It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Let’s make up for some lost time by learning how to make some stuff you can take home and set up for your players to use before you run your first game. Race options are usually the first or second thing your player considers when making a character, so we’ll start with making one of those.

Races are central to a character, and can either be a big part of their identity, or simply a feature of who they happen to be. After all, Drizzt Do’urden wouldn’t be quite as regarded if he weren’t a drow who defied his upbringing, would he? Mechanically, races are also fairly light on mechanics which means you really only need to have two or so interesting rules to make them unique.

Clearly, we need to make sure our race succeeds in a few areas. So what are those areas?

Let’s make a quick checklist of what we’ll need to make our race, and then hop directly into the creation process.

  • What idea or concept inspires this race?
  • What cornerstone ability score is important to our race?
  • What’s already in the game that can do what our race is looking to do?

What inspires this race?

This is the most important question of the three, since the core concept, theming, and mechanics will come from this question. For our race, I’ve been really enjoying playing as my bug-person Kher’as in my home game. However, we’ve been using the Thri-kreen rules to represent her. While it works, it’s not exactly representative of her species of humanoid ant people. So, I want to make a race of ant people. What makes an ant person special?

Teamwork and unity. Immense strength proportional to size. Doing the job you were meant to do. After all, each ant has a position in the hive they keep until they die, so why not embrace it in the form of a subrace? This will be the idea that we head back to each time we are lost or confused. Working with the party, being relatively tough, and possibly specializing in the way ants do, allowing us to look into different types of ants for inspiration. Let’s come back to that idea after we come up with the baseline rules for our ant race.

What cornerstone ability score is important to our race?

What is a cornerstone ability score, and why is it important? In my eyes, each ability score, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma, each “belong” to a different class. The first three being the physical, martial traits, and the last three being the mental, spellcaster traits. We want to either design this race with one of these in mind, or make it so that it gives an ability score befitting for the theming of the race. Ants, in my eyes, are tough little buggers, carrying things many times bigger than them, working tirelessly, and trekking long distances to do their job.

Therefore, constitution is their cornerstone ability score. The variant rules for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything make it so you can take a +2 to one ability score and +1 to another, but I like the old way of doing things since I feel it helps better inform the flavor of the race to the player, and gets the mind going, so we’ll give our ant person a +2 to their constitution. We won’t worry about the +1 since we plan for them to have a subrace, and we’ll give them that second ability score increase there.

We won’t do anything funny with the walking speed, creature type, or size, they’ll all be the standard 30 feet, humanoid, and medium or small. I like to think that these ant people have a shorter lifespan than most, so their age of maturity is 1 year of age, and they generally outlive their usefulness at 40. Here’s where the fun part begins: racial traits.

I want to represent what we highlighted in our previous section, so let’s go through with that and list it:

  • Teamwork and unity.
  • Able to carry big stuff proportional to them.
  • Having a specific job.

Finally, with a focus on constitution, they should have some representation of their toughness in mind, so let’s start with that first. Here’s my rough draft of the trait I have in mind. It’s not really “balanced”, but it does what I want it to do.

Exoskeleton: This creature has a natural armor AC of 16.

Boom, done. With something to represent their chitinous frames, it should be pretty easy to have the player playing with this race feel as if they won’t really need armor to begin with. We’ll have to write up a rule for teamwork of some sort, so here’s what I’ve got.

Hive-Minded: As a reaction to a friendly creature [doing something], you may expend a use of this feature to give them a 1d4 to that roll.

Guidance is a great cantrip, so being able to help out your friends through this teamwork benefit is neat! We could also write up this ability to use the help action like this too:

Hive-Minded (Help version): You may use the Help action as a bonus action on a creature.

However, I feel like giving advantage to an ally as a bonus action is really strong. We’d need to ensure the rest of the race isn’t too strong to use this, and as a DM, I feel that both Exoskeleton and the Help bonus action together is really good. Honestly, we could stop here and have our ant species, but I want to go a little further, so we’ll stick with our first iteration and focus on having the “carry big thing” included instead, which leads us to our next section.

What’s already in the game that can do what our race is looking to do?

