more than a fair shake, when that came along, but… well, some other time maybe.)  Mostly I ended up playing home-brews, often heavily influenced by TFT and its class-less, level-less “be anything you want to spend points on” system. When decades later I encountered the OSR and people who had never given up on their old systems, and/or people who’d newly encountered them in the form of various retro-clones that provided copy-right friendly versions of long out-of-print editions, mostly of D&D, it never actually occurred to me to look for retro-clones of TFT.  It turns out, though, that there are several.  One in particular, Legends of the Ancient World,  by Dark City Games, deserves mention as a streamlined, stripped down version that compresses everything into 8 pages, and happens to be free.

A much more ambitious and complete (as well as more expensive) project is Heroes & Other Worlds, by C.R. Brandon, which has been described (paraphrasing) as TFT meets Moldvay Basic.  It’s a very impressive offering, with pretty substantial additional support, particularly a monster & treasure manual (The Tome of Terrors & Treasures… flipping expensive, though, even for 425 pages), and a supplement of extra spells (The Magi Carta, 190 pages)  both translations into HOW terms of OGL material, and several adventure and setting supplements (including a HOW version of my friend Rob Conley’s Blackmarsh setting Blackmarsh: Heroes & Other Worlds Edition).

I really dig Heroes & Other Worlds, although I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, both for the wealth of material that it provides and for the ways it has simplified some of the odder things in TFT, such as the way HOW eliminates the IQ minimums for learning various talents (in HOW called Skills).  No more minimum of 10 IQ to learn the most rudimentary form of martial arts; it may have made sense as a game balance technique to prevent fighters from using IQ as a dump stat, but it’s pretty hard to justify on any other grounds.  It also introduces some of its own new ideas, some of which are very neat indeed: I particularly like the notion of “reactions” that allow a character to Parry or Dodge at the cost of moving next turn, instead of taking a full turn (no attack) as in TFT, and the EN(durance) stat that allows for spell-casters with a lot of magical oomph who aren’t built like Conan.  HOW does introduce some of its own oddities, like Tridents being as good on the average wielded one-handed as Halberds with two, but you could easily change them back to the original TFT rules (available from David O. Miller’s Melee & Wizard site).

It is kind of pricey, as retro-clones go, and you might want to start by dipping your toes in Legends of the Ancient Worlds if you want to try a TFT-like for free… but HOW and its supplements represent a good deal of work by Brandon and I don’t begrudge him some recompense for the labor.  I’m looking forward to running TFT again in the near future, probably on a G+ Hangout some evening.  For me it’s like putting on a comfy old sweater in a way that D&D never really was.  Check it out.

Heroes & Other Worlds

heroes_and_other_worlds

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How To Hexcrawl

+Joe Johnston released How to Hexcrawl: a nice little pay-what-you-want primer on running a hex crawl in Labyrinth Lord, or any other D&D-like, gathering together the rules and charts you might use as well as some advice.

What I want to talk about, though is how to handle checking for encounters. Joe correctly points out (p 20) there’s a contradiction in the rules, or at least some confusion, about the step-by-step procedure of rolling once per day’s travel vs what happens when you travel over multiple terrain types and the admonition against checking more than 3-4 Times per day.  He suggests 3 possibilities: roll based on the start hex, the last hex, or each time the terrain changes. Unfortunately those all skew the encounters one way or another.

I’d like to offer a fourth option:

4) Secretly roll 1d12 for the hour and 1 die  of any type (or flip a coin) for day/night.  At the appointed hour in the game day, roll for an encounter based on the current hex’s chance of encounter.   This prorates the chances exactly.  The only minor drawback, if it is a drawback, is you do need to pay slightly closer attention to what the in-game time is, though that shouldn’t be at all difficult since you already are dealing with the travel speed to traverse the hex.

