Design Notes: Awakened Tree (Patreon)

Tuinvale Treefolk, by Jason A. Engle © Wizards of the Coast LLC

Somebody suggested I do a species design diary, so let's do it! And just for funsies, let's do a two-parter! (As a small aside, the last design diary, and this one, is pretty screenshot-heavy; it's a big accessibility problem. I will probably move away from that, because Patreon makes editing alt-text virtually impossible, and Windows doesn't do much better.)

The key to species design is...it's truthfully not all that interesting. For a class or a subclass, the goal is to embody a specific theme or fantasy, and come up with a mechanical approach that fits it and is exciting to play. For a species, you don't do that.

Species as Bread

If a D&D character is an exciting sandwich of ideas, the species is the bread. It's the base layer a player is building on top of. Because it could interact with ~anything in the game, you expressly don't want to make it too wild, or pull in any really major mechanics. And it doesn't have that big a power budget, so you can't really color outside the lines all that far. You want to take a more economical approach with your ideas, coming up with something that'll carry the species's fantasy without overwhelming the rest of a character concept.

Be a Tree

In a way, the Awakened Tree is the perfect way to talk about this idea while also hitting a little bit of novel mechanics. I've been contemplating writing a large species for at least a year, slowly chewing over the best way to do it. So I used the Awakened Tree as a clean way to throw the idea out there, unburdened by too many other ideas to express.

The basics:

Type: It's a plant. Immune to Charm Person and Hold Person, weak to Blight (this basically doesn't matter).

Speed: 25 feet, because it's a big slow tree.

ASIs: Strength +2, Constitution or Wisdom +1. Basically fits with our fantasy, big tough bruisers with special forest wisdom. I considered doing Con +2 here, but WotC did that with the first version of Genasi, and I think it contributes to how unpopular those are. Nobody's ever sad about a +2 to Con, but nobody can build around it, either.

Natural Armor: Constitution-based natural armor, again fitting the tree idea; trees don't dodge attacks, they just tank them. Very good for caster trees, feels like it should be good for warriors but it's not really high enough to ever compete with armor. Probably works best on a druid, in fact, which is great, because that's maybe our most thematic class.

The Interesting Stuff

When you make species based on existing monsters, you try to ground them in the existing stat blocks — and awakened trees have full-on fire vulnerability. I considered it, but on a PC, it's just too punishing. Especially since the tree will lend itself to being a front-liner, it'd just find itself useless in any fight with lots of fire damage. Fear of Fire is still a pretty nasty downside, but not nearly as crippling as "melting through all your hit points immediately."

Reaching Branches started as general reach, without the natural weapon — but that's too good. Put that on top of a Large species and you can control a ridiculous amount of the battlefield, especially if you pick up Sentinel. So I toned it down to this, which importantly won't combo with your reach weapons. And I added the natural weapon; a d6 natural weapon almost never matters but is a fun and flavorful thing to stack on.

We can talk about these two together because they're both basically ribbons. Really fun ones, but ribbons. False Tree lets you pretend to be a tree, and enables the wildly-exciting Constitution (Stealth) check. Solar Replenishment is actually better than it looks, because it neutralizes one of the (small) disadvantages of being Large.

The Really Interesting One

Size is usually a basic feature, but not so here! I put a lot of thought into the right way to handle a Large species. I based my ideas on Sock's and Kibbles' rules, but made a few adjustments compared to both of those.

Large Build is pretty much table-stakes; big creatures can carry lots of stuff. Large Appetite and Large Armor are pretty basic and quite mild disadvantages. Oversized Weapons are the controversial one, entirely because the DMG suggests double-damage-dice for oversized weapons. Giving a PC permanent double-dice is way too strong, wildly too strong. An oversized greatsword would be +7 free damage per hit that way, with no downside; better than free GWM or SS. A bonus 1d4 is a pretty decent compromise; it respects the oversized-weapon idea, and is a significant benefit, equivalent to bumping a weapon's damage die by two and a half sizes.

The real money here is in the "less obvious" sections. Almost all the mechanical penalty a large species will suffer comes from having to squeeze in 5-foot spaces. And the mechanical benefits I'm actually concerned about, that I'll be keeping my eye on, are the larger auras and generally larger degree of area control. The Awakened Tree is actually a mechanically fairly tame way to test out large-PC ideas. I considered doing an Ogre species for that first (that was my plan for a long time), but ogres are a little too basic to be that exciting.

Potential Revisions

As above, I'm curious to see how Awakened Tree does for area-control builds (any warrior archetype, but especially ones with Sentry or boosts to grappling) and aura-heavy builds (clerics and druids, particularly clerics that wade in with spirit guardians up). I usually don't get all that excited about species myself, but this one I do find pretty fun - I may try to test those ideas by playing one myself.