Greywander
2020-08-07, 03:41 PM
Creature types are a somewhat curious subject, and in some cases it can seem arbitrary which type a creature is filed under. For example, centaurs in the Monster Manual are monstrosities, while the centaurs in Ravnica and Theros are fey. IIRC, I've also heard that in previous editions of D&D some unicorns are fey, generally those found on the Material Plane or Feywild, while usually those found in the Upper Planes are celestials.
This subject has been brought up before, and last time I remember someone making the argument that a humanoid was just that: a bipedal, upright creature with two arms and two legs. I disagree. The Monster Manual does indeed say that humanoids are bipedal, but otherwise makes very little mention of the anatomical aspect of humanoids. Beyond that, the Monster Manual itself contains numerous examples that contradict this simple view of what makes a humanoid. Merfolk are humanoids, despite being definitely not bipedal. Apes are beasts, not humanoids, despite how similar anatomically they are to many other humanoid races. There are many creatures in the Monster Manual that are anatomical humanoids, but are classed as some other creature type, such as celestial or fiend. And then, of course, there is the entire category of giants. Giants are not a subtype of humanoid, as D&D 5e already has a system for dealing with creature subtypes (e.g. "humanoid (orc)", or "fiend (devil)"), rather giants are entirely distinct from humanoids.
What we can infer from this is that anatomy has no actual bearing on a creature's creature type, it just so happens that most humanoids are also anatomical humanoids. Another clue that this is the case is that certain spells treat different creature types differently. Charm Person only works on humanoids, not on giants, and not even on beasts. Protection from Evil and Good works on a number of creatures that are anatomical humanoids, but not on creatures with the humanoid creature type.
What, then, is a creature type? What does it mean? What is the difference between a centaur that is a monstrosity from one that is a fey? What separates beasts from humanoids? I'm of the opinion that a creature's creature type tells us something about the fundamental nature of that creature. Understanding the nature of each creature type can help us understand why two similar creatures have a different type, as well as when a creature's type should change (e.g. fallen angels becoming fiends).
For a rather large chunk of creature types, native plane seems to be one of the primary identifying pieces of information. Celestials are native to the Upper Planes, fiends are native to the Lower Planes, elementals are native to the Elemental Planes, fey are native to the Feywild.
Are there exceptions to this? That depends on whether we're describing or defining. I can say that celestials tend to be native to one of the Upper Planes, or I can say that a creature that is native to the Upper Planes (possibly with additional qualifiers) is a celestial. In the second case, asking if there are any celestials that aren't native to the Upper Planes is akin to asking if there are any bachelors that are married; by definition, a married man is not a bachelor. This doesn't mean that any creature native to the Upper Planes is automatically a celestial, but it does mean that any creature that is a celestial is native to the Upper Planes.
For fiends and celestials, specifically, they also seem to carry another part to their definition. Namely, they seem to be heavily associated with the alignments of Evil and Good, respectively. One could say that celestials are the physical manifestation of Good, while fiends are the physical manifestation of Evil. There are issues with this, as, while rare, non-Good celestials do seem to exist. This does imply that there might be some mechanism by which a celestial could become a fiend, and vice versa, but it's not clear if switching alignments is sufficient or if there's more to it than that. This seems to describe a fundamental part of the nature of fiends and celestials, but that nature seems to contain a certain mutability. All celestials start off as Good, but can be subverted to Evil, for example. If you encounter an Evil celestial, then it's because there is something really wrong with them. Being anything other than Good is unnatural for a celestial, even if it is possible.
Related to native planes are the aberrations. These seem to trace their origins back to the Far Realm, but it's not clear if this is their native plane, of if they even have a native plane. Aberrations might not be restricted in their native planes, with some aberrations being native to one plane while others are native to a different plane. The only common thread seems to be originating in the Far Realm. None of the other creature types came from the Far Realm, setting aberrations apart from all others. What, exactly, the significance of this is, I'm not sure.
