All the Race Reprints! Tabaxi, Tortles, Tritons, and Yuan-Ti

 Continuing our series of looking over all the reprints of playable races in Monsters of the Mulitverse, here's the first post, with a breakdown of the parameters of these posts (basically, I'm trying to limit this to changes, not writing out every racial feature).

Tabaxi:

Here, the only changes I can see are that your Cat's Claws natural weapons deal 1d6, rather than 1d4 damage (which seems to be the new standard) and your climbing speed is now equal to your walking speed, rather than being a flat 20 feet - which was always odd.

Actually: one more change is that you can now choose to be either Small or Medium in size.

    So, this seems to be a pure buff to the race, albeit a very subtle one. The climbing speed is nice, especially for Monks and Barbarians.

Tortle:

So, I'll confess, I don't actually have access to the Tortle's stats from the Tortle Package. While WotC has been talking about this as if the Tortle had never been published in a hardcover book, I could have sworn they were in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. (Actually, in the process of confirming that yes, it is in EGW, I also found the original version. Ahem!)

So, changes: You now choose between Small or Medium size when you pick the race (this seems to be a common thing for "animal people" races).

Your Claw attacks now do 1d6 rather than 1d4 damage (again, seems to be a standard update).

Survival Instinct has been replaced with Nature's Intuition, which allows you to choose one proficiency from among Animal Handling, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Stealth, or Survival.

    So, again, we're looking at a pure buff, albeit a subtle one.

Triton:

Ah, this is near and dear to my heart, as my Wizard is a Triton. Tritons were already errata'd to have darkvision and cold resistance - both good for denizens of the deep ocean.

Like with other movement speeds, your swim speed is now equal to your walking speed rather than a flat 30 feet.

Also, like other racial magic options, you now get to choose between the three "mental" stats for your spellcasting ability for those spells, and can spend spell slots to cast them again after you've used your daily "free" cast. In this case, as well, the spells you get have been changed. You know get Fog Cloud, then Gust of Wind at 3rd level, and Water Walk at 5th level, the latter replacing Wall of Water.

Emissary of the Sea has also been buffed slightly - you can now communicate simple ideas to any Beast, Elemental, or Monstrosity that has a swim speed, whereas the old version only worked on Beasts - which, interestingly, makes this better than the equivalent feature for Sea Elves, which still only works for Beasts.

    The only potential nerf here is that you lose Wall of Water in favor of Water Walk. These are very different spells with very different uses, which make any confident buff/nerf discussion extremely subjective. But I can say that while my Wizard has a +2 to Charisma, he'd much rather use his +4 to Intelligence with his racial spells (yes, I rolled really good stats).

Yuan-Ti:

Here we come to the final revised race. Notably, this is no longer the Yuan-Ti Pureblood, and is just generally Yuan-Ti. I assume the reason might have something to do with the fact that “pureblood” is a… shall we say dicey term when D&D is trying to move past old racist tropes. Of course, the irony is that in the lore of the Yuan-Ti, the “purebloods” are the bottom social caste, as status is associated with how much they’ve left their humanity behind. On the other hand, that’s sort of old lore. Here we might get more of just a “snake people” vibe without necessarily putting a judgment on it. The upshot of all this is that you don’t have to be a mostly-human-looking person if you play this – you can now be a full on snake-headed person, which is cool.

Mechanically, we have a couple changes.

First off, Poison Immunity has been replaced with Poison Resistance, along with advantage on saving throws against the poisoned condition (the wording on this, which is identical to the wording for the Duergar’s version, seems to imply that you do not get advantage on saving throws against things that deal poison damage but don’t inflict the condition, like a green dragon’s breath – which is what I think the older Dwarven feature technically grants). This is a serious blow, as Yuan-Ti Purebloods were the only race that got a full damage immunity, rather than just a resistance.

Innate Spellcasting has been replaced with Serpentine Spellcasting, and share the same racial spellcasting changes we’ve seen throughout this suite of revisions (being able to choose Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma as your spellcasting ability and being able to spend appropriate-level spell slots to use the spells after you’ve cast them once for free per day). You also continue to be able to cast Animal Friendship an unlimited number of times for free but you can only use it on snakes.

Oh, and again, you can choose between being Small or Medium, which really seems to be grouping Yuan-Ti with the other “animal-people” races, who all seem to get this option.

So, here, I think we’ve got to address the loss of poison immunity. While the revisions bring this far more in line with other playable races, I do think that it means the Yuan-Ti Pureblood loses out on something that made it special. The other changes are, of course, buffs, and I think that even with the immunity swapped out or resistance and advantage, this remains a potent choice (the magic resistance hasn’t gone anywhere).