One of the rival adventurers in Call of the Netherdeep is Maggie Keeneyes, an ogre. Since all the other rival adventurers are PC races, does this perhaps signal plans to make ogres a playable option in the future? Or was this just a special request from Matt Mercer?
D&D 5E Does Call of the Netherdeep open the door to ogre PCs?
If you read the sidebars for Firbolg and Ogres in Exandria, as a species (for PCs or otherwise), essentially have the same racial features. So, if you ask me, seems like anyone could take that and just roll up a character as normal.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Or use something similar and customize it as per Tasha’s. Like say the firbolg you mentioned or the goliath or an orc. Anything roughly in the ballpark of big, tough, and strong would work.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
10 ft tall and super strong…
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I played a a half ogre back in 1st edition days. As pointed out the Tasha's custom lineage rules allow you to create an ogre PC, so long as they are medium (i.e. under 10 feet tall).
Mercer takes advantage of Maggie being defined by a stat block rather than a class and level to make her 12 foot tall and large. The drawback of this is called out early on, where there is a place she simply can't go because she is too big. She also uses the "giant sized weapons*" rule, and is only not overpowered because it's not leveraged in the way a PC would be expected to, and she doesn't get a bunch of class abilities (such as action surge) that a PC would have. She also has considerably more hit dice than you would expect a PC of her level to have - 10d10+30 (85 hp) at "level 4".
*Edit: just checked this, and she actually uses the 3rd edition/Pathfinder large weapon scaling rule for her "giant maul", 2d6 -> 2d8. It should be 4d6 per RAW 5e.
I would like to see this weapon scaling restored in "5.5", it would make large PCs much more reasonable.
Mercer takes advantage of Maggie being defined by a stat block rather than a class and level to make her 12 foot tall and large. The drawback of this is called out early on, where there is a place she simply can't go because she is too big. She also uses the "giant sized weapons*" rule, and is only not overpowered because it's not leveraged in the way a PC would be expected to, and she doesn't get a bunch of class abilities (such as action surge) that a PC would have. She also has considerably more hit dice than you would expect a PC of her level to have - 10d10+30 (85 hp) at "level 4".
*Edit: just checked this, and she actually uses the 3rd edition/Pathfinder large weapon scaling rule for her "giant maul", 2d6 -> 2d8. It should be 4d6 per RAW 5e.
I would like to see this weapon scaling restored in "5.5", it would make large PCs much more reasonable.
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Weiley31
Legend
I mean, honestly, that seems like a simple/more elegant way of doing Giant-Sized weapons for 5E, avoids a bit of the balanced around the Bounded Accuracy headache that WoTC tries to strictly avoid in 5E, and would help with larger PCs be much more reasonable.
Weiley31
Legend
Worse case at most, it's a refluffed Orc with the 5E Giff's Hippo Build.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
One of the missed opportunities of 5e is that once you take ability score modifiers out of the equation, there is little actual "power" in racial features. There's a bit of flavor, but it's not an equal pillar of character creation. And this lack of design space means that giving a race a significant bonus like large/tiny size, permanent flight, and the like doesn't have enough of an balance in opportunity cost of missing out on the features another race would give.
If all of the races meant more, then you could have a centaur PC who's the same size as the MM's centaurs and that's okay - that large size is nicely balanced by not getting all of the goodies some other class gets.
All of that said, I remember playing a half-ogre out of Dragon mag back in AD&D and it would be great to revisit that in 5e if Call of the Netherdeep does it in a 5e-reasonable way.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
This is actually why I'm considering adding some "ribbon" type stuff to Archetypes in my game, but adding some actual heft to Ancestry and Upbringing.
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