N.B. How to Hexcrawl doesn’t mention it, but the assumed overland travel rate for most D&D editions is about 3 m.p.h. for unencumbered travelers, with an 8-hour effective travel day, which gets you the list 24 miles/day.  With 6-mile hexes, each hex of travel is 2 hours.  If you get in the habit of announcing the time of day as the party enters the hex (“it’s about 10 am when you get to the mountains”) it’s dead easy to tell if it’s time to roll for an encounter, and helps give the players a better sense of the passage of time anyway.   This suggests a nice variation, if you want to roll for travel encounters and then separately for night encounters while camped: roll a d8 to see which hour of travel the encounter gets checked and then again at night based on the terrain where they are camped.  Ideally you want to have a separate table, or at least adjust the results, for night encounters, since a caravan or troop of men are not at all likely to be traipsing through the woods in the dark.

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Death & Dismemberment Smorgasbord

Lloyd Neill writes:

I’m writing a series of blog posts on Death & Dismemberment Tables and have put yours down on my Honour Roll

http://deathanddismemberment.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/d-on-death-dismemberment-tables.html

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Player Agency vs. Narrative Control

Player Agency is when as a player, your decisions matter… they have weight and consequences, and play out into the future in the game.  Narrative Control is when the player can control what goes on in the world, including what the consequences are or whether to accept them.

As I view them, they are incompatible despite the fact that at first glance they’re both about allowing the players to have input.  The problem is that the kinds of input cancel each other out. Weighing the decision whether the character should do X or Y in the game hoping for consequence A or B becomes pointless as soon as you can control whether it’s A, B, or something else.  And if you’re controlling the consequences, whether creating it from whole cloth or picking from a list, any time spent on the decision that led to that point is a waste…you’re just slowing the game down by pretending to consider probabilities and chains of causation which in the end will actually be decided by you choosing the one you like (understanding that like might mean what you feel is dramatically satisfying and not necessarily what the character would choose).

Now, if you’re very careful and aware of the distinction it may be possible to have a game where you shift back and forth…only having narrative control over things that aren’t the consequences of the decisions you’re making, and only pondering and planning out your decisions in areas that have been placed beyond your narrative control.  That’s actually kind of how SFX! games work: players have a lot of narrative control over details of the environment, but only as long as they don’t really matter.  If you’re in a bar and want to hit somebody with a bar stool, that’s mechanically the same as hitting with your fists, or a chair, or a bottle so you  have narrative control over whether there are suitable bar stools in the place.   It matters only insofar as hitting them with a stool might insulate you from their electric shock power, say.  On the other hand, whether hitting them is actually going to hurt them is completely out of your control and in the hands of the GM and the dice, so the decision you are making to try to hit them instead of any of the other things you might attempt (grab them, knock the gun out of their hand, distract them by throwing a drink in their face, run away, etc) is an important one that bears assessing and reasoning about the probable consequences.

This is why as a player I have very little interest in games that emphasize giving the players a lot of narrative control: it’s something that actively interferes with my favorite part of RPGs.  I want a lot of player agency, but only narrative control in very limited circumstances, such as when creating a character, or perhaps between sessions deciding what’s been going on in the character’s life off-screen.

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Chess isn’t an RPG, but D&D sure as Hell is

John Wick’s post Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance is making the rounds of the RPG blogosphere (I stumbled across it when Michael “Stargazer” Wolf wrote about it here) .  I started to write a comment, but it blew up into an entire post.

I was suspicious when I saw Wick start talking about telling stories, since that’s not really what I think RPGs are about, but it’s a common-enough starting point for discussing them.  Where Wick completely lost me, though, is when he proclaimed “The first four editions of D&D are not roleplaying games.”  Sorry, but if that’s where your argument ends up, it’s obvious you need to reexamine your premises.

