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###Warforged Resilience

Warforged Resilience

You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

 
  • You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
  • You are immune to disease.
  • You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
  • You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

###Skeletal Resilience

Skeletal Resilience

Your undead physiology gives you remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

###Warforged Resilience

You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

 
  • You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
  • You are immune to disease.
  • You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
  • You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

###Skeletal Resilience

Your undead physiology gives you remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

Warforged Resilience

You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

  • You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
  • You are immune to disease.
  • You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
  • You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

Skeletal Resilience

Your undead physiology gives you remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

added 1374 characters in body
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Dan B
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You've told us that your boyfriend actually wants to be a skeletal necromancer. This is likely to become be a problem.

For the first four levels, a "necromancer" is just a wizard -- wizards don't learn any good necromancy until level five.

After that point, your necromancer has a bunch of skeletons following him around who he can send into battle. This can produce balance issues (is the necromancer character more powerful than other characters because he's got all those skeletal allies?).

It also can produce alignment issues. Is your skeletal necromancer a good person? Is he a person who has friends? Does he treat his friends with respect? Or is he all "FOOLISH MORTAL FLESH-WORMS, I WILL DEVOUR YOUR SOULS" all the time?

In most worlds, animating skeletons is evil and only bad people do it. Most players who announce that they want to play a necromancer are intending to play an evil character.

So now you have a really hard question: if your skeletal necromancer is a bad person, why are the other adventurers hanging out with him? Why do they think he's their friend?

If you're sitting in the DM seat and you're like "yeah, your characters all have to be friends because that's the only way we have a D&D game", then you need to have all the players on board with their characters actually being friends with each other.


You've told us that your boyfriend actually wants to be a skeletal necromancer. This is likely to become be a problem.

For the first four levels, a "necromancer" is just a wizard -- wizards don't learn any good necromancy until level five.

After that point, your necromancer has a bunch of skeletons following him around who he can send into battle. This can produce balance issues (is the necromancer character more powerful than other characters because he's got all those skeletal allies?).

It also can produce alignment issues. Is your skeletal necromancer a good person? Is he a person who has friends? Does he treat his friends with respect? Or is he all "FOOLISH MORTAL FLESH-WORMS, I WILL DEVOUR YOUR SOULS" all the time?

In most worlds, animating skeletons is evil and only bad people do it. Most players who announce that they want to play a necromancer are intending to play an evil character.

So now you have a really hard question: if your skeletal necromancer is a bad person, why are the other adventurers hanging out with him? Why do they think he's their friend?

If you're sitting in the DM seat and you're like "yeah, your characters all have to be friends because that's the only way we have a D&D game", then you need to have all the players on board with their characters actually being friends with each other.

fixed formatting; added page number
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V2Blast
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It's a little bit dangerous to experiment with custom rules as a beginning DM. The risk is that you hand out something that's too good, and then one of your characters is more powerful than the others and it creates tension.

(In particular, we have an existing antipattern where the DM invites their significant other to the table and then makes a bunch of rules exceptions to make their significant other's character super badass, which tends to annoy the other players. You'll want to be careful of this.)

The best way to generate a custom race is to "reskin" an existing race. In your case I'd recommend reskinning the warforged race (WGtE, p. 68). By default, this is a race of robot warriors who have somehow gained sentience and humanity. You can go through the rules and replace the word "robot" with "skeletal" and you'll get something reasonably close to a skeletal warrior. In particular, your race would have:

Warforged###Warforged Resilience
You

You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.
 

You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
You are immune to disease.
You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

  • You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
  • You are immune to disease.
  • You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
  • You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

and you'd replace the header with:

Skeletal###Skeletal Resilience
Your

Your undead physiology gives you remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.


There's a separate question here, which is that your player wants a race that "basically can't die". This is sort of unusual but honestly I think it's fine to let him have this. Add a feature where, when he's reduced to 0 hit points, he collapses into bones and then the bones reform after twelve hours. Being out of the story for twelve hours will hopefully be enough of a penalty that he won't start getting himself killed for fun.

If you like, you could implement this using the experimental rules for the revenant subrace from Unearthed Arcana.

(If you were planning to run a game where player characters die frequently, the "basically can't die" ability would be too good and you'd have to disallow it. Many DMs will run the whole adventure and not have anybody die, so in most games the fact that he can't die shouldn't matter too much.)

It's a little bit dangerous to experiment with custom rules as a beginning DM. The risk is that you hand out something that's too good, and then one of your characters is more powerful than the others and it creates tension.

(In particular, we have an existing antipattern where the DM invites their significant other to the table and then makes a bunch of rules exceptions to make their significant other's character super badass, which tends to annoy the other players. You'll want to be careful of this.)

The best way to generate a custom race is to "reskin" an existing race. In your case I'd recommend reskinning the warforged race. By default, this is a race of robot warriors who have somehow gained sentience and humanity. You can go through the rules and replace the word "robot" with "skeletal" and you'll get something reasonably close to a skeletal warrior. In particular, your race would have:

Warforged Resilience
You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.
 

You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
You are immune to disease.
You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

and you'd replace the header with:

Skeletal Resilience
Your undead physiology gives you remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.


There's a separate question here, which is that your player wants a race that "basically can't die". This is sort of unusual but honestly I think it's fine to let him have this. Add a feature where, when he's reduced to 0 hit points, he collapses into bones and then the bones reform after twelve hours. Being out of the story for twelve hours will hopefully be enough of a penalty that he won't start getting himself killed for fun.

If you like, you could implement this using the experimental rules for the revenant subrace.

(If you were planning to run a game where player characters die frequently, the "basically can't die" ability would be too good and you'd have to disallow it. Many DMs will run the whole adventure and not have anybody die, so in most games the fact that he can't die shouldn't matter too much.)

It's a little bit dangerous to experiment with custom rules as a beginning DM. The risk is that you hand out something that's too good, and then one of your characters is more powerful than the others and it creates tension.

(In particular, we have an existing antipattern where the DM invites their significant other to the table and then makes a bunch of rules exceptions to make their significant other's character super badass, which tends to annoy the other players. You'll want to be careful of this.)

The best way to generate a custom race is to "reskin" an existing race. In your case I'd recommend reskinning the warforged race (WGtE, p. 68). By default, this is a race of robot warriors who have somehow gained sentience and humanity. You can go through the rules and replace the word "robot" with "skeletal" and you'll get something reasonably close to a skeletal warrior. In particular, your race would have:

###Warforged Resilience

You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.

  • You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage.
  • You are immune to disease.
  • You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
  • You don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the effects of exhaustion due to lack of rest, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

and you'd replace the header with:

###Skeletal Resilience

Your undead physiology gives you remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits.


There's a separate question here, which is that your player wants a race that "basically can't die". This is sort of unusual but honestly I think it's fine to let him have this. Add a feature where, when he's reduced to 0 hit points, he collapses into bones and then the bones reform after twelve hours. Being out of the story for twelve hours will hopefully be enough of a penalty that he won't start getting himself killed for fun.

If you like, you could implement this using the experimental rules for the revenant subrace from Unearthed Arcana.

(If you were planning to run a game where player characters die frequently, the "basically can't die" ability would be too good and you'd have to disallow it. Many DMs will run the whole adventure and not have anybody die, so in most games the fact that he can't die shouldn't matter too much.)

added 185 characters in body
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Dan B
  • 90.6k
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  • 345
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Source Link
Dan B
  • 90.6k
  • 14
  • 201
  • 345
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