Unearthed Arcana: Folk of the Feywild

This month's Unearthed Arcana was of special interest for me.  Finally a fairy!  As I mentioned in my bucket list post a few months ago, I've always wanted to play a fairy character in a tabletop RPG.  Judge me if you want, but I used to play one in NeverWinter Nights, and I really enjoyed it.

It looks like a decent race - it gets flight, a couple of innate spells, and the ability to squeeze through tight spaces.  I definitely look forward to trying this out, and will instantly preorder whatever splatbook it eventually appears in.

That said, overall this edition of Unearthed Arcana was a bit of a letdown.  Four races: Fairy, Hobgoblin, Owlfolk, and Rabbitfolk.  For a Feywild document, it's not Feywild enough.  I would have preferred Dryads, Nymphs, and Satyrs to all these animal folk.  And we already had a playable Hobgoblin the Volo's Guide to Monsters, so I'm not convinced we needed another one.

Of course, that's just me.  I mean, I have to be in the minority, wanting to play a fairy.  I'm sure that for every oddball like me, there's someone out there who has always wanted to play a rabbit person.  So, sure, throw in more animal people, see if you can pull in the furry crowd.  The more fringe groups we can get to try D&D, the better.  But I hope the final book also includes Dryads.

I'm also a little wary of the new stat system.  A few months ago I read Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, which has optional rules for stat generation.  Side note, I've been rereading Tasha's recently, and I think I must have been in a bad mood the first time I reviewed it.  It's still not as useful as Xanathar's, but there's definitely some stuff in there I can use.  I particularly like the Monk subclass that can heal their allies by punching them in the face.

Anyway, Tasha's took the first steps in D&D's push to eliminate racial stats.  It presents the optional rule that during character creation, you can trade out stat bonuses for other stat bonuses.  This allows you to play characters that grew up in non-traditional environments for their race, and distances the game from problematic stereotypes.

This Unearthed Arcana continues the trend by not having set stat bonuses at all for these new races.  Instead, it just says, "When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one of those scores by 2 and a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1."

This is a great system, but it might have gone over better if they had included some suggested stat increases for each race.  After all, that "pick whatever stats you want" rule was supposed to be optional, and not every group intends to adopt it.  Even if you intend to trade out the suggested stats, some people are going to wonder what stats would be traditional for that race's society.

But I guess even asking that question is to skirt racism.  Saying "Most Orcs are stupid, but your Orc is smarter because they were raised by Elves" is no better than saying "All Orcs are stupid".  And since some people draw parallels between D&D races and real world ethnicities, it's probably best to just drop automatic stat bonuses going forward.

If only they could have made that realization during 5e's playtest phase, they could have worked it into the system, and maybe let stat bonuses be come from your class instead.  As it is, this late-stage change makes the system feel sort of messy.  Hopefully they will reprint the PHB at some point, so that the core book is more consistent with the follow-up material.

Until then, I think they're doing the best they can.  I can't wait to try the fairy.