Continuing the thread of native planes, we come at last to the Material Plane. Both beasts and humanoids are native to the Material Plane. I'm going to argue that monstrosities are also native to the Material Plane, as otherwise it would likely just have the creature type associated with its native plane. Beasts and humanoids are both natural creatures, whereas the defining trait of monstrosities is that they are unnatural, whether they were the result of a magic experiment or corrupted by evil (or good?) magical energy. Depending on what creation myth your setting uses, all creatures might have been created by something, but monstrosities always fall outside of acceptable methods of creation.
But what is the difference between a beast and a humanoid? Where is the line between them? This is something that could vary setting-to-setting. In some settings, it might be sapience/intelligence, however, the Awaken spell does not change a beast's type to humanoid, and intelligent beasts such as giant eagles and giant elk exist. Perhaps humanoids have a soul, while beasts do not. Do they have a different afterlife, or possibly do beasts have no afterlife at all? Perhaps the gods can derive power from the worship of humanoids, but not from the worship of beasts. Right now, there doesn't seem to be a specific definition of what makes someone a humanoid, but the particular definition you use could have huge implications. Perhaps there are a number of creatures that should be dual-typed as humanoid/X (e.g. liches being humanoid/undead), and the loss of your humanoid status (e.g. by becoming undead) might carry some drastic implications.
And then we come to the mysterious dragons and giants. Like with aberrations, there doesn't seem to be a clear definition of what these creatures are, or what their defining features are, aside from some kind of shared lineage. A dragon is a dragon because their parents where dragons, and likewise a giant is a giant because their parents were giants. One can imagine that at some point there existed a primordial dragon from which all others descended, and likewise a primordial giant. A giant is not just a big humanoid, and you could conceivably have a "giant" who was as small as a gnome. There is something fundamental that makes a creature a giant, and while this correlates to size, it doesn't directly depend on it. Likewise, not all dragons have wings, not all dragons are reptiles, and not all dragons have breath weapons, and yet there's something intrinsic to them that makes them dragons. You could create a giant, flying, fire-breathing lizard, and it would be a monstrosity, not a dragon. Giants and dragons are both ancient races, and their origins and nature are possibly beyond mortal ken. Despite this, we "know one when we see one", and we can recognize that there is a fundamental difference between these creatures and others.
Now we come to creature types that are more... biological in their definitions. Constructs are generally built, not born. However, the azer is an elemental, and warforged are humanoids. Constructs are typically non-biological, though see the flesh golem. Constructs, it seems, are somewhat difficult to nail down. Perhaps the defining trait of a construct is that they are not truly alive, but merely given a semblance of life. Robots, if you will. But what if you made a robot that was truly alive? Would it be a construct, or a humanoid, or what? I suppose the warforged gives us our answer, but perhaps that is merely a function of them having a biological element to their construction (namely, wood).
Plants are pretty straightforward, including not just plants but fungus as well. It's probably safe to say that plants include anything vaguely plant-like, such as coral and sponges, despite these both actually being animals, but would exclude things like giant viruses and amoebas. "Plants + fungus" is too narrow, while "anything not an animal" is too broad. This could be a topic of heavy debate, I just don't think most people care enough about it. Just about every creature you encounter is either (a) clearly not a plant type, or (b) clearly a plant or fungus, and the gray area is rather narrow and not of interest to most people.
Now for perhaps the oddest creature type of all: the ooze. Why does this exist? What makes something an ooze? Why aren't these just monstrosities? Was it really necessary to create an entire creature type for one very specific niche of creature? As far as I can tell, this is a legacy creature type, from an era where creature types had intrinsic qualities. In D&D 5e, it's not uncommon for creatures of the same type to share certain traits, but those traits are always bestowed independently of their creature type. For example, most undead don't need air, food, drink, or sleep (but see vampires, which only don't need air), are immune to poison (except, again, vampires) and exhaustion (except vampires and zombies). In other words, previous editions used to have special rules attached to different creature types, while 5e does not. You could change all oozes to monstrosities and virtually nothing would change. I don't even know if there are any spells, class features, or other abilities that specifically interact with oozes or monstrosities, aside from the ranger's Favored Enemy.
