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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6557498" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I interpret the HD in the same way I interpret the HD of the guard over the commoner. Commoner is your basic member of the race, guard is someone with a certain amount of combat training. PC classes represent an alternate type of training (or in the case of the warrior classes, they might represent more and better training beyond what the guard gets).Humanoids that have more than 1 HD in their most basic MM incarnation are really representing that that race trains more elite warriors by default. There are aarakocra and svirfneblin commoners, and in fact most of the members of their species probably are commoners with 1d8 non-maxed hit points and the PC-style racial traits.I really like the feat for the svirfneblin, as that is how I was planning on implementing such things. For instance, MM drow all get levitate, but PC drow lack that particular feature. A feat can be made available in my campaign for any PC drow who wants levitate (and it would have other benefits also).It's worth noting that the racial write up for svirfneblin says that the magical abilities aren't something all svirfneblin have--but that it requires training. So your svirfneblin commoners are unlikely to have such features.My preference is that a PC can approximate monster stats, because otherwise the world doesn't make a lick of sense to me. A good example would be the gladiator. It looks like he has a bunch of special toys, but almost everything he can do can be approximated by a Battle Master with the right feats. It's expensive to approximate, but it's doable.I think 5e is off to a reasonably good start. Feats are powerful enough to provide a good option to allow players of monster characters to opt-in to special abilities while allowing those who just want to look like something from the MM without advanced abilities (I have no idea why anyone would ever want to do that--maybe that's what I'm not getting), to avoid paying for such abilities.</blockquote>

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