In a recent marketing manual for the new Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast claimed that it would include “more playable options that aren’t humanoid” in future books. “We have some fun stuff coming that demonstrates that”, says designer Jeremy Crawford. Personally, I’m all for tweaks that make player options stand out more – but I think D&D needs to get a lot weirder than minor category changes.
Right now, DnD races are pretty uniform. The 2014 rules offered minor variations in speed, size, and ability scores, but these creases have been smoothed out for the 2024 Player’s Handbook. The playable species of today are differentiated only by a handful of unique abilities that its rules grant.
Wizards of the Coast acknowledges this in the marketing video posted on January 23, and it seems these changes to species categorization are an attempt to make your build choices feel more meaningful – both narratively and mechanically.
Goblins were listed as Fey for the first time in Monsters of the Multiverse, and they will be again in the new Monster Manual. This apparently gives you some additional flavor about where the species originated from, and it makes them immune to spells that only target humanoids (something of a nerf to that spell, if you ask the D&D community).
However, this is a tiny behind-the-scenes change that is unlikely to revolutionize how people play Goblins or other species that are no longer humanoid. If D&D wants people to get excited about future playable species, it needs to get way more inventive.
Personally, I’m hoping that Wizards will take a leaf from the book of its biggest competitor, Pathfinder. D&D has a few oddballs among its species options – from the shapeshifting Changeling to the bug-like Thri-kreen – but Pathfinder takes playable fantasy species to the extreme.
In the world of Pathfinder, you can play humanoids warped so drastically by magic that they become something unrecognizable. You can play the undead skeletons you’d usually battle, or a spider creature that shapeshifts to blend into society. Heck, you can play umbrellas that gained consciousness or a shard of the cosmos that gained sentience and built itself a plant-based body.
The creativity on display here is more narrative than mechanical, so there’s nothing stopping other tabletop RPGs from thinking outside of the box in a similar manner. That being said, Pathfinder has the rules to back it up – including trait categories in a manner similar to D&D’s.
Of the five Pathfinder races I mentioned above, three of them count as humanoid. The skeleton is classed as an undead, and the sentient cosmos shard (a Conrasu) is technically plant matter. That’s two categories we rarely see as playable in D&D.
Plus, out of those three humanoid ancestries, two of those have dual creature types. A Poppet (the sentient umbrella is a Tsukumogami Poppet, if we’re getting specific) is both a construct and a humanoid. Fleshwraps (the humanoid warped by magic) are an aberration in addition to their humanoid classification.
D&D has shown reluctance to try the dual-category approach. Case in point: the humanoid Gith will now be classed as aberrations in the new Monster Manual. Jeremy Crawford explains in the marketing video we mentioned that some Gith may still be humanoid if they’ve never spent time on the Astral Plane – it’s the effects of their environment that ultimately decide whether they are an aberration. No double identity for the Gith, then.
This is likely to keep things simple. Pathfinder is an absolute crunch-fest that has built its reputation on digging deep into edge cases and tiny details, while learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons tends to be a slightly more straightforward affair. But, as I’ve said, a lot of Pathfinder’s creativity is narrative rather than mechanical. If D&D is promising us playable non-humanoids, I want to see a lot more than re-flavored Gith and Goblins.
I tend to have lots of opinions on Dungeons and Dragons – for more takes, here’s why I think DMs should avoid casino dungeons. Or, for rules and tools you can use, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes and DnD 2024 backgrounds.
Source: Wargamer
