Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Revenant Subrace, Monster Hunter, and Inquisitive

There's a new Unearthed Arcana up from WotC's Mike Mearls, and this month it looks at Gothic Options for your D&D game, supplementing the themes of the recently released Curse of Strahd. The Revenant is a new sub race which can be applied to any existing race, the Monster Hunter is a fighter archetype, and the Inquisitive is an archetype for rogues who excel at solving mysteries. "This month, Unearthed Arcana takes a look at a few new character options appropriate to gothic horror.The revenant subrace provides an interesting way to bring a character back from the dead—a useful option if you’ve lost a character in the mists of Barovia. The Monster Hunter and the Inquisitive are two new archetypes for the fighter and rogue, respectively, well suited to the challenges of Ravenloft or any other gothic horror campaign."

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[Twiggly the Gnome]

Looking at the Revenant as a concept for cross-race subraces, I'm thinking that that would be a good way of implementing dragonmarks in Eberron.

That's what I did!

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?430758-My-Hack-for-the-Dragonmark-Playtest-Rules

It had the added bonus of allowing me to dial back the idea of "sub-races" in a Eberron context.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I find this kills the flavour though. If you are a revenant, you should be undead. Can you be turned? Shouldn't you not eat, sleep, breathe? Healing should be a problem. The idea of a player becoming a revenant is cool, but this needed to be more thought out, and needed more than a paragraph of explanation. Also, not doing it for half-orc and half-elf seems kind of lazy. We are only getting UA every two months. Surely this could have been a little more filled out, or why bother at all?

Does anyone else picture that by the end of a brutal campaign, all the players are revenants?

Personally, I am glad they are trying to keep the fiddly "this race is immune to this spell, but extra vulnerable to that spell" stuff to a minimum. I have noticed that players who like that are quick to point it out when it is in their PC's favor but either seem to forget or take offense when it doesn't, even when the situations take place within minutes of each other (in real time). Given that tieflings and assimar and the warforged and minotaurs from the UAs are all humanoids, I think we can reasonably assume that 5e policy is that all PC's are humanoids.

 

[Arilyn]

Personally, I am glad they are trying to keep the fiddly "this race is immune to this spell, but extra vulnerable to that spell" stuff to a minimum. I have noticed that players who like that are quick to point it out when it is in their PC's favor but either seem to forget or take offense when it doesn't, even when the situations take place within minutes of each other (in real time). Given that tieflings and assimar and the warforged and minotaurs from the UAs are all humanoids, I think we can reasonably assume that 5e policy is that all PC's are humanoids.

Isn't this going to lead to some very silly situations, and a lot of players asking why? If a revenant wants to keep watch all night, for example, shouldn't he not have to sleep? How could you justify saying, "Sorry, you aren't really all that dead, after all." This also applies to gas, going underwater, etc. Regenerating will keep him up, of course, but he shouldn't be taking the damage at all from these kinds of sources. If the revenant character is going to be almost the same as a living one, except for losing sub-race features and gaining temporary immunity from death, it shouldn't have been made at all. This just wasn't thought out completely. Mearls had difficulty figuring out how to do it for races that don't have a sub-race feature, so he skipped them. Humans, of course couldn't be skipped, so they just go their two stat points. The other races, however, get to keep their main race features. It is just not working. As I said earlier, good idea, but poor implementation. With two months to figure things out, this is a poor showing.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Isn't this going to lead to some very silly situations, and a lot of players asking why? If a revenant wants to keep watch all night, for example, shouldn't he not have to sleep? How could you justify saying, "Sorry, you aren't really all that dead, after all." This also applies to gas, going underwater, etc. Regenerating will keep him up, of course, but he shouldn't be taking the damage at all from these kinds of sources. If the revenant character is going to be almost the same as a living one, except for losing sub-race features and gaining temporary immunity from death, it shouldn't have been made at all. This just wasn't thought out completely. Mearls had difficulty figuring out how to do it for races that don't have a sub-race feature, so he skipped them. Humans, of course couldn't be skipped, so they just go their two stat points. The other races, however, get to keep their main race features. It is just not working. As I said earlier, good idea, but poor implementation. With two months to figure things out, this is a poor showing.

