Playing Centaurs in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

the thunder of hooves signals the arrival of the quintessential shock cavalry in the fantasy worlds of Dungeons and Dragons the Centaur the center is our creature trapped between two worlds embodying the spirit and freedom of the Fae wild with the intellect and wisdom of humanity greetings my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything Dungeons & Dragons including advice for players and guides for Dungeon Master's we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are taking an in-depth look at playing a center in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition this player race was introduced in the guild masters guide to Ravnica the MTG Magic the Gathering crossover with Dungeons & Dragons and while they have been presented for this setting they're easily adaptable to any campaign world we're gonna be taking a look at their racial features traits and how you might be able to roleplay a Center at your next game table there's a lot to cover so let's get rolling so let's talk about how centaurs fit into the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons now centers have a dual nature not only are they the fusion of human and horse but in the rules of Dungeons & Dragons themselves there's a pretty big difference between the playable centur race presented in the guild masters guide to Ravnica and how they are depicted in the monster manual this dual nature how they work as a player character and how they work as a monster or as part of the D&D worlds is really something that we have to think about carefully when we're integrating centers into our settings our worlds or playing them as a character whether we want to go with the roots of the center in its mythological origins in Greek mythology or we want to really go ahead with how they're depicted in the guild masters guide to Ravnica I find how they're depicted in the monster manual is a lot closer to their mythological roots as nomadic creatures that live on the fringes of civilization but also have this strange dichotomy between being warriors of the wilderness and wise sages world of Ravnica centers are either of the Celestia Conclave or the girl clan if you play Magic the Gathering you can look at them as either steering towards a green and white or green and red in the worlds of magic the gathering green mana is associated with nature red mana associated with fiery magic volcanoes and primal savagery and white magic is often associated with community and working together and light and life and wisdom we can see this well represented in the centres and how they're depicted either as nomadic warriors fighting with this primal savagery of nature itself or in the community building aspect of how their communal and they embrace nature and they embrace wisdom and kind of exist in serenity with each other your scent or character could embody this conflict or drive towards one element or the other very very strongly but either way they both have that element of green which is their affinity to nature certainly every Center holds in their heart the urge to gallop free across the open plains really embodying the spirit of wild horses that can take them wherever they want to ride now in the worlds of Ravnica there's not a lot of open plains but they will find space to enjoy and run and gallop through ruins or city streets or parks the dual natures of centaurs goes right back to their ancient roots in Greek mythology where they originated and we can find examples in Greek myth of centaurs acting in violent savage and incredibly scary ways being drawn by their lust and their natural urges to go forth and raid and pillage but also in examples like perhaps one of the most famous centres of Greek myth the sage Chiron who is the tutor of Achilles depending on which myths you're reading so we can find inspiration almost anywhere for this duality that is embodied in the center we can also look to CS Lewis for inspiration with his depiction of centaurs in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe as being noble warriors and strong allies so Kelly centaurs are pretty unique and there is a player race I think they're very morphologically different from most playable races and I think that that's probably part of the draw to play one as a character centers are such a unique race to put into the world of Dungeons and Dragons half horse half man we all grew up reading stories about centaurs looking into the mythology they were in children's books and and lore and they're just such a cool thing to imagine putting into your D&D game running one into battle with hooves trampling over your enemies and swords and bows slashing and shooting it's such a cool image playing a centaur means you've basically got a built-in mount you might even be the mount for other player characters in your party and you can kind of be that naturally born shock cavalry mounted Archer or explore some really unique archetypes that you really can't get from other player character races so if you had two centaurs in your party and both of them were like barbarians or fighters and then you put other like fighters on the back with Lance's or a road with a bow or a ranger you you have the cavalry charging into battle with a lot of different attacks going on that's a really fun image to think so all that on the table let's look at the traits that sent our player characters game well you gain a +2 to strength and a +1 to wisdom which can make for some really interesting builds I agree I think that strength and wisdom are very complimentary ability scores to get boost - and when we talked about the classes that we might want to play as a center I think there's a lot of really awesome and strong options when we look at the size of centers they're pretty big creatures they're not as big as a real mounted combatant on an actual sized horse they do have smaller horse bodies but they do range from about 6 to 7 feet tall with their horse body spanning about 4 feet this is one of the things though that kind of disappointed me personally