Riddick and the teacup is a terrible example of why weapon stats shouldn’t matter: the thing that makes the scene stand out is that we all know that a teacup is a lousy weapon.  In a game without weapon stats, players will be completely unimpressed if you manage to kill somebody with a teacup because they’re aware that the rules make that no harder than killing with a gun or sword.  They might give you points for style if it’s the first time anybody’s done that, but nobody’s going to conclude your character is a bad-ass because of it.  Even having it built into your character “Can kill a man with a teacup” is less impressive than accomplishing it when according to the rules you need to roll two 20’s and then max damage to have a chance.  And I say that as the designer of a game that indeed doesn’t have weapon stats precisely so that characters with the right kind of abilities can accomplish feats like that.

My take on balance is the only important form of balance is whether the players are all getting satisfactory amounts of time to do their things.  It comes up in combat more frequently only because a lot of systems make resolving combat take a lot of time even in encounters that aren’t very important or interesting so the combat-oriented characters get a bunch of spot-light time simply because there is a combat.  This leads to people feeling that everybody needs to be balanced in the sense of having a substantial role in combat when really what needs to be balanced is the amount of table time devoted to combat vs. other activities.
As for player skill vs. character skill in social tasks, I’m pretty firmly against the model where accomplishing a task is defined as entertaining/persuading the GM. The problem isn’t just that naturally some people are better at reading the GM and describing or acting out what they do in such a way to please the GM and get rewarded with a success, or that games of charming the GM into getting your way often narrows the scope of characters you can successfully play, it’s that games like that are almost always too predictable and cliched.  Once you’ve grasped the GM’s sense of plot and pacing, everybody knows what’s going to happen most of the time.  Games are much more exciting for everybody involved, IMO, when the outcome isn’t known before the die stops rolling. You may make the most brilliant rallying speech since St. Crispin’s say… but do the troops buy it?  That moment when everybody at the table, GM included, are hanging on whether the universe is going to pop up a Yea or Nay result, is *the* moment in an RPG where it goes from being a form of clumsy collaborative fiction to an “it’s almost like you’re there” experience.  That may actually be the crux of it: fiction you create, games you experience.  Substituting the former for the latter every time there’s an important social interaction robs RPGs of their most compelling feature: the ability to experience fictive worlds.

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Most Intellectual RPG I own

(This is in response to the #rpgaday list of questions)

I’m not entirely sure what “most intellectual” RPG I own even means. Clearly *Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth* is the most pretentious RPG ever published in English, but do I own that or was it Rob Barrett’s copy?

I think, though, that I’m going to go with a different take on “intellectual”, and make an argument that good old D&D white box is the most intellectual of the RPGs I own. I mean, besides the fact that even understanding how to play requires a bunch of analysis of cryptic text. Unlike most of the games that came after it, OD&D engages the GM and the players on a purely intellectual level. Not that you have to be smart to play it, but that there’s nothing to do, no way to resolve situations or move ahead in the game except by thinking, trying to understand the fictional world, and making decisions based on that. Any puzzles that are encountered have to be solved by the player. Anything the players attempt to do outside of a sparse set of tasks has to be adjudicated by the GM based on what seems reasonable: there isn’t even a hint of a mechanism along the lines of pick a difficulty and roll a die, or rules to mold outcomes according to aesthetic considerations or play that emphasizes non-thinky things like performance, empathy (especially empathic understanding of your own character), and so on. You could use OD&D as the basis for such play, and it wouldn’t get in the way…but that’s because it said nothing about it. Everything that’s actually on the page is about play as an intellectual task. OD&D doesn’t even use the term “role-playing” anywhere in its text: the only uses of the word role are in reference to the character’s *function*, e.g. “roll three six-sided dice in order to rate each as to various abilities, and thus aid them in selecting a role.” (in context fighting man, magic user, or cleric).

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Unofficial Large Creature Template for D&D 5e

Minotaur_SmallSince Joshua Burnett and some folks on G+ were talking about statting up Minotaurs as a Large playable race, this is my take for a Template that could be applied to a creature to make a Large version of a creature.  This is based on the Ogre from the Starter Set, since that’s the only example of a Large humanoid we’ve got so far.