If you’re ever unsure of what’s balanced and what’s not, check out the official source! There’s a pretty common rule shared by a good few of the bigger races called Powerful Build that allows them to carry, push, pull, or drag objects a size class larger than them, so we’ll just give that to our ant, which at this point I’ve gotten a name for: Myrmek, which I pulled from the etymology of the myrmidons of ancient Greek legend, essentially meaning “ant”.

Now, we should probably take a look at our first two abilities and compare them to similar races the players have access to, just to make sure they’re about right with what’s out there. This balancing takes getting used to and a lot of experience. It’s not easy, but I found the best way to understand is to share your creations with your friends or on a forum! We’ll go over that next time.

Looking at Exoskeleton, I see that the Thri-kreen has something pretty similar in Chameleon Carapace, except it uses 13 + dexterity instead of a flat number. We can use that, since a player with max dexterity of 5 goes up to 18 AC, which should be our limit on natural armor. We can change the dexterity to constitution if we want, but I think I’ll save that for a subrace instead.

Hive-minded doesn’t really have anything to compare it to aside from the guidance spell, which it was already emulating, and the Hobgoblin’s Fey Gift ability which does allow the player to use Help as a bonus action. Honestly though, I personally feel that the Hobgoblin’s Fey Gift is really strong, even with it’s limit on uses. I’ll keep what I’ve got for the most part, and give it a limit as well, 8th and 16th level. You’ll notice I use proficiency bonus in a number of places here, because it’s a number that grows in size as the player grows in strength, so the places where proficiency bonus shows up will always have just enough uses to be good.

Finally, I’ll look into re-writing the text of the abilities to better fit with D&D’s language and terminology, which is actually available in their style guide you can find online. Don’t be afraid to reference official material where you can, people appreciate an ease of clarity and straight forward rules when reading.

Here’s what I’ve got for the main race.

Myrmek:

Your Constitution score increases by 2.

Age: Myrmek mature at the age of 1, and can live until 40. Usually, most live until 15.

Size: Medium or small

Speed: 30 feet

Exoskeleton:  When you aren’t wearing armor, your base AC is 13 + your Dexterity modifier. You can use your natural armor to determine your AC if the armor you wear would leave you with a lower AC. A shield’s benefits apply as normal while you use your natural armor.

Hive-Minded: Whenever a friendly creature makes an attack roll or ability check, you may use a reaction to add 1d4 to that roll. At 8th and 16th level, you gain an additional use of this ability. You regain all uses of this ability after a short or long rest.

Lithe Pack Creature: You count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift. You gain proficiency in Athletics.

Putting it all together.

Now that we’ve gone over how to generally make a race, let’s go through the thought process on making subraces, step by step. That means we’ll have to start with inspiration. Since we’re making ants, I wanted to make a few general roles they have rather than any particular species. What do I think of when I think of ants?

Soldiers ants to do the fighting, worker ants to do the everything, queen ants to keep the hive together, and honeypot ants because I just think they’re neat. Each of these will need one interesting ability that the player can manually activate, and one ability they just “get” that’ll always be useful to them, and a cool +1 to an ability score to tie things all together. What is an “interesting ability” and an ability that you “get” you may ask? It’s simple really. An interesting ability is something that you’d mechanically want to represent that race or subrace. Soldiers should have something to help them fight, the queen should lead or get people to protect her, the worker should know their station and be willing to sacrifice themselves. Stuff like this can be represented with a manual ability (think Hobgoblin’s Fey Gift, something you’ll consider using when applicable) and an innate ability (Fey Ancestry, it’s just there, not something you’re consciously thinking about, but it’s nice to have).

We’ll go in the order I listed, soldier first. Obviously, we want a bite attack with their mandibles, so we’ll give them a simple 1d6 strength based bite that counts as an unarmed strike. I thought it’d be cool to have them crush their prey a little harder, so I also wrote up a bonus action to have them deal an extra 1d4 damage by using a bonus action on a creature they bit that turn.