about their depiction in the guild masters guide to Ravnica is that they are a medium-sized player character race I understand why this was done it's to make it easier for you to explore dungeon environments and to get into smaller spaces and I think that there's some concern about having a large sized playable character race that said I think if I was having a center character I would want to be big and want to be that large character and if I had a player that came to me as a DM that wanted to play a cent or I would almost certainly allow them to be large sized I don't think it's gonna be a huge problem given the other traits of the center's now with them having that horse body their speed is going to be a little bit better than most of the other playable characters you get a speed of 40 feet right off the bat yeah I think the only other race in Dungeons & Dragons that is a higher speed than this would be the Eric okra with their flying speed so you can really zip around and it immediately makes me think of choosing character classes that are gonna stack on top of that to get an even faster character what's also great about this is it does give you that extra edge for people to maybe want to use you as a mount in battle because if you're going from point A to point B or riding around the battlefield you're gonna be a little bit faster than the rest of the party now interesting as well for the centaurs their creature type is Fae as opposed to humanoid or monstrosity which is what they're classified is in the monster manual this has some very interesting gameplay ramifications because it means that certain spells like charm person or hold person or spells that specifically target humanoids don't work on you because you're a fake creature so you get some extra hidden immunities to some common spells by virtue of your creature type what a great hidden little attribute it nowhere in there does it specify oh by the way you're going to be immune to these spells but yeah the subtext there is that you actually have a lot of little fun bonuses by being a fake creature instead of a humanoid that's said you may also be susceptible to effects that target fake creatures so watch out for spells like banishment pros and cons so as part of the Centaurs size they also have the equine build feature which counts them as one size category larger when determining how much they can carry now also in the rules of the game quadrupeds also get a bonus to how much they can carry as well so figuring out exactly how you're gonna rule this at your table might vary if you choose to be like me and actually make the center as a large creature I would probably ignore this trait so they can they can push and pull and lift a lot more but the downside of being a center is that you're terrible at climbing it's really hard to climb up a cliff when you have horse hooves dangling behind you as you're trying to climb anything so when you do try to climb something it's gonna cost you much more extra movement than it would any other build in the game on the flip side you can bash people with your hooves and they are a natural weapon that you can use to make unarmed melee attacks with when you hit with your whose you do bludgeoning damage that's equal to one d4 plus your strength modifier not bad as an extra little kick in the face from a horse what's special about this is that your hooves combined with the charge trait which means that if you moved 30 feet directly towards a creature and then hit them with a melee attack you can immediately make an extra attack as a bonus action with your hooves as well meaning that as a scent or even at level one you can manage to get two attacks in it's a really cool trade especially if you're going to be a frontline combatant centers are natural survivors and they get the survivor trait which lets you gain proficiency in either nature animal handling medicine or survival centers automatically no common and Sylvan and finally it is worth noting that centers do not gain any special vision they don't have dark vision or anything else like that so they are reliant on typical human level vision one thing that I've experienced with trying to play a center is that it's really hard to find a great miniature to have at your table there's known a lot that have been made for D&D there are not at all and worse many of the ones that are out there are really generic and don't feel like player character quality miniatures that's why we were really excited when our amazing friends at hero forge who sponsored this episode told us that they were coming out with options for custom centaurs as an option from hero forge directly we jumped right on that and we ordered a classic Archer Center which is just great and then we also have that gritty kind of go ideator Fighter Center as well I totally love hero forges options for the center playable characters you can do these really amazing poses of rearing back and shooting the bow and it really solves that problem that you have when making a scent or character isn't that you can't find a good miniature that actually represents the weapons and armor that your character is wearing you can go rate on hero forge and fully customize the character giving them the exact equipment weapons armor appearance hairstyle that you have in mind for your character and then fully customize their pose as well getting a perfect mini hero Forge is great for coming up with all of the different options you can play around with it for hours coming up with exactly what you want your character to look like on top of that I even just use it for inspiration as soon as I'm thinking of a character I hop on hero forge and I start designing to see what he might look like and really kind of nail home exactly what I want my player character to be holding to be wearing to be posing as I want that heroic strong character and hero Forge gives me all those options whether you want to create a center for your next player character or explore hero forges amazing options for all the player character races and classes and equipment that are out there you can find it all