Large Creature

Movement: +10 feet

Reach: +5 feet

Ability Scores: if you want to stick to the Basic pattern of playable races not having any penalties, I’d stick with the ranges of bonuses they have (+2 to +4, no more than +2 in any single ability); if you’re willing to impose penalties, then I’d suggest another up to +3 on STR or CON, with a matching penalty to DEX, for a maximum of +5 increase and a cap of 21.  So a Minotaur might have straight +3 STR (within the “normal” increase range for a non-human, so no penalty, but all applied to the one stat), while an Ogre might be STR +4, CON +2,  DEX -2 (another +2 above the normal, matched by a -2 penalty, and again with more in the one stat than “normal”).

Points to bear in Mind

While most rules and spells in Basic affect creatures up to Large the same way as Small and Medium, so there’s nothing special you have to do, there are a couple rules that are triggered by a creature being Large:

Maximum # of Large enemies that can surround a Medium creature: 5 (page 71)

Large creatures can’t squeeze through a space smaller than would fit a Medium creature, and treat spaces that are Medium size as difficult terrain.  So, e.g. a 5′ wide corridor would be difficult terrain and take 2′ of movement for every 1′ of passage.  This is really the same rule as for other creatures (Medium vs. Small), it’s just liable to come up much more often. (p.71)

Carrying/lifting/dragging capacity is doubled compared to a Medium creature of the same STR. (p. 60)

Armor should have to be custom made (p. 44 suggests armor size as an optional rule, but it probably ought to be mandatory for Large humanoids even if optional for Medium and Small).

 

 

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Beast-kin of Salamagundi

A new #DnD5e racedog-kin

Beast-kin have the appearance of bipedal beasts (cats, dogs, pigs, cows, etc). They usually wear clothes, and are roughly human-sized. They can also transform to full-on beast form, in which case they use that stats for that type of beast, as well as an almost completely human form. Beast-kin typically end their utterances with an sound appropriate to their nature. E.g. “What’ll you folks have for dinner, moo?” or “Catch them before they get away! Oink!”

In their hybrid form they can move around and breath on land as humans do even if their full beast form could not, but have the special abilities of their subrace according to the table below.

In their fully human-looking form they retain only slight traces of their beast ancestry (generally ears, tail, and eyes): this form grants an extra +2 Cha but lacks any of the special abilities of the hybrid form except Animal Senses.

In their fully beast form, they have the stats and abilities of their beast, though they are size Medium unless otherwise noted.

Size Medium
Speed 35 feet

Stats +1Dex +1 Con

Animal senses: choose one since that acts as tool (grants proficiency in tasks that use it)

Proficiency: Survival

Languages: Common, specific species (e.g. Wolf-kin can talk to wolves)

Beast-kin Type Tablecat-kin

Roll d20 (Type and Examples)

  1. Fish:
    Bass, Clownfish, Dolphin, Eel, Lionfish, Marlin, Puffer, Shark
  2. Bird:
    Crow, Dove, Egret, Hummingbird, Ostrich, Parrot, Raven, Robin
  3. Insect
    Ant, Bee, Beetle, Butterfly, Centipede, Cricket, Flea, Fly, Moth, Wasp
  4. Arachnid
    Mite, Scorpion, Spider, Tick 
  5. Rodent
    Bat, Capybara, Gopher, Mole Mouse, Rat, Squirrel
  6. Canine
    Dingo, Dog, Fox, Hyena, Jackal, Wolf
  7. Feline
    Cat, Cougar, Leopard, Lion, Lynx, Ocelot, Puma, Tiger
  8. Bovine
    Antelope, Auroch, Bison, Bull, Buffalo, Gnu, Ox, Yak
  9. Marsupial
    Bandicoot, Kangaroo, Koala, Platypus, Possum, Tasmanian Devil
  10. Pachyderm
    Elephant, Hippo, Rhino
  11. Raptor
    Eagle, Falcon, Hawk, Owl, Osprey, Peregrine
  12. Amphibian
    Frog, Newt, Salamander, Toad, Turtle
  13. Aquatic Mammal
    Beaver, Manatee, Orca, Otter, Porpoise, Whale
  14. Reptile
    Alligator, Crocodile, Gecko, Gila Monster, Iguana, Komodo
    Dragon
  15. Snake
    Anaconda, Boa, Cobra, Coral Snake, Mamba, Viper
  16. Dinosaur
    T Rex, Ankylosaur, Triceratops, Allosaur, Pteranodon, Velociraptor
  17. Extinct Giant Mammal
    Giant Sloth, Mammoth, Mastodon, Saber-tooth Tiger
  18. Primate
    Ape, Baboon, Chimp, Gibbon, Gorilla, Lemur, Monkey, Orangutan
  19. Equine
    Camel, Deer, Donkey, Horse, Reindeer, Zebra
  20. Invertebrate
    Jellyfish, Octopus, Sea Anemone, Sea Urchin, Squid, Starfish

