Need help balance checking a homebrew race

So, basically the title says it all. Need feedback, comments, questions, suggestions, etc. So I can make it playable. I know the advantage saving throws are probably OP and unnecessary. I would like to have throw in mask of the wild since I think it naturally fits in. So I was thinking about moving weapon and armor proficiencies into a new class that I was also homebrewing called Trickster. Let me know about any ideas you guys got... thanks in advance.
[Wukong] “[Sun Wukong then defies Hell's attempt to collect his soul. Instead of reincarnating, he wipes his name out of the Book of Life and Death along with the names of all monkeys known to him. The Dragon Kings and the Kings of Hell report him to the Jade Emperor. Sun is taken to heaven to be executed for his crimes, but fire, lightning, and edged weapons have no effect on his invincible body. Laozi then suggests that they put him inside of the deity’s mystical eight trigrams furnace to reduce the demon into ashes. They check the furnace forty-nine days later expecting to see his charred remains; however, Monkey jumps out unscathed, and not only that, the intense flames refined his pupils the color of gold, giving them the power to see for hundreds of miles and to recognize the dark auras of demons in disguise. He overturns the furnace and begins to cause havoc in heaven with his iron cudgel. The monkey’s anger cannot be contained.]"
—[Wu Cheng'en], [Journey to the West]
The Wukong are monkey/humanoids who are magical from blessings by Sun Wukong, the Monkey God. They are as wild as the different places where they live such as the barrens to high in the mountain ranges. Because of this, there is rarely any other race they do not come in contact with. They emulate their god constantly practicing drilling with each other using polearms, acrobatics, and their trickery.
Monkeylike and Humanlike The Wukong are slender monkey/humanoids with brown or grey fur and have a pink face, which is bereft of fur as well. Their tail is of medium length and averages between 32.1 and 36.0 inches. Adult males measure about 60 inches on average and weigh about 160 lbs. Females are smaller, averaging 55 inches in height and 150 in weight.
From Realm to Realm The magical Wukong may be found arid, open areas, grasslands, woodlands, and in mountainous regions up to 2,500 m (8,200 ft) in elevation. They walk on two feet, all fours, are natural climbers, and are regular swimmers. Babies as young as a few days old can swim, and adults are known to swim over a half mile between islands. The Wukong are noted for their tendency to move from rural to urban areas, coming to rely on handouts or refuse from humans. They adapt well to human presence, and form larger troops in human-dominated landscapes than in forests. Their troops number anywhere from 10 to 100.
Children of the Monkey God The Wukong are magical creatures as they blessed by their monkey god. Highly reverent to Sun Wukong, they constantly pray to their god and act out his adventures with each other and in the world. When in another race’s community, they perform acrobatics, trick, or steal. They don’t do this, because they need money (they are wild and have no need for it), but in order to live their lives as closely to Sun Wukong.
Wild and Fearless
The Wukong being very energetic and having little patience, are born adventurers. Especially because of their short lifespan, they are constantly on the move, looking to experience the world around them. The Wukong, since they are magical and acrobatic, love attention, meeting other races, and sometimes, tricking, and stealing from them. They are always willing to join adventurer’s party, hardly questioning the difficulty or the purpose.
Friendly, but Misunderstood The Wukong argue much amongst themselves, but many have a forgiving nature since this is the the way of the Wukong. There is never a problem, it’s just another day, except that once in a while in their family tree, a fruit bears very bad seeds.