at hero forge com you can also get five dollars off your first physical order by using the discount code dungeon dudes at check out follow the links in the description below for more information as I was going through all of the options on hero forge for building a centaur miniature I really started to think about all the unique class combinations we could consider when building a Santora player character what did you start with Kelly with that plus two to strengthen that +1 to wisdom my first choice to tie into the savagery of the center was to look at the Barbarian I completely agree I think the Barbarian with their fast movement trait focus on melee combat can really really take advantage of all of the Centaurus traits and really captures the quintessential image of the center as depicted in many Greek myths now if you wanted to go more noble with your scent or you could look at a cleric as well and I imagine the nature domain claret is a really cool way to go with a scent or tying into their natural order and their affinity towards nature and the faith why not even the tempest domain or even the war domain and you could tie it right back and say that you are a cleric of Demeter or Ares or Zeus and you are a centaur come straight from Greek myth wielding the powers of the ancient gods of old this could be a really cool character archetype to explore I love the idea of being maybe like a cent or gladiator or Spartan you know putting on that kind of like ha polite style armor on the scent or wearing really big heavy armor and being kind of this force of nature and metal charging into battle it's a very cool fighter I also have to say I I don't think that the ability to are bonuses line up awesomely but the boost to wisdom is worth noting and I do think that a centaur druid has a lot of great role-playing opportunities and a center ranger or Archer would be a lot of fun to play to be that natural horse archer and really go for running circles around your foes keeping them at distance and peppering them with arrows maybe if I was doing the Ranger and wanted to focus on ranged attacks I might focus on throne weapons that's a great point because the Ranger and the druid really lend themselves well from a role-playing perspective to what we imagine the centur to be with their affinity to nature I really like centaurs having a bow or a ranged weapon because that's how I've seen them depicted so many times but the strength and wisdom don't really lend themselves well to that but if they had javelins that they could throw that's a really cool concept and I think it still speaks to the centur yeah on the other hand I have my doubts about playing a center as a rogue I don't really see a half-human half-horse being very stealthy at all clippity-clop yeah and I think that a center probably doesn't really line up well with a wizard or a warlock or a sorcerer although I could see a cent or bard being really cool a centaur coming in with like their loot oh yeah you thought that yeah it is strange that centaurs are magical beings and they they embody a magical essence but at the same time I never have envisioned them as slinging spells yeah I think centaurs are magical creatures but I think that their magic is subtle and I think the role-playing of a centaur really goes nicely with the type of magic that you see from a druid or a cleric whereas the outrageous arcane magical effects of say a warlock or a sorcerer or a wizard feel a little bit out of place but that would be a great way to play against type to play like this scholarly center that has a library full of books on their back might be a kind of cool mental image I mean even when we say something's not going to work there's people out there who will make it work and it will be a lot of fun you know those might work as well a scent or a monk you could build a strength-based centaur monk I mean you have extra limbs the only issue with this is that the monks unarmed strike abilities basically override your natural traits so you don't get the benefit of your hooves or your charge feature because the monks martial arts features are already giving you better benefits anyways but on the flip side you're gonna be really really fast also just imagine a scent or being able to run straight up a wall that breaks my brain I really like the idea of playing a life domain cleric that is a healer and is going out trying to cure a plague I'm going to call them the Center for Disease Control no matter what you do with the center you got to take the mobile feet oh yeah yeah that's that's dirty it is because one of the cool things that you can do with it is a now your speed is up to 50 feet but B you also can now move away from your foes after you attack them on your turn because of the benefit of mobile so whether you're playing as a strength-based gladiator or a slight skirmisher you really get to do that hit style play by taking the mobile feet with your sent or because this allows you to charge in get the benefit of the charge feet get the hoof attack in and then run back out and because your speed is so high especially imagine if you're playing a center barbarian with the mobile feet you now have a speed of 60 feet which means you can get in and get out and your enemy has to use all their movement just to get back up to you again that's a really nice combo and honestly I think makes the center of barbarian one of the coolest and strongest ways to go yeah I could even see multi classing battle master fighter with barbarian as a center because then what you could do is charge in hit them with your hooves knock them prone and ride back out and now they have to stand up from prone costing half their movement so they're not even going to be able to get up to you unless they dash up to you again and then you rinse and repeat yes over and over again until they're dead yeah and if you are playing a center or fighter as an archer then you just take advantage of your speed of fifty feet because again you're taking mobile and you just go up around them and pepper them with arrows until they're all gone yes you're not getting the