NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8421021" data-attributes="member: 5948">Hmm.  There's some i like a lot and some that makes me scratch my head a bit.I like that the Astral Elf gets to choose which ability score their free cantrip and Radiant Soul ability key off.  Takes away one little bit of annoyance, and i hope this becomes standard.  Radiant Soul I'm not sure i like.  Does 5e really need to make it HARDER for PCs to die?  Trance Proficiencies I'm pretty sure i don't like.  I think it (and I believe there was a magic item or something in Tasha's which effectively gave proficiency in every tool?) is a reflection that WotC believe that tool proficiencies are too hard to get for their relative usefulness in-game.  This is an issue that should be fixed in character creation/advancement tweaks in 5.5 rather than be patched over by retrofitting magic items and new racial features in.  And it risks niche protection as well.  If I'm a PCs of a non-Astral Elf ancestry, who has a rarely-used skill proficiency that i took for character concept reasons, I'm going to be a bit annoyed when a situation arises that FINALLY means my proficiency can be used in-game ... and then the elf takes a nap and suddenly knows it as well as i do.  Possibly better, especially if I'm a martial character with lower mental ability scores.Autognome looks powerful.  I do like that even though they get natural armour, they also get a bunch of other features too.  WotC used to overvalue natural armour I think, it looks like they've re-evaluated that.  They're affected by cure spells which is a little hinky from a thematic point of view, but seriously, the game would almost break for them if they weren't, so i don't mind that just as a practical measure. Giff seem ... bland.  As others have said, WotC is still struggling to make Large PC races work properly.  I never knew much about Spelljammer - could giff swim back then?  The melee damage re-roll ... hmmm.  It's yet another attempt to make the big bruiser ancestry work, but on a species who are best known for their use of ranged gunpowder weapons it seems a bit out of place...Hadozee seem like a flexible option with climb and glide, and I'm so glad they didn't limit the useages of glide per long rest or anything like that.  DMs who don't pay attention to ceiling heights etc are going to hate them.  The bonus action Use Object is cute, not sure how much applicability it'll have, but it's nice that it's there.  There just seems to be one tiny thing lacking with these guys (flavour-wise, not power-wise), maybe a circumstantial advantage on a skill or something.Plasmoid - yeah, the squeezing aspect of the amorphous ability seems like it'd be used very, very rarely given the limitation of having to strip down and leave all your gear behind.   And it'd be best used in solo stealth missions, which aren't always the most fun for uninvolved PCs.  Agree with the idea posted above about donning/doffing armour as a bonus action, that's really clever.  Do they revert to blob form if incapacitated?  And what happens to your armour/gear if you do?  Or even if you revert to blob form voluntarily?  Does magic plate armour re-size to suit blobs?  Language is not entirely clear, but it'd be a pain to have to re-don all the clothes, gear etc that you're wearing that assume you have arms/legs after un-incapacitating yourself.  This ability needs a fair bit of work I reckon.  The pseudopod ability looks limited.  Hell, about 3/4 of its text is devoted to very strictly limiting it. Thri-kreen looks powerful, but done ok from a thematic point of view.  If I had to take anything off it to balance, it'd probably be the chameleon ability, which i don't think was ever a major thri-kreen feature (whereas poison and natural weapons, which were, don't appear here).  Darkvision seems to be a nod to sensory abilities in general rather than being a historic thri-kreen thing, as far as i remember they always had a great sense of smell, but that's not an easy thing to adjudicate.  Extra hands .. I'm not really a good optimiser, so I'm trying to work out what the power combos would be here.  Dual wielding while using a shield hardly seems like a gamebreaker, nor does having some melee weapons in-hand while using a bow just in case you get engaged up close.  Nothing I can immediately come up with seems terrible - though that's more of an artefact of the restrictive two-weapon fighting rules rather than anything else.  Telepathy seems very strong, but i think needs clarification - can the creatures you contact talk back?  It's not entirely clear.  This could be a pain in-game something though, as specifically you communicate with others, it's not like telepathic bond where everyone can communicate with everyone.  If the telepathy allows replying, I hope you like feeling like a telephone switchboard.  Also, not a word about custom-fitting armour for non-standard anatomy etc, or some magic items not being usable.  It looks like that's a concept that has gone the way of the dodo.  Presumably you can attune two pairs of magic gauntlets though?In general, i like that natural armour is no longer being overvalued.  I like that darkvision is no longer being handed out with quite such a lavish hand.  I suspect that we'll see a rewrite of humanoid-specific spells like Charm Person etc in 5.5 if the trend for non-humanoid PC races continues - though to be fair that's going to be an annoyance that affects PC spellcasterss more than NPCs as NPC/monster stat blocks normally just have a non-type-specific 'charm' action listed rather than the tightly-defined spells that PCs have to work with.  So it's not like being an autognome comes with major hidden immunities. I do wish that they'd bring back limitations as balancing factors to races.  Sunlight sensitivity got such kickback it seemed to spook the designers, but it was such a BIG penalty so i think they've overreacted by never having disadvantages ever again.  Disadvantage on swim checks for thri-kreen or autognomes seems perfectly reasonable, for instance - it'd be flavourful and a useful balance tool without being quite so universally intrusive.Also - racial feats.  They'd add a LOT to some of these races and are a way to bring back some of the historic features while minimising balance problems somewhat - a feat to give natural weapons or poison or even blindsense to thri-kreen, all sorts of weirdness for autognomes, perhaps critical immunity or acid touch attack or the ability to mimic Change Self for plasmoids?  I think it's a pity that the Ravenloft races didn't get any racial feats, the not-vampire and not-zombie in particular were crying out for them, I hope WotC doesn't miss that bus again.</blockquote>

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