Lastly are the undead. These guys are kind of weird, because there exist both "native" undead, i.e. creatures that were always undead and never alive, and "artificial" undead, i.e. creatures that were once living but became undead. Most native undead seem to be native to either the Shadowfell or the Negative Energy Plane (see the nightwalker), whereas artificial undead presumably retain their previous native plane. The defining trait of undead seems to be an alternative biology, which often includes the removal of all biological needs such as food or sleep. This altered biology makes many healing methods ineffective on them, requiring them to find alternative methods of healing. In fact, undead start to look awfully similar to constructs once you analyze their actual abilities, which just makes the flesh golem even weirder. Why is the flesh golem a construct while a zombie is undead? Another defining quality of undead seems to be an inversion of energy; undead seem to react to negative energy the same way a living creature reacts to positive energy, and vice versa, though it's debatable if this is still true in 5e.
I can't help but feel like undead should be used as a subtype, much like "shapechanger" is used. A lich would then be a "humanoid (undead)". The exception would be native undead, who would just have the undead type. But perhaps there's something intrinsic to being undead that is mutually exclusive to being humanoid. Unfortunately, our concept of undead seems to be mostly descriptive rather than definitive, so it's hard to say for certain what fundamentally makes someone undead, as opposed to simply being immortal and not needing to eat or sleep.
So what does this all mean?
Once you start taking creature types as definitive, rather than descriptive, you can end up assigning creature types to creatures that fit the definition but not the description.
I've already mentioned small giants. As long as a creature is descended from giants, and retains whatever that fundamental essence is that defines giants, they can be any size. Goliaths are related to giants, but lack that fundamental essence, instead becoming humanoids. This seems to be a common theme with humanoids that breed with other creature types: the offspring retains certain aspects of the non-humanoid parent, but becomes a humanoid.
By understanding what the fundamental component of a creature type is, you can end up with something that doesn't seem to fit, but it does match the definition. A good example of this would be non-humanoid creatures that think, act, and, fundamentally, are humanoids in all but anatomy.
Anthropomorphic animals are a good example of this. We already have official examples with things like tabaxi and lizardfolk, but these examples are highly anthropomorphized. What about a creature that is very unanthropomorphic? The best example I can think of are the ponies from MLP:FiM; anatomically they are basically stylized cartoon horses, but mentally they think and act like humans would. Despite their anatomy, they are clearly not beasts. They'd probably best be classified as fey, but if we assumed we had a race like the ponies, but native to the Material Plane, I'd argue that they should be classed as humanoids. Regardless of their physical appearance, they still possess whatever it is that fundamentally makes a creature a humanoid rather than a beast, whether that is sapience, a soul, or what have you.
This doesn't just apply to sapient animal races, but also explains why merfolk are humanoids, and it opens up the possibility of classing centaurs as humanoids. You could have a creature that is very different anatomically from a humanoid, but still class it as a humanoid, like a race of jellyfish-people.
However, all of this has made me start wondering if perhaps the whole "creature type" think should be reworked entirely. This could be as simple as splitting it into "native plane" and "fundamental nature", or it might just be a series of clearly defined labels that can be combined as necessary to fully describe a creature. A celestial fiend might be kind of weird, but one could easily imagine something like a celestial beast, which acts like a normal beast except it is native to the Upper Planes. It's not entirely clear if creature types are merely meta classifications to make it easier for players and DMs to play the game, of if they are real in-universe qualities, but it seems to be the latter. This is why the current system kind of confuses me; labeling something as, say, a "celestial" actually means something, in-universe, but I'm not entirely clear what it actually is or how that differs from a different creature type. It just seems to be a hodgepodge of legacy material that is vaguely meaningful and somewhat useful.
TL;DR, talking cats can be humanoids, giants can be smol, why does ooze even exist, and what is it is even the difference even between construct and undead. Sponsored by Ravine: Shadow Ledges. Thanks for listening to my TED talk, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Eat your vegatles.
