Are Tritons Seriously Underrated?

 Volo's Guide to Monsters was a huge expansion of playable races in 5th Edition. It gave us official stats for Aasimar, Goliaths (ok, that was technically a reprint), Kenku, Tabaxi, Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Bugbears, Yuan-Ti Purebloods, Kobolds, and the subject of this post: Tritons.

Essentially merfolk but with legs instead of a fish-tail, I don't think I've ever seen any other players pick this as their character's race. And frankly, I'm kind of surprised.

Obviously, in D&D, race choice is often based on thematics and aesthetics, and building a story around them. The classic races like dwarves, elves, and such, come with a lot of lore and attitudes built in. Personally, I'm weirdly drawn to the most mundane (human) and the most outlandish (things like Warforged, or the awesome new Gothic Lineages in Ravenloft).

Tritons, at least in the games I've played, have kind of slipped under the radar, but I think they're really cool. They come with a whole host of really awesome features.

First off, there's the obvious: as underwater people, they have an innate swim speed and can breathe underwater. That might seem so-so, but take the following into account: Creatures with an innate swim speed don't get disadvantage on weapon attacks underwater. And creatures who can breathe underwater are unimpeded in spellcasting with verbal components. Yes, you can take care of the latter with a water breathing spell, but there's nothing stopping a Triton from wielding a Greatsword just as well below the waves as they do above them, which is pretty sweet.

Next, they have cold resistance, which is one of the most common forms of magical damage, and furthermore protects you from exhaustion if you ever go to a place of extreme cold. If you're playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, a Triton (or Silver/White Dragonborn or Goliath) is not going to have to worry about the chill.

And they have darkvision, which is not, like, rare, but still nice to have (Tritons having darkvision and Goliaths having cold resistance were both errata'd into Volo's when they were slightly updated in Mythic Odysseys of Theros and Rime of the Frostmaiden, respectively).

But the hits keep coming:

Like tieflings and drow, you get some innate spellcasting, getting access to fog cloud, gust of wind, and wall of water.

And finally, just like Aquaman, you can communicate simple ideas to aquatic animals, though like with Firbolgs, the ideas you can convey are limited, and you don't get to understand their responses.

The default ability score increase for Tritons is a +1 to Strength, Constitution, and Charisma, which makes them obvious candidates for Paladins, but thanks to the Tasha's rules that let you reassign these scores, like any race, they can go with any class (though given that it's a 3-ability spread, they might be best suited for classes that want decent scores in many abilities, like a Barbarian (S/D/Con) or a Ranger (D/W/Con).)

Most fantasy worlds don't really go into detail about civilization beneath the waves - given our own world and its decidedly non-amphibious humanoid population, I think most fantasy creators think of oceans as mostly negative space on their maps.

But I think there's a ton of really fascinating potential in underwater societies that have their own cultures and histories, perhaps interacting with the surface but also distant from them. In fact, given that the sea-dwelling humanoids are the ones who can operate in both worlds, there might even be a haughty superiority to them. Of course, as also seen in Volo's description, Tritons are often forced to deal with threats from the deep that the rest of the world doesn't even know about.

My friends and I are in the very early stages (as in, we don't have a full player list) of putting together a Wildemount campaign that I'll be playing in, and I'm starting to lean heavily toward playing a Triton, likely living somewhere in the Menagerie Coast (perhaps the son of an ambassador or something.)