Dwarves. “Dwarves always seem angry, but we know it’s not because of something we have done, although stealing from them does make them so. But many times, they use our services, and we get them something they need and if you do this enough times, even a Dwarf’s stone heart will let them smile and make a long friendship.”
Elves. “Many Wood Elves live with us. They protect the forests and we help them. We trade with them and they seem very forgiving when one of our troop did something wrong. They are very kind to our race.”
Halflings. “Halflings are great folk! They have so much food, that we don’t even have to beg or steal from them! But if anyone were to interfere with them, out troop will deal with them happily.”
Humans. “Some hate us, some like us. Sometimes it’s our fault, but other times they hate us, because they hate anything they do not know. We see how they treat other races, and they hate them too, for no reason! But then, out of nowhere, they’ll treat us again with great kindness. Sometimes I think we are the ones most closely related to them, because of our chaotic nature.”
Wukong Names A Wukong addresses people with his surname first, and then his first name. Many times they choose Wukong as their last name, because they are proud direct descendants of Sun Wukong, the Monkey God.
Male Names: Zhang Wei, Wang Wei, Li Wei,Liu Wei, Li Qiang, Wang lei, Li Jun, Wang Yong, Zhang Yong, Li Jie, Zhang Lei, Wang Qiang, Wang Jun, Zhang Jie, Zhang Tao, Wang Tao, Li Ming, Wang Chao, Li Yong, Liu Jie, Zhang Jun, Zhang Qiang, Wang Ping, Wang Gang, Wang Jie
Female Names: Wang Fang, Wang Xiu Ying, Li Xiu Ying, Li Na, Zhang Xiu Ying, Zhang Min, Li Jing, Zhang Li, Wang Jing, Wang Li, Zhang Jing, Li Min, Wang Min, Liu Yang, Wang Yan, Li Juan, Zhang Yan, Li Yan, Wang Juan, Wang Xiu Lan, Li Xia, Liu Min, Li Li, Li Gui Ying, Liu Fang.
Surnames: Wukong, Liang/Leung, Luo, Kuang, Chan/Chen, Liang, Lu, Zhang/Chong, Zheng, Lin, Xǔ, Xie, Wang, Xú, Zhu, Wang, Yang, Mao, Shen, Hu, Tan, He, Deng, Wu, Yang, Chen, Gao, Wan, Xue, Bao, Ma, Kong, Dong, Guo, Pan, Yu.
Wukong Traits Your Wukong character has a variety of natural and magical abilities, the result of many magical blessings by Sun Wukong, the Monkey God.
Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity score increases by 2 and Charisma by 1.
Age. The Wukong reach physical maturity at 12 years old and live up to approximately 50 years old.
Alignment. The Wukong love freedom, are adventurous, and carefree. So much so, much of their behavior is impulsive. Some act on their gut feeling, doing what they believe is right, not caring what others think of them. Others just go with the moment instead of considering outcomes. But very few are wild and are violent falling to their desires
Size. The Wukong range from 4 to 6 feet tall and have slender builds. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 35 feet.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Simius. Wukong interact with each other using a variety of facial expressions, vocalizations, body postures, and gestures. They can read and write at mostly a basic level.
Prehensile tail. A Wukong can pick up, hold up to 18 lbs., and can hang from it’s tale.
Inborn Movement. Being both arboreal and terrestrial, bipedal and quadrupedal, and traveling between arid, open areas, grasslands, woodlands, and in mountainous, they can climb, crawl, and swim with no penalties.
Wild Life. You have proficiency in the Perception skill.
Monkey God lesser resistance to magic. You have advantage on saving throws against fire and water based magic attacks. All magic damage is reduced by half.
Reduced Falling Damage. Check is done with advantage due to also being able to use their tail to grab and stop falling. Reduce damage you take by half your check result (round down). If damage is reduced to 0, then he lands standing.
Wukong Armor Training. You have proficiency with hide, breastplate, chain mail, and chain shirt armor.
Wukong Weapon Training. You have proficiency with the glaive, halberd, pike, longbow, and long sword. Natural Strength. All strength and athletics checks are done with dexterity instead.
Natural Strength. All strength and athletics checks are done with dexterity instead.