Hybrid Special Abilitiesbear-kin

The GM and players are strongly encouraged to tweak the special abilities to better fit the exact beast type since the listed special abilities are quite general.

Fish

Breath under water, +10′ movement in water

One of Camouflage  (hide as bonus action in appropriate terrain), Natural attack 1d6 Bite, Natural Attack 2d4 Poison spines

Bird

Flight or +10′ running (for flightless).

Two of Proficiency: Singing; Absolute Direction Sense; Natural Attack 1d4 Peck or Scratch, Long-distance vision

Insect

Walk on walls and ceiling

One of Poison Bite/Sting (1d6), Fly +10′,  Blood sucking (recover 1d4 HP on successful attack after grapple), Can eat anything organic

Arachnid

Walk on walls and ceiling.

One of Poison Bite/Sting (1d6), Web Spinning (cast Web spell once/short rest), Blood sucking (recover 1d4 HP on successful attack after grapple)

Rodent

+1 Dex. Treat as 1 size smaller when moving through tight areas (so no penalty for small, tiny is difficult terrain).  Low Light Vision. Proficiency: Climbing. +5 Move.

Canine

Proficiency: Tracking. Natural Attack 1d6 bite. Pack Tactics (gain advantage on foe if ally who isn’t incapacitated is within 5 feet of foe), Additional Keen sense.

Feline

+2 Dex.  Low light vision.  Proficiency: Jumping, Climbing.  Natural Attack: 1d4 claws. +5 Move.

Bovine

+2 STR, Double carrying capacity. +10 Move.

Marsupial

+2 Cha.  Either Proficiency Climbing or Proficiency: Jumping.

Pachyderm

+2 Str, +2 Con.  Double carrying capacity.  Either Trunk (extra limb), or Natural attack 1d6 (teeth/horn)

Raptor

+1 Wis. Fly +10 Move, Long-distance vision, Natural Weapon 1d6 claw.

Amphibian

+1 Wis, +1 Con. Can breathe under water, Full movement under water, Camouflage (hide as bonus action in appropriate environment). One of climb walls/ceiling freely or Proficiency: Jump +10′ jump

Aquatic Mammal

+1 Dex, +2 Dex under water, +10 movement under water.  Can hold breath for 10 minutes per +1 con bonus.

Reptile

+2 AC. Additional Keen sense (one of heat detection, vibration detection, smell).  Hard to Kill (advantage on Death saves)

Snake

+2 AC. Additional Keen sense (one of heat detection, vibration detection, smell).  Hard to Kill (advantage on Death saves)

Dinosaur

+2 AC, +2 STR, Natural Weapon 1d8 Bite.  Note that Dino beast Kin are still Medium sized humanoids, and their beast forms are only Large, even if the natural form would be Huge or bigger

Extinct Giant Mammal

Size Large (+10 Move, 5 ft reach, double carrying capacity). +2 Con.  Natural Weapon 1d6 Bite or claw or tusk.  Advantage on saves vs. cold.