I don't think it would matter if UA's only came out every 2 months or 2 years or 2 weeks, WotC has consistently made all PC races humanoid in 5e. As I mentioned in an earlier post, they have had opportunity after opportunity to do it differently, and they have yet to do so. I think they made a deliberate design decision, and they are sticking with it.

But you know what, they will have a survey about this UA, and you can raise this issue. I am sure that there were people who complained that warforged weren't constructs or minotaurs weren't monstrocities (just like in the monster manual), and we haven't seen the final versions of them yet, so you can still hope....

 

[Arilyn]

I don't think it would matter if UA's only came out every 2 months or 2 years or 2 weeks, WotC has consistently made all PC races humanoid in 5e. As I mentioned in an earlier post, they have had opportunity after opportunity to do it differently, and they have yet to do so. I think they made a deliberate design decision, and they are sticking with it.

But you know what, they will have a survey about this UA, and you can raise this issue. I am sure that there were people who complained that warforged weren't constructs or minotaurs weren't monstrocities (just like in the monster manual), and we haven't seen the final versions of them yet, so you can still hope....

It is not really so much the humanoid issue. These revenants just DON'T work. If WOTC is determined to not go too far out there, they really should have skipped the concept.

 

[Mathias Severin]

Regarding Monster Hunter, if he scores a critical and spends 2 two superiority dices (let's say 2d10) does it turn into 4d10?

And if the target was an undead, are they maximized so it takes 40 extra damage?

And if the said maneuver, where you chose to expend a superiority dice to deal extra damage, is sweeping attack (taken through Martial Adept), does the other undead next to it also take 40 damage?

Just wondering how powerful this feature is.

 

[Flamestrike]

Re revenants, bite the bullet and make em either humanoids or undead.

Most spells work on the undead (cure wounds etc).

Who cares if they get turned. In the words of the great and wise former leader of the State of Cali:- They'll be back.

 

[Shardstone]

It is not really so much the humanoid issue. These revenants just DON'T work. If WOTC is determined to not go too far out there, they really should have skipped the concept.

Care to say why they don't work, or are you just going to sit there screaming your head off about it?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Monster hunter seems like it should be a ranger thing. As it stands it's just a slightly redone battlemaster.

"No maneuvers" is a little more than slightly re-done.

It's an interesting design-philosophy, though. There have been a number of new fighter sub-classes out, published in SCAG or gracing UAs like this one. They've all stayed neatly silo'd. That is, none of them introduce options that existing sub-classes can also avail themselves of. It'd've been easy to simply add new maneuvers in support of new archetypes, then let the BM and those new archetypes all poach eachother's maneuvers - the way new cantrips were added for the Bladesinger that other wizards, and even EKs, could then snag, for instance.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It'd've been easy to simply add new maneuvers in support of new archetypes, then let the BM and those new archetypes all poach eachother's maneuvers - the way new cantrips were added for the Bladesinger that other wizards, and even EKs, could then snag, for instance.

But at that point, you're not really creating new archetypes, you're just creating new maneuvers. All you're doing is pre-selecting a series of maneuvers as a Battle Master and wrapping them up in wrapping paper that says 'Cavalier', 'Scout' or 'Monster Hunter' on it.

Which is fine if that's what you want to do... I've mentioned before in the various "Fighter sub-classes have no fluff" threads that an easy way to make fluff for your fighters is to do just that-- come up with a fluff concept, then pre-select the maneuvers for that concept and say "Here's a Gladiator!" for example. These archetypes are pretty much the same thing except in order to make them truly unique, they've each been given an additional special feature that no other BMs get to take, as a reward for pre-selecting the maneuvers they can take by staying within the fluff.

One way isn't better or worse than the other. The only real difference is that with the way WotC is currently going about it... they are "stopping" the one biggest avenue for problems down the road-- they are not making every maneuver open to every BM, which means the optimizers can't create the "ultimate" BM by cherry picking from all the maneuvers. Not unless they have a DM who is okay with throwing all these new maneuvers back into the general BM pot. But that's going to be an individual DM's choice rather than the default for everyone.