Okay, let's focus on the game mechanics since you are asking for a balance check. I'm going to put in a little formatting:

turd ferguson said:

Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity score increases by 2 and Charisma by 1.

Size. The Wukong range from to 6 feet tall and have slender builds. Your size is Medium.

Speed. Your base walking speed is 35 feet.

Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Simius. Wukong interact with each other using a variety of facial expressions, vocalizations, body postures, and gestures. They can read and write at mostly a basic level.

Prehensile tail. A Wukong can pick up, hold up to 18 lbs., and can hang from it’s tale.

Inborn Movement. Being both arboreal and terrestrial, bipedal and quadrupedal, and traveling between arid, open areas, grasslands, woodlands, and in mountainous, they can climb, crawl, and swim with no penalties.
Wild Life. You have proficiency in the Perception skill.

Monkey God lesser resistance to magic. You have advantage on saving throws against fire and water based magic attacks. All magic damage is reduced by half.

Reduced Falling Damage. Check is done with advantage due to also being able to use their tail to grab and stop falling. Reduce damage you take by half your check result (round down). If damage is reduced to 0, then he lands standing.

Wukong Armor Training. You have proficiency with hide, breastplate, chain mail, and chain shirt armor.

Wukong Weapon Training. You have proficiency with the glaive, halberd, pike, longbow, and long sword.

Natural Strength. All strength and athletics checks are done with dexterity instead.

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I'd say this is rather well above the power level of other races. Once you get rid of some glaring issues, I'll take the wood elf as another +2/+1, 35 speed medium race and doing a 1:1 comparison of features. Group up ones of equal power, and then see if you have extras or if you are missing some. It's one the upper power curve of races, if the Wukong is equal to it they will be one of the more powerful races as well.

BTW, prehensile tail doesn't give enough information. Can you wield a weapon? Wield a shield? Cast spells? Do fine manipulation like pick locks? And 18 lbs seems to ignore Str. If it can do anything beside just "hold an object" or "manipulate with disadvantage", then it needs to be looked at as a major feature and not just a ribbon. At this point I'm assuming it doesn't do anything nifty like that.

Swim doesn't seem thematic - that usually is reserved for half aquatic elves and others of that nature.

Monkey God lesser resistance to magic. You have advantage on saving throws against fire and water based magic attacks. All magic damage is reduced by half.

The first part of this is powerful but if it's thematic I could see it as a major feature. The second part is more powerful then anything any other race gives out. Get rid of halving all magic damage. And consider if you want the first part because you'll need to trade off between other big boost for it.

Armor and weapon training isn't a huge deal, but you give a wide selection of good weapons, and basically negate the need for most martial weapon proficiencies. If this is a core part of their core identity, keep it. Just opportunity cost of this vs. something else again.

Natural Strength is interesting for a non +2 race. This may not do exactly what you think it does - Athletics is already a Strength check. "Skill check" is a leftover term from earlier editions. Athletics is a strength check where you can add your athletics skill. Advantage is very nice, especially in something used often for brawler builds and always useful for movement and escaping, but on a non-STR bonus build that's not too-good.

Okay, assuming that the tail is useful but that can't wield a sheild/weapon or cast, that there is no swim speed bonus, and the "half damage from all magic" is gone, let's do that Wood Elf comparison.

Both get training in perception, +2 Dex & +1 other, 35 base move, medium speed, two languages.

Fey ancestry balances well against the Monkey God Lesser Resistance to Magic.

Wood elves get:
Darkvision, Trance, training with 3 weapons, and mask of the wild.

Wukong get:
Prehensile tail, full climb/crawl speed, reduced falling damage, training in 4 armors, training in 5 weapons, and natural strength.

Trance and Prehensile tail are both "occasionally useful, pretty flavorful", let's pair them up.

The Wukong has 2 weapons and 4 armors more known. Not a huge deal, but having armor makes having weapons better. So a minor amount more to offset.

Mask of the wild is a minor boon for one skill use, it can partially offset all strength checks have advantage, but there is still a good amount more to be made up.

In addition to those two, there's still full climb/crawl speed and reduced falling damage. I'm not going to discount Darkvision, that's quite a nice ability. But that's four full or partial features to offset.

I'd say with the reductions I suggest, the Wukong is a bit more powerful then the Wood Elf, which is already on the high end of the racial power scale. Is it off the top? Eh, probably not. But I'd feel better with going through and identifying is some of those are part of it's core identify and cutting them. The write-up is all over the place in proclaiming their blessings, it might make sense to do some editing their first.