Primate

+2 Str.  Proficiency: Climbing, Jumping.  One of +1 Con; Size Small; Size Tiny + Prehensile Tail.

Equine

+10 Move, Double Carrying Capacity.

Invertebrate

Advantage on saves vs. crushing; Damage Resistance vs. bludgeoning.

pig-kin

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Suraimu of Salamagundi

A new D&D 5e PC race. slime

Suraimu are intelligent amorphous creatures, usually translucent although some are opaque or even metallic colored; a given Suraimu always stays the same color. Unlike oozes and jellies, Suraimu have visible and fixed eyes and mouths.

Stats: +2 Con

Size: Medium

Speed: 25 ooze, on any solid surface.  Despite lack of legs, Suraimu may jump. Age: Suraimu reach maturity at age 1 and never die of natural causes.

Alignment: Chaotic Languages: speak Suraimu and Common.

Weapons and Armor: Cannot use weapons or armor unless under the influence of a People Potion, but have a natural melee attack (1d6, Acid). They can extend pseudopods to manipulate other items, or even carry items.

Magic: Suraimu can use magic without material components it would ordinarily require or a spell focus (if the spell calls for a consumable material component like gold dust or a gem, the Suraimu must consume it first).

Dissolve: Can attack with 1d6 Acid as a Bonus action against any grappled foe.

Amorphous: Advantage on saves vs. crushing, Damage Resistance against Bludgeoning attacks. Any Slashing attack that does over half the Suraimu’s Max HP may split the Suraimu in two… Make a Death Save or become two creatures dividing the remaining HP between them.  The twin Suraimu have the same personality and memories up to the point of splitting, but are distinct creatures after that.  If they are ever rejoined the memories merge, and but the two personas must battle for dominance (Opposed Wis rolls)…the Suraimu has the levels, XP, proficiencies, etc. of the dominant persona.

Ooze: May pass through any opening large enough for one of the Suraimu’s eyes to fit; this counts as at least one foot of difficult terrain (2 feet of movement) regardless of how thin the barrier is. May not take carried items with them unless the items would also fit.

People Potions: Suraimu can consume People Potions (what other races call Healing Potions) and temporarily assume human form.  A Healing Potion used on a Suraimu doesn’t heal any HP, but changes it into a human for a number of hours equal to the HP that would have been healed.  Other sources of healing such as spells do not have this effect, and heal normally.  People Potions may also be used to re-merge split Suraimu.  Suraimu may decide such things as appearance and gender each time they consume a People Potion, though they will retain some of their natural coloring (typically the hair and eyes), and disguising themselves as a specific other person would be difficult (likely DC 25).  A Resurrection Potion or Phoenix Down will allow a Suraimu to permanently gain the ability to assume human form (switching back is an action).

Sub-races

Nomaru

Nomaru Suraimu come in various colors, with abilities that vary by color.

Abilities are shown in ROYGBIV order (Violet may be Pink instead)

Ability Score Increase: +1 STR/+1 DEX/+1 CON/+1 INT/+1 WIS/ +1 CHA/+1 Random

Damage Resistance: Fire/Necrotic/Poison/Acid/Electricity/Ice/Random

Metaru

Metaru Suraimu have shiny metallic coloring.  Metaru Suraimu are unable to use People Potions.

Ability Score Increase: +1 Con

Toughness: +4 AC

Conductivity: Advantage on saves vs. Electricity, Damage Resistance vs. electrical attacks

Hearingu

Hearingu Suraimu have the appearance of floating jellyfish, with a gas-bag like head and dangling tentacles.

Ability Score Increase: +1 Wis

Float: unlike other Suraimu, Hearingu Suraimu float through the air at 25′ instead of oozing or jumping.

Heal: You have tentacles dangling beneath you that can heal creatures you touch. You can cast Spare the Dying as a cantrip, and can also cast Cure Wounds once for free (recharges with a Short Rest).  If you know spells, you may additonallycast Cure Wounds with your Spell slots without having it prepared.