bonus to your dexterity we could use throwing weapons instead to make that work but I really think the center opens up these options for these hit and run tactics provided you're working on a battlefield large enough to accommodate it and I think that that is one of the big downsides of the center is that if you're in dungeon environments you can really feel boxed in and you're not going to be able to leverage all of your speed to its full advantage what a great flaw though for your centur to be claustrophobic with those closed environments it goes against everything that it says about the center in the book about them loving wide-open spaces they love galloping through fields and and parts and ruins you put them inside of a contained space and they can't use most of their best features and I would play into that I would definitely drive that home and just say that the side door hates closed in spaces so if we're looking at the race of centaurs in Dungeons & Dragons let's start thinking about what backgrounds might be interesting to use for role-playing or Center so because centers are often associated with nomadic tribes that wander the far-off natural places of the world a center that becomes an adventure might be an outcast or an outlander or someone on a special mission from their tribe that requires them joining an adventuring party has to look at far traveler as a good option you have Outlander they could even be a hermit who is secluded from society and lives out in the woods but they're the lone yeah yeah woods I think a really cool way to think about a centaur player character would be drawing inspiration from a character like a LOI from horizon zero dawn someone that might have been an outcast or that has then been sent out into the world by their people to recover something special that was stolen from them there's a lot of great stories that you can explore with this dynamic because I think at a lot of D&D worlds you're not gonna walk into a city even like water deep and encounter a lot of other centaurs no centers seem like one of those things that if they're in the adventuring party everybody's kind of like whoa look a central yeah even within the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons finding a clan of centaurs is a rare thing I also like this idea for sent our player character of a centaur that grew up and lived in the Fae wild and because the Fae wild mysteriously crosses through the Material Plane maybe your centaur was lost in the Fae wild and accidentally stumbled into the Material Plane and is looking for a way home ah a poor Center it just wants to go home to me that's a much more innocent approach to the center is this loss Center who just wants to find his way home and adventures to try to find an entrance to the fairy wild your scent or being from the Fae wild could have an affinity towards other fake creatures and maybe draws themselves towards elves and Pixies and you could have an entire adventuring party made up of favor elated creatures yeah I love this idea of maybe a group of centaurs and elves working together to overcome some mutual threat to the face or to the natural world maybe there's an interesting case where one of the elves in your adventuring party found your scent or after they were lost in the Fae wild and they were injured and that's how they became friends and started working together with the center of being such a unique and interesting race in the world of Dungeons and Dragons it's possible that your player character was captured and forced to be a gladiator in the pits for people's amusements and now you've gotten out and now you're trying to find your way back to your people or maybe your character wants to get revenge this would be very appropriate for a centaur barbarian who was captured and was imprisoned and kept in captivity and couldn't roam the open plains and now that they've escaped or won their freedom all they want is to even the scales or maybe they just want to get as far away as possible from civilization so going back to some of the other options when we look at things like the Outlander or the Hermit and think more about a druid or a cleric who is a wise cent or who lives out in the woods and and practices their own magical energies that is in tune with nature maybe your scent or is an invoice sent from their clan to work with humans or elves or dwarves to strike a better balance between the natural world and the Fae wild and the encroachments of civilization that may be a really great way to reconcile an oddball party that is filled with maybe more traditional characters that don't care about the connection to nature that your character has and this really all just ties in to that dual nature of the center with both their savagery and their wisdom you can kind of go either way and play so many different options for your center or character something that always makes a compelling Dungeons & Dragons player character is one that has a fantastic internal conflict and with a center this is front and center because you have ingrained in within your character the conflict between nature and reason itself exploring this element in this conflict and how your character navigates it will give you so many rewarding options for playing your characters in many pains to come so this has been a look at centers in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition if you're planning out your Center or character don't forget to check out the links below for hero forge to plan out your perfect miniature if you're enjoying the show please consider supporting our work on patreon you can find out how by following the links in the description below don't forget to check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes of that write-up over here and we have plenty more guides to the races of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition wait up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 59,368

Rating: 4.9445887 out of 5

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: YfJ6lT9kyxk

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 28 2019