Anyway, I don't know why I spent so much time typing this out. Probably I'm just procrastinating doing something else I need to be doing. But since I went through the effort, you might as well tell my your thoughts.
This subject has been brought up before, and last time I remember someone making the argument that a humanoid was just that: a bipedal, upright creature with two arms and two legs. I disagree. The Monster Manual does indeed say that humanoids are bipedal, but otherwise makes very little mention of the anatomical aspect of humanoids. Beyond that, the Monster Manual itself contains numerous examples that contradict this simple view of what makes a humanoid. Merfolk are humanoids, despite being definitely not bipedal. Apes are beasts, not humanoids, despite how similar anatomically they are to many other humanoid races. There are many creatures in the Monster Manual that are anatomical humanoids, but are classed as some other creature type, such as celestial or fiend. And then, of course, there is the entire category of giants. Giants are not a subtype of humanoid, as D&D 5e already has a system for dealing with creature subtypes (e.g. "humanoid (orc)", or "fiend (devil)"), rather giants are entirely distinct from humanoids.
What we can infer from this is that anatomy has no actual bearing on a creature's creature type, it just so happens that most humanoids are also anatomical humanoids. Another clue that this is the case is that certain spells treat different creature types differently. Charm Person only works on humanoids, not on giants, and not even on beasts. Protection from Evil and Good works on a number of creatures that are anatomical humanoids, but not on creatures with the humanoid creature type.
What, then, is a creature type? What does it mean? What is the difference between a centaur that is a monstrosity from one that is a fey? What separates beasts from humanoids? I'm of the opinion that a creature's creature type tells us something about the fundamental nature of that creature. Understanding the nature of each creature type can help us understand why two similar creatures have a different type, as well as when a creature's type should change (e.g. fallen angels becoming fiends).
For a rather large chunk of creature types, native plane seems to be one of the primary identifying pieces of information. Celestials are native to the Upper Planes, fiends are native to the Lower Planes, elementals are native to the Elemental Planes, fey are native to the Feywild.
Are there exceptions to this? That depends on whether we're describing or defining. I can say that celestials tend to be native to one of the Upper Planes, or I can say that a creature that is native to the Upper Planes (possibly with additional qualifiers) is a celestial. In the second case, asking if there are any celestials that aren't native to the Upper Planes is akin to asking if there are any bachelors that are married; by definition, a married man is not a bachelor. This doesn't mean that any creature native to the Upper Planes is automatically a celestial, but it does mean that any creature that is a celestial is native to the Upper Planes.
For fiends and celestials, specifically, they also seem to carry another part to their definition. Namely, they seem to be heavily associated with the alignments of Evil and Good, respectively. One could say that celestials are the physical manifestation of Good, while fiends are the physical manifestation of Evil. There are issues with this, as, while rare, non-Good celestials do seem to exist. This does imply that there might be some mechanism by which a celestial could become a fiend, and vice versa, but it's not clear if switching alignments is sufficient or if there's more to it than that. This seems to describe a fundamental part of the nature of fiends and celestials, but that nature seems to contain a certain mutability. All celestials start off as Good, but can be subverted to Evil, for example. If you encounter an Evil celestial, then it's because there is something really wrong with them. Being anything other than Good is unnatural for a celestial, even if it is possible.
Related to native planes are the aberrations. These seem to trace their origins back to the Far Realm, but it's not clear if this is their native plane, of if they even have a native plane. Aberrations might not be restricted in their native planes, with some aberrations being native to one plane while others are native to a different plane. The only common thread seems to be originating in the Far Realm. None of the other creature types came from the Far Realm, setting aberrations apart from all others. What, exactly, the significance of this is, I'm not sure.
Continuing the thread of native planes, we come at last to the Material Plane. Both beasts and humanoids are native to the Material Plane. I'm going to argue that monstrosities are also native to the Material Plane, as otherwise it would likely just have the creature type associated with its native plane. Beasts and humanoids are both natural creatures, whereas the defining trait of monstrosities is that they are unnatural, whether they were the result of a magic experiment or corrupted by evil (or good?) magical energy. Depending on what creation myth your setting uses, all creatures might have been created by something, but monstrosities always fall outside of acceptable methods of creation.
