D&D: Behind The Screen – Centaurs And Minotaurs
Take a look at some of what went into the design of the latest rendition of Centaurs and Minotaurs, and some of the challenges involved in converting them to player suitable options.
Creating a player race can be tricky–there’s the issue of balanced abilities to consider, but then also as you’ll see: size matters. And this can be particularly troublesome for monsters that are traditionally large. Creatures like Centaurs and Minotaurs who are both the subject of this month’s Unearthed Arcana, and today’s chat with Jeremy Crawford, take a look:
As Crawford points out, one of the big problems is with the Large category. As soon as you make a creature Large for an extended period of time, it presents a lot of design challenges. Abilities that emanate from a creature (including a Paladin’s aura, but also a ton of other abilities, like a Storm Barbarian’s damaging field, etc.) become a lot more powerful.
Incidentally, if you have a party member with aura abilities, consider Enlarge/Reduce for maximum fun and profit. But the size category is just one aspect of it–an important one. After all playing a Minotaur that’s kind of weedy doesn’t seem to fit well. You want to have that feeling of a powerful, hard-hitting creature. That’s what the imagery of a minotaur evokes. But–there’s more to it than that.
There’s also the question of anatomy–how do you fit in a world designed for bipeds if you’re playing a quadruped? What kind of ladder can you go up, if at all? The end result has been pretty solid so far. It does make me wonder what sort of book we’d see these two races appear in. Unearthed Arcana is sort of their testing ground for concepts to see how they’ll shape up. We’ve seen the Elven subraces and the Gith make it to Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes–so if these two ideas are being revisited (and the Minotaur after a few years) it does seem to hint that there’s some future expansion planned for these two.
The Stream of Many Eyes might have some more answers–but time alone will tell whether or not we’ll be seeing these in an official capacity any time soon.
In the meantime, just imagine riding into battle on a centaur, riding atop another centaur…
