Talk:Piglin (5e Race)

Mostly good, needs a bit of balancing

Hey there! This is a very good race overall. There is a lot of depth in the history, and I love all of the subraces. It is certainly an accurate depiction of the Minecraft race. However, there are a few things that I think are a bit unbalanced and should be taken note of.

First off, the bonus to damage. The Gold Gluttony feature gives a +2 bonus to damage rolls for any weapon lined with gold, and a +4 to a solid-gold weapon. This is very powerful, especially at low levels and combined with Extra Attack. Imagine that a Piglin character hits a creature with a solid gold longsword, and gets 5 + 3 (Strength modifier) damage, which is 8, plus another 4 so 12. This feature can potentially increase your damage output by a significant amount, but on average between 33% and 66% percent per attack which, over time, adds up to a lot of damage. This needs to be reduced significantly, maybe just to a +1 or +2. The AC boost is also very powerful, but not as powerful as the damage boost. I would recommend removing the feature of lined with gold vs. solid gold for both of these and make it a flat +1 to damage or AC for anything containing gold.

Next, the subraces. Most of them are balanced. However, there are a few features to take note of. First off, the Waste-Hogs Horde Cleanser. It gives them resistance to necrotic damage on top of fire and also gives them advantage on attacks against Undead. The reason I want to take note of this is because they now have resistance to two fairly common types of damage- fire and necrotic. Also, they have advantage against a fairly prominent kind of enemy- undeads When I want to put some things in my dungeon as a DM, I almost always throw in skeletons and zombies. Liches are one of the most common boss enemies. This can be very powerful in a variety of situations, so I would recommend nerfing this ability. I would allow them to choose between fire resistance and necrotic, and maybe only a damage boost against undead creatures.

Then there's the Crimson Forest Dweller's Words of Wisdon ability. This ability is not too overpowered on paper but, in practice, it can be very powerful. The ability to use Wisdom for Persuasion and Intimidation checks and adding your proficiency to either if you have proficiency in just one basically gives the player a free proficiency and the use of a much more powerful score for a much weaker one. Wisdom is used for some of the most common things in D&D, such as Perception, Medicine, and Animal Handling, as well as saving throws. Charisma is only used for social interactions. By allowing Wisdom to replace Charisma, you change the game fundamentally. This allows the players to dump two stats and min-max like crazy. Or, if your players aren't min-maxers, they can still become very good at social interactions on top of whatever else they're good at, because they don't need Charisma anymore and nobody dumps Wisdom. It can get very powerful very fast, and that is why I recommend changing it.

Finally, the Zombified Pigins are much more powerful than any other subrace. For example, they get a +2 to Constitution instead of a +1, which already puts them on top. That, plus Undead Fortitude which can save someone from dying almost infinitely, makes them very strong compared to the other subraces. I would change the +2 to a +1 and the Undead Fortitude to something more like the half-orc's Relentless Endurace ability, where it only works once but doesn't require a saving throw. If you change that, it would become much more balanced and overall be better.

In short, this race is a great concept. Hoever, there are a few features that can be exploited to make this a very overpowered race. If you change these, it would be great to play. Think about changing these. Thanks! --MarshDASavage (talk) 17:31, 17 December 2020 (MST)

Possible Reworks

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to look over this race. I now see that yeah, there are a couple of pretty overpowered attributes that I've given a couple of these subraces (and the main race itself), but I've certainly a couple of possible reworks in mind, if you'd care to hear them:

First off with Gold Gluttony: Change it so that it's a flat +2 damage (of the same type, I should add that) on solid gold weaponry, and +1 AC for wearing full gold armour, which doesn't stack with shields. That way, a character with full plate can't go over 20 AC with just their racial ability alone. As for the damage, I agree that it's pretty broken in retrospect. (In truth, this was supposed to be something that a character would work toward in the campaign, where they'd amass a significant amount of gold to buy an ornate golden sword due to their race's background. I guess that in some scenario, a DM would unsuspectingly let a player start with some gold weapons without any extra cost due to the background, and they'd do significantly better than I meant them to.)

Next, the Waste-Hogs. The Zombies that I imagined them fighting don't even do necrotic damage in base 5e rules, so that can be easily scrapped. The advantage on hit against all Undead can be fixed in two ways:

 A. Add proficiency to attack rolls made against Undead that you've fought in the past for at least 1 minute, even if your already have it.
 B. Add half of your proficiency bonus rounded down to AC when being targeted by an attack made by an Undead.

(I guess I never really saw how broken this was, as the campaigns I've played in/ran almost never have Undead in them. Now that you've mentioned it, it makes a lot more sense that this should be changed. I was thinking of saying "you're better at tracking Undead" in one way or another, but that would defeat the purpose of being a Ranger.)

The Crimson Forest Dweller's ability. This was made back when the Piglins had a -1 to CHA to compensate for their bad social skills, but since I removed that, it's certainly a major increase in usefulness. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what to do with this one. I want to focus in on their "Wise words make people like them more" aspect, or general sociability without necessarily dealing with the Charisma stat alone. Maybe this could be an ability that could be used as many times as Proficiency bonus per long rest? That's up for debate, really. Or, combine the two: gain your Wisdom bonus in additional to any skill for Persuasion/Intimidation checks once per long rest. I'm obviously brainstorming here, but it's not like once I make the change it's set in stone.

I'm just going to remove the Zombified Piglin. Waste-Hogs get overshadowed by them, and they're not even alive to begin with (besides, 5 subraces was enough; with the addition of the Basalt Delta Hikers, 6 might be a bit too overwhelming for anyone scrolling around on here).

Okay, I think that's everything. I'll change some obvious stuff around (like Gold Gluttony and the removal of a subrace that probably isn't even sentient...), but the rest that I've come up with is up to debate, really. I usually try to go for stuff that's "never been seen before" in terms of the vanilla races, so I guess that kind of mindset is a slippery slope into a lot of broken stuff. I sincerely thank you for taking the time to review ths race, and I look forward to making it the best that it can be from a balance standpoint. --BUDDERMON (talk) 19:48, 17 December 2020 (MST)

Hey, Buddermon!

I looked over it, and it looks good! Pretty much everything I had a complaint about got fixed. I have changed it so the armor bonus does stack with shields, because a +1 to AC is not that gamebreaking- it was the +2 and +4 I had a complaint about. Looking back, the things I said were pretty nitpicky. Advantage on attack rolls against undead is pretty powerful, so I'm glad you changed that. However, most of what I said were simple errors that could be easily exploited. Thanks for taking my feedback and changing the race! I'm thinking about allowing it in my games soon. Hopefully it works out! --MarshDASavage (talk) 20:46, 27 December 2020 (MST)