Good luck.

As far as the tail goes, it doesn't do anything much than that. I just didn't know what else to put down as to what it can't do since I'm new to D and d. I thought it was obvious that it can't attack or defend since nothing was not mentioned.

The reason why swim is important is because I modeled him after the Rhesus macaque monkey because it is natural to them and that is who Sun Wukong is.

I know I over did it with the magical resistance part, I was just trying to model it after Sun Wukong. I know it needs to be nerfed, but since I'm new, I just didn't know how to go about it.

I did give him a wide selection of weapons, but many of these weapons are similar in traits so choosing one of the other doesn't really give much of an advantage. I was going for flavor instead. For example, using a blowgun. It doesn't do much damage, but it adds to the flavor of the race especially since they are more martial arts themed.

As far as natural strength goes, I just wanted the race to be able to have no problems climbing, since that's what they do all the time and I feel this is something they shouldn't fail often at.

I was trying to model him as closely as I could to the wood elf since they share many characteristics, but like I said, I needed help balancing him. Thanks for the help!

Based on what you have written about their lore and physicality, the proficiencies with pole arms seem quite odd; seems like it would be more natural (and easier to remember) to go with "simple weapons, longbow and longsword".

I agree with [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] that you should remove halving magic damage.

If you want them to be good at swimming and climbing, then just say "advantage on ability checks for swimming or climbing". Saying that all STR checks are to be done with DEX is kind of hard to wrap my head around. STR is just not a universal substitute for DEX. If you wanted to constrain it to climbing, that would be absolutely fine, and swimming would be ok, I guess, but still makes me raise a skeptical eyebrow.

I suggest rewording "climb, crawl, and swim with no penalties" to something more like "climb, crawl, and swim at their current walking speed". Otherwise, someone will interpret it as meaning that, for instance, a slow spell would have no effect on their swimming speed.

You realize that Wukong doesn’t use ANY of the weapons you gave the race proficiency for right? On flavor along those should be removed, maybe allow them to fight better with quarterstaff?

I would also stay away from giving them heavy armor proficiency, especially with the proposed magic resistance. The magic resistance seriously steps on bear barb’s toes, actually, lets dump the magic resistance, the heavy armor proficiency won’t be too bad that way.

Swim speed would be out of place, given how only very select few races gets it, it is also a relatively large boon, if this is a racial feat it might not be too bad (depending on campaign type of course, a naval theme would likely make it a feat tax, and if lakes and rivers are hard to come across in the world this feat probably won’t even be worth a half feat)

Prehensile tail is weird, how do you justify it not being able to wield a shield if it has no problem picking the shield up? Same with a weapon, it is a rather obvious mechanical restriction for the sake of balance.
I might give them a lower base AC (and this effects armor base AC as well) for having a slightly more fragile body, but they could choose whether they want the tail to wield an additional weapon or shield (with stacking shield bonuses if two shields, or advantage on one of the attacks because you can exploit lines of attacks easier and from an angle that is harder to expect, the damage will be rolled with disadvantage or simply halved if the lower dice does not hit, the tail will be unlikely to deliver an attack with equal force to the arm)
I haven’t mathed out the idea, as I don’t need to have something like this in my games, but that is likely how I would rule it, the lower base AC is the opportunity cost of having an additional “limb” that they could utilize, but it is something that they could cover with an additional shield and thus negate the penalty but also forfeits the extra “limb”

Firstly, trying to model an entire race after a demigod is going to run into issues. - Its like trying to rewrite the human stats based on the exploits of Thor. If you had to stat Sun Wukong out, he'd probably have high levels of Monk, so be wary of giving the wukong racial features that possibly should come from class levels instead.

Secondly, look up the Vanara. They're an race of monkey people that appeared in the Oriental Adventures book for 3rd edition and probably elsewhere. I don't think that there is anything official about them for 5e, but the earlier stuff may be a decent guide.

turd ferguson said:

As far as the tail goes, it doesn't do anything much than that. I just didn't know what else to put down as to what it can't do since I'm new to D and d. I thought it was obvious that it can't attack or defend since nothing was not mentioned.
The reason why swim is important is because I modeled him after the Rhesus macaque monkey because it is natural to them and that is who Sun Wukong is.