But what is the difference between a beast and a humanoid? Where is the line between them? This is something that could vary setting-to-setting. In some settings, it might be sapience/intelligence, however, the Awaken spell does not change a beast's type to humanoid, and intelligent beasts such as giant eagles and giant elk exist. Perhaps humanoids have a soul, while beasts do not. Do they have a different afterlife, or possibly do beasts have no afterlife at all? Perhaps the gods can derive power from the worship of humanoids, but not from the worship of beasts. Right now, there doesn't seem to be a specific definition of what makes someone a humanoid, but the particular definition you use could have huge implications. Perhaps there are a number of creatures that should be dual-typed as humanoid/X (e.g. liches being humanoid/undead), and the loss of your humanoid status (e.g. by becoming undead) might carry some drastic implications.
And then we come to the mysterious dragons and giants. Like with aberrations, there doesn't seem to be a clear definition of what these creatures are, or what their defining features are, aside from some kind of shared lineage. A dragon is a dragon because their parents where dragons, and likewise a giant is a giant because their parents were giants. One can imagine that at some point there existed a primordial dragon from which all others descended, and likewise a primordial giant. A giant is not just a big humanoid, and you could conceivably have a "giant" who was as small as a gnome. There is something fundamental that makes a creature a giant, and while this correlates to size, it doesn't directly depend on it. Likewise, not all dragons have wings, not all dragons are reptiles, and not all dragons have breath weapons, and yet there's something intrinsic to them that makes them dragons. You could create a giant, flying, fire-breathing lizard, and it would be a monstrosity, not a dragon. Giants and dragons are both ancient races, and their origins and nature are possibly beyond mortal ken. Despite this, we "know one when we see one", and we can recognize that there is a fundamental difference between these creatures and others.
Now we come to creature types that are more... biological in their definitions. Constructs are generally built, not born. However, the azer is an elemental, and warforged are humanoids. Constructs are typically non-biological, though see the flesh golem. Constructs, it seems, are somewhat difficult to nail down. Perhaps the defining trait of a construct is that they are not truly alive, but merely given a semblance of life. Robots, if you will. But what if you made a robot that was truly alive? Would it be a construct, or a humanoid, or what? I suppose the warforged gives us our answer, but perhaps that is merely a function of them having a biological element to their construction (namely, wood).
Plants are pretty straightforward, including not just plants but fungus as well. It's probably safe to say that plants include anything vaguely plant-like, such as coral and sponges, despite these both actually being animals, but would exclude things like giant viruses and amoebas. "Plants + fungus" is too narrow, while "anything not an animal" is too broad. This could be a topic of heavy debate, I just don't think most people care enough about it. Just about every creature you encounter is either (a) clearly not a plant type, or (b) clearly a plant or fungus, and the gray area is rather narrow and not of interest to most people.
Now for perhaps the oddest creature type of all: the ooze. Why does this exist? What makes something an ooze? Why aren't these just monstrosities? Was it really necessary to create an entire creature type for one very specific niche of creature? As far as I can tell, this is a legacy creature type, from an era where creature types had intrinsic qualities. In D&D 5e, it's not uncommon for creatures of the same type to share certain traits, but those traits are always bestowed independently of their creature type. For example, most undead don't need air, food, drink, or sleep (but see vampires, which only don't need air), are immune to poison (except, again, vampires) and exhaustion (except vampires and zombies). In other words, previous editions used to have special rules attached to different creature types, while 5e does not. You could change all oozes to monstrosities and virtually nothing would change. I don't even know if there are any spells, class features, or other abilities that specifically interact with oozes or monstrosities, aside from the ranger's Favored Enemy.
