D&D (2024) 2024 Monster Manual Fiends and Elementals Are Coming This Week

family-friendly image
This feels a little bit like trying to still have their cake after the ship has sailed away with it and the crew ate it.

I'm not (just) mashing idioms together for fun here - family-friendliness in practice is largely dependent on the DM and the players. There's also plenty of baseline stuff well outside that image already in the game. One could argue foundationally so. Is the message they're now incidentally sending about 'ancestral purity' and 'personhood' family-friendly? I personally don't think so, but to be clear, I am also certain it was unintentional.

I don't think this was a concerted thematic/narrative/philosophical push, really - I get the distinct impression that the changes to humanoid in particular are a mechanical/meta push with narrative implications they now have to kludge around. Mechanical for the few game systems that care about it, and meta for the out-of-game fear of stuff like giving orcs and drow statblocks. There's just a whole new avenue of controversy they opened by trying to condense all the humanoids into species-agnostic stat blocks and thus creating a type difference within species. It's... well, it's very WotC.

I'd personally prefer stat blocks for playable species regardless of "expected alignment/hostility" (and that alignment - the only thing in a block of RAW text that explicitly isn't RAW - be removed entirely from stat blocks)... but I'd also probably okay a 1500 page Monster Manual if I were inexplicably in charge of this and bankrupt WotC with printing expenses.

I'm used to the size constraints of digital libraries in my day-to-day, you see.

these ones lives matters, and those ones don’t
This is what "they're bandits" or "they're cultists" etc. is used for. D&D isn't built for treating even human bandit lives with sanctity - everything except the PCs is a 'monster' according to the new PHB rules glossary, including NPCs (it even explicitly calls out benevolent NPCs as also being monsters). Sanctity of life in D&D is one of the more explicitly DM-dependent themes, but nothing about the game's structure implies killing a thousand humanoid goblins is any narratively different from killing a thousand fey goblins. Whether they were "just a goblin infestation you purged" or "goblins with lives and hopes and dreams and families you massacred" at that table, their type only mattered mechanically in that it possibly allowed wasting spell slots to Hold Person a goblin. Narratively it's just giving the dead goblins some dubiously coherent backstory about them being 'de-feyed' or not.

The actual narrative difference in the value of their lives is entirely independent of the type in the stat block. Same as it is for the now mechanically extra-homogenized humanoid enemies.
 

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The party: Oh no, those goblin bandits, we killed just now, had a baby and we just discovered it in this hut nearby. Did we do a bad thing? What should we do?

The Fighter:
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We know Aacrokra are Elementals now.
According to Level Up's Monstrous Menagerie 1 and 2, a being with the Elemental Type is any being who comes from the Elemental Planes. Since the Aarakocra originally hail from the Elemental Plane of Air, it sort of makes sense that they are being rebranded as Elementals.
And literally all of this would be solved by dual typing,
Several of Level Up's heritages are dual types.

Garoul - Humanoid and Beast
Giantkin- Humanoid and Giant (this includes those Giantkin from the Goliath culture. MoAR: Complete)
Spriggan- Humanoid and Plant (MoAR: Complete)
the Unliving- Humanoid and Undead (MoAR: Complete)
Mycelial- Humanoid and Plant
 

On reflection, it seems like the thing we have to do is think about type differently -- especially as it relates to the planar types. Previously, type was essentially indicative of origin, almost a "genus" in D&D taxonomy. But what it looks like they are doing is turning it into "influence" more. Being exposed to or aligned with planes or planar powers can change your type by infusing you with aspects of that plane.

That's kind of cool.

I think powerful creatures should be able to do it too. What if human cultists in service of an illithid were abominations, or an order of knights serving a gold dragon got the draconian type?
 

Being exposed to or aligned with planes or planar powers can change your type by infusing you with aspects of that plane.
I could see this being the case for the Aasimar, Tiefling and Genasi. It could also work if you are role-playing one of the standard species who happened to be a Planar in a setting like Planescape.
 

I could see this being the case for the Aasimar, Tiefling and Genasi. It could also work if you are role-playing one of the standard species who happened to be a Planar in a setting like Planescape.
Too bad there are no templates or half-species, because the logical conclusion is that aasimar, tieflings and even dragonborn could all be members of any species.
 

Too bad there are no templates or half-species, because the logical conclusion is that aasimar, tieflings and even dragonborn could all be members of any species.
Pathfinder 2nd edition (not the remastered version) has the Aasimar and Tieflings being versatile heritages. These heritages are like templates. So, you could have an Elven Tiefling or a Goblin Aasimar.

As for the Dragonborn, PF2 core does have the Dragonblood versatile heritage.


In Level Up, you could be an Elven Tiefling or a Goblin Aasimar by picking either heritage and then picking up a Planetouched Gift (Aasimar, Tiefling and Elementaari) from the Planetouched heritage.
 
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Pathfinder 2nd edition (not the remastered version) has the Aasimar and Tieflings being versatile heritages. These heritages are like templates. So, you could have an Elven Tiefling or a Goblin Aasimar.

As for the Dragonborn, PF2 core does have the Dragonblood versatile heritage.


In Level Up, you could be an Elven Tiefling or a Goblin Aasimar by picking either heritage and then picking up a Planetouched Gift (Aasimar, Tiefling and Elementaari) from the Planetouched heritage.

The Dragonblood versatile heritage, PF2's Core's answer to the Half-Dragon.

If only WotC had followed suit...
 


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