After some thinking on the “interesting ability”, I figured I wanted to do one of my favorite things: resource management. It’s nothing crazy this time, but I really enjoy having a number that ticks up and down, or down at a controlled rate, while playing D&D. So, I’ll tie this new ability to Hive-Minded’s number of uses. Since they’re meant to be the soldier of the hive, I’ll give them a fighter-like ability similar to Second Wind. They’ll regain 1d8 HP in addition to their constitution modifier, and their +1 stat will be constitution to try and help that. Simple as that. I went ahead and wrote up the rest of these using the same formula as above: Interesting ability, innate ability, and an appropriate +1 ability score. So with everything all done, the subrace should look something like this:

  • Your Strength score increases by 1.
  • Crushing Mandibles
    • You have a pair of crushing mandibles that you use for your unarmed strikes. When you hit with it, you do 1d6+Strength modifier piercing damage instead of the bludgeoning damage you would use for a normal unarmed strike.
      • As a part of an unarmed attack, if you successfully hit an opponent, you may attempt to crush their bones by expending a bonus action to deal an additional 1d4 bludgeoning damage.
  • Battle-Hardened: As an action, you may expend a use of Hive-Minded to regain 1d8 + Con HP.

Now that you’ve seen my layout and my process, I’ll give you my results and some of my thoughts on each. Here’s the worker.

  • Your Dexterity score increases by 1.
  • Protect the Hive!
    • Whenever a friendly creature within 5 feet would take damage, you may use a reaction to expend a use of Hive-Minded to instead share the brunt of the blow. That creature gains resistance to that attack, and you take any damage it takes from that attack.
  • Farm, Tend, Carry.
    • You gain proficiency in Animal Handling and Nature, and count as an additional size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift. This is in addition to Lithe Pack Creature.

I specifically wrote Protect the Hive using the wording of the Warding Bond spell, mostly word for word. Why? Why not? It perfectly encapsulates the character’s selfless nature by jumping in and taking the worst of a hit. If somebody else figured out the exact wording to use for that idea, I don’t mind reusing it to create something new, which is what I encourage you to do. Remember, everything has been done already, it’s up to you to retool those ideas into something uniquely yours! The Honeypot ant is up next.

  • Your Charisma score increases by 1. 
  • Sticky Secretions
    • As part of an attack action, you may coat your weapon in a sticky honey-like substance to impair fine movement. When you hit a creature as part of an attack action, that creature must make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, they have a -1 to their attack rolls until the start of your turn. You may use this feature a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus.
  • Honey to Share!
    • As an action, you may use your Hive-Minded ability to cast the spell Goodberry at first level. You may use your Charisma or Constitution as the spellcasting ability for this spell.

Funnily enough, Honey to Share was a very different ability when it was first written. Originally, it gave out a d4’s worth of temporary HP which in testing, proved to be really good. Oh yeah, don’t forget: play these with your friends! It can be fun to have whole campaigns with a new design, but if you find that something you wrote doesn’t work, you’ll be down a deep rabbit hole of perfecting it over and over again. This sort of stuff comes somewhat easily to people who have been playing the game since forever, but you’ll end up dragging your friends and DM into an endless balance hell. I highly suggest TheArenaGuy’s arena for this sort of thing, or try a short adventure module with your group for fun and testing! It’s good to take a short break from a main campaign to just enjoy Dungeons and Dragons for what it is! We’ll end with the Queen.

  • Your Wisdom score increases by 1.
  • Serve Me, Serve Your Hive
    • As an action, choose a creature of your choice that can see or hear you within 30 feet and expend a use of Hive-Minded. That creature may attack or cast a spell immediately.
  • Imperious
    • You gain proficiency in Intimidation or Persuasion. If you already have proficiency in the ability you’ve chosen, you may instead choose to gain expertise in that ability.

I feel this one was the simplest to come up with, but I’m happy with the result. While Imperious doesn’t really interact with the +1 to Wisdom given by the subrace, I felt it would be better to have the wise ruler be tactful with her words, rather than double down on her sheer force of personality that would be represented by the +1 to charisma. However, it’s really no big deal to change the wisdom increase to charisma at your table, D&D is meant to live in the mind’s eye of the player, not to be constrained on the page.

Wrap Up

I hope you guys enjoyed this blog post, I plan to update this MUCH more frequently, so expect a subclass creation post next! See you guys next week.