Lastly are the undead. These guys are kind of weird, because there exist both "native" undead, i.e. creatures that were always undead and never alive, and "artificial" undead, i.e. creatures that were once living but became undead. Most native undead seem to be native to either the Shadowfell or the Negative Energy Plane (see the nightwalker), whereas artificial undead presumably retain their previous native plane. The defining trait of undead seems to be an alternative biology, which often includes the removal of all biological needs such as food or sleep. This altered biology makes many healing methods ineffective on them, requiring them to find alternative methods of healing. In fact, undead start to look awfully similar to constructs once you analyze their actual abilities, which just makes the flesh golem even weirder. Why is the flesh golem a construct while a zombie is undead? Another defining quality of undead seems to be an inversion of energy; undead seem to react to negative energy the same way a living creature reacts to positive energy, and vice versa, though it's debatable if this is still true in 5e.
I can't help but feel like undead should be used as a subtype, much like "shapechanger" is used. A lich would then be a "humanoid (undead)". The exception would be native undead, who would just have the undead type. But perhaps there's something intrinsic to being undead that is mutually exclusive to being humanoid. Unfortunately, our concept of undead seems to be mostly descriptive rather than definitive, so it's hard to say for certain what fundamentally makes someone undead, as opposed to simply being immortal and not needing to eat or sleep.
So what does this all mean?
Once you start taking creature types as definitive, rather than descriptive, you can end up assigning creature types to creatures that fit the definition but not the description.
I've already mentioned small giants. As long as a creature is descended from giants, and retains whatever that fundamental essence is that defines giants, they can be any size. Goliaths are related to giants, but lack that fundamental essence, instead becoming humanoids. This seems to be a common theme with humanoids that breed with other creature types: the offspring retains certain aspects of the non-humanoid parent, but becomes a humanoid.
By understanding what the fundamental component of a creature type is, you can end up with something that doesn't seem to fit, but it does match the definition. A good example of this would be non-humanoid creatures that think, act, and, fundamentally, are humanoids in all but anatomy.
Anthropomorphic animals are a good example of this. We already have official examples with things like tabaxi and lizardfolk, but these examples are highly anthropomorphized. What about a creature that is very unanthropomorphic? The best example I can think of are the ponies from MLP:FiM; anatomically they are basically stylized cartoon horses, but mentally they think and act like humans would. Despite their anatomy, they are clearly not beasts. They'd probably best be classified as fey, but if we assumed we had a race like the ponies, but native to the Material Plane, I'd argue that they should be classed as humanoids. Regardless of their physical appearance, they still possess whatever it is that fundamentally makes a creature a humanoid rather than a beast, whether that is sapience, a soul, or what have you.
This doesn't just apply to sapient animal races, but also explains why merfolk are humanoids, and it opens up the possibility of classing centaurs as humanoids. You could have a creature that is very different anatomically from a humanoid, but still class it as a humanoid, like a race of jellyfish-people.
However, all of this has made me start wondering if perhaps the whole "creature type" think should be reworked entirely. This could be as simple as splitting it into "native plane" and "fundamental nature", or it might just be a series of clearly defined labels that can be combined as necessary to fully describe a creature. A celestial fiend might be kind of weird, but one could easily imagine something like a celestial beast, which acts like a normal beast except it is native to the Upper Planes. It's not entirely clear if creature types are merely meta classifications to make it easier for players and DMs to play the game, of if they are real in-universe qualities, but it seems to be the latter. This is why the current system kind of confuses me; labeling something as, say, a "celestial" actually means something, in-universe, but I'm not entirely clear what it actually is or how that differs from a different creature type. It just seems to be a hodgepodge of legacy material that is vaguely meaningful and somewhat useful.
TL;DR, talking cats can be humanoids, giants can be smol, why does ooze even exist, and what is it is even the difference even between construct and undead. Sponsored by Ravine: Shadow Ledges. Thanks for listening to my TED talk, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Eat your vegatles.
Anyway, I don't know why I spent so much time typing this out. Probably I'm just procrastinating doing something else I need to be doing. But since I went through the effort, you might as well tell my your thoughts.