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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[Tony Vargas]

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.

While CS+Manuevers are the BM's signature thing and the whole editions only nod to 'complex martial options,' they're not it's /only/ class features. So it's a conscious design decision to use CS dice in other archetypes, but in a way that silo's them for the BM, and the new archetype from the BM's existing maneuvers.

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.

They're not so much 'pre-selected maneuvers' though, are they? That is, they don't each do what some extant maneuver already did?

One way isn't better or worse than the other.

Nope, just different wedges of the available 'design space.' But, still, the difference between the two approaches is interesting.

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.

Oh, clearly. (Though it seems doubtful that recombinant BM builds cross-pollinating 3rd-level-appropriate maneuvers from other archetypes are the /biggest/ avenue for problems down the road, not in a game featuring 9 spell levels and Bards able to poach spells from other classes, anyway.)
And (even so) it seems like a prudent approach on those grounds.
Then again, its not being used exclusively across all new sub-classes...

 

[The Human Target]

"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.

Aren't the things the Monster Hunters can do with its superiority dice basically just maneuvers?

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Aren't the things the Monster Hunters can do with its superiority dice basically just maneuvers?

Depends what you meant by "basically". Some of the abilities do similar things to BM maneuvers, and they do use Superiority dice, however the MH gets them all as options to use rather than picking a few from a selection. They are also not listed as "Maneuvers" so you can't pick up any of those abilities through the feat that grants access to BM maneuvers for example.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

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.

Nothing in the race description implies that a revenant loses the requirement to sleep, breathe etc. I'm guessing that you're getting tripped up by previous editions' beings with the same name and thought that this 5e version was undead?
Nothing in the description implies that. Indeed its specifically called out that you have "returned to the land of the living".

If you did want to make changes to these UA rules to make revenants undead, you'd probably have to stick in a pile of additional stuff to cover the undead properties and capabilities, and then wedge in even more to provide disadvantages to balance that out.

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.

Yes. Probably. Nope.
Sweeping attack's superiority die isn't added to the damage of the main attack, and the damage the second target takes is only the superiority die that you spent on the maneuver.
You could achieve this effect, but you'd be expending five superiority dice to do it.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Nothing in the race description implies that a revenant loses the requirement to sleep, breathe etc. I'm guessing that you're getting tripped up by previous editions' beings with the same name and thought that this 5e version was undead?

Or more likely by the fact that the 5E revenant in the Monster Manual is full, 100% undead. Frankly, the folks at WotC could solve a lot of conceptual and perceptual problems by simply renaming this subrace to something else.

 

[The Human Target]

Depends what you meant by "basically". Some of the abilities do similar things to BM maneuvers, and they do use Superiority dice, however the MH gets them all as options to use rather than picking a few from a selection. They are also not listed as "Maneuvers" so you can't pick up any of those abilities through the feat that grants access to BM maneuvers for example.

So, basically they are.

 

[Al2O3]

So, basically they are.

"Basically" as in they work as manoeuvres: yes.
"Basically" as in can be picked by the battle master: no.

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[Mathias Severin]

Yes. Probably. Nope.
Sweeping attack's superiority die isn't added to the damage of the main attack, and the damage the second target takes is only the superiority die that you spent on the maneuver.
You could achieve this effect, but you'd be expending five superiority dice to do it.

Damnit. I feel like there is hidden potential in the Monster Slayer feature, but I just can't figure it out. I thought maybe there would be some synergy with Sweeping Strike, but all it does is spread out the damage it seems. Thanks for clearing that up.

Still cool that you can burn two Superiority Dices on a critical, and deal an automatic 32/40/48 extra damage to a fiend, aberation, fey or undead.

Which got me thinking, now I haven't read the new Strahd book, but isn't it kinda weird that monstrosities aren't on the list... and maybe kinda weird fey are?

 

[Al2O3]

Which got me thinking, now I haven't read the new Strahd book, but isn't it kinda weird that monstrosities aren't on the list... and maybe kinda weird fey are?

The fey I find in monster manual are dryad, a couple of hags, pixie, satyr, sprite and blink dog. I guess the hags are enough to justify it in a gothic horror context. The monstrosities were on the other hand very common, so I think it could be overpowered to have them included (but they are not very common in horror I guess). And suddenly I want some kind of favoured enemy trait instead for a more generic option. Something along the lines of picking two or three from a list of fiends, undead, aberrations, monstrosities and dragons. Maybe turn it into a "defender of civilisation" and allow changing one into two kinds of humanoids like the ranger feature. The difference would be the benefits related to the creature types (damage for fighters, knowledge for rangers).

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[Mathias Severin]

The fey I find in monster manual are dryad, a couple of hags, pixie, satyr, sprite and blink dog. I guess the hags are enough to justify it in a gothic horror context. The monstrosities were on the other hand very common, so I think it could be overpowered to have them included (but they are not very common in horror I guess). And suddenly I want some kind of favoured enemy trait instead for a more generic option. Something along the lines of picking two or three from a list of fiends, undead, aberrations, monstrosities and dragons. Maybe turn it into a "defender of civilisation" and allow changing one into two kinds of humanoids like the ranger feature. The difference would be the benefits related to the creature types (damage for fighters, knowledge for rangers).

Makes a lot of sense. Fiends, aberations and undead are evil monsters, everybody knows. Monstrosities are monsters by default. Dragons are evil monsters 50% of the time. But fey? Fey are monsters 20% of the time

If I ever get to play a Monster Hunter I will ask my DM if I can customize my Monster Slayer creature type list. Hags are just not enough in a normal DND game to justify the fey entry to the list.

Also, I like your rationale on the ranger comparison. It really sets the two classes apart and gives incentive for multiclass.