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Are you sure that the prehensile tail is something they should have? If you're modelling them after the macaque, for example, which do not have prehensile tails. (The legend may have been inspired by gibbons, which do, but stick with one. )
Likewise macaques are unusual for monkeys in that they do go into water. However they're still worse swimmers than humans. That strikes me as something cultural and not needing any special rules.

I know I over did it with the magical resistance part, I was just trying to model it after Sun Wukong. I know it needs to be nerfed, but since I'm new, I just didn't know how to go about it.

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Think about why they would have this. Sun Wukong gained these powers from Taaoist practices, which implies that they're more class-based than racial. A wukong monk would gain magic resistance for example, but a wizard wouldn't (outside of using spells).
Basing magic resistance off specific elements is a little odd. Giving them Fire resistance 5 for example could be an option. Or give a bonus against specific schools of spells perhaps?

I did give him a wide selection of weapons, but many of these weapons are similar in traits so choosing one of the other doesn't really give much of an advantage. I was going for flavor instead. For example, using a blowgun. It doesn't do much damage, but it adds to the flavor of the race especially since they are more martial arts themed.

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Again, think about whether this is actually a racial thing or something learned from class. "Martial arts themed" implies that they have a cultural predilection for the Fighter and Monk classes. Would a wukong wizard really learn how to use all of these weapons? Why?
They're a selection of some of the best weapons in 5e. I would definitely tone this down or remove.
Likewise why do they get armour proficiencies?

As far as natural strength goes, I just wanted the race to be able to have no problems climbing, since that's what they do all the time and I feel this is something they shouldn't fail often at.

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A climb speed would seem to be the most obvious, but most powerful option.
Racial proficiency in Athletics sounds about right, perhaps with doubled proficiency bonus for climbing would be less powerful but still fit.

Note that his great strength and athletic feats were something that Sun Wukong was renowned for, so pushing the race into dumping their Str score sounds counterintuitive.
High movement speed sounds a bit odd for a monkey walking on hind legs. Again, remember that a wukong Monk for example will already move faster.

You're right, I just wanted to add a little flavor since these are all polearms.

The chain mail was an editing error. Sorry!

I don't think that swimming would be out of place since Sun Wukong is modeled after the Rhesus macaque and if there are things that sound unreasonable, its a scientific fact that they can do all those things.


The prehensile tale I wanted to add for flavor, no attack or defense. I'm just having a hard time describing it. Lots of people have been asking for more of a description, but I didn't feel the need to say it can attack or not.

You're right about them not having prehensile tails. I wanted to add it just for flavor and maybe gaining the ability to use it from them being magical and all.

So yes, I have been modeling them wood elves:

1. Ability score increase. (Elf)+2 dex (woodelf subrace ability score increase) +1 cha
2. Speed: 35 (Elf is 30. Woodelf subrace: fleet foot. your base walking speed increases to 35).
3. Darkvision substitute???
4. Keen senses: You have proficiency in the Perception skill.
5. Fey Ancestry substitute/ Advantage on skill check for climbing and swimming.
6. Trance substitue???
7.Elf weapon training/ Monkey armor training. You have proficiency in light and medium armor.
8. Mask of the Wild. You can attempt to hide even when you are only lightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling now, mist, and other natural phenomena.

So what would you guys substitute for Darkvision and Trance?

Hmmm. I'd probably swap proficiency in Perception (Keen senses) with proficiency in Acrobatics.
Trance is mostly ribbon, so could swap for a prehensile tail that can hold small objects but not weapons or shields.
Darkvision is a good ability, so I'd probably swap for proficiency in Athletics, with double bonus (expertise).
Fey ancestry could be swapped for a similar boost to saves. Perhaps against fear and effects that specifically cause the Grappled, Prone, Restrained, or Paralyzed conditions? (Elves are hard to charm, Wukong are hard to frighten, trap or hold.)