Extraplanar Heritage feat - balance and simplicity check

[Sindeloke]

Rather than use tieflings, aasimar, or genasi in my setting (since they're all implicitly human, and mixing with otherworlders is common to all Kin), I've always just set up the various planetouched NPCs I've made as normal for their type, but with a couple extra thematic abilities thrown in. I told my players if they wanted to be planetouched themselves, they could swap a +2 at character generation for the appropriate feat to achieve the same (they're also free to just incorporate small cosmetic evidence of planar heritage, which is much more common than having any actual power, but obviously that doesn't need any PEACHing).

No one has ever actually wanted to be planetouched, though, so I never actually got around to making the feat. No points for guessing why I've come back to it now, but thoughts on making it as clear, simple, and balanced as possible are welcome.



One of your parents or ancestors was not of the material world. From the following traits, you gain four minor, or one major and two minor, which must be appropriate to the heritage you have chosen.

Major:

You have resistance to one damage type of your choice.
You are immune to a status effect of your choice.
Select one cantrip. You can freely emulate that cantrip. Doing so is not magical, and requires no verbal, somatic or material components.
Select one sense. If you do not already have that sense, you gain it, at an average potency. If you already have it, it gains exceptional potency (talk to your DM about what this entails).
A movement speed of your choice increases by 50%.

Minor:

You have a climb or swim speed equal to your walk speed.
Select a hostile environment, such as high elevation or arctic cold. You are adapted to that environment.
You do not need to breathe (though you cannot speak without air).
You do not need to sleep (strenuous activity still prevents you from resting).
You have advantage on saves against a status effect of your choice.
You may communicate effectively with a plant or animal family of your choice, and members of that family are generally friendly to you.
Select acid, cold, fire, lightning, necrotic, radiant, or thunder. You have a natural melee attack which deals 1d6+CON damage of that type.


You may also work with your DM to choose an ability which is not listed here, but thematic to the heritage you have chosen and of comparable power level.

So obviously even in this state it's quite long and unwieldy, despite already having a lot of "of your choice" and way more vague "talk to your DM" than I like. The senses bit in particular, I don't know how to convey in a straightforward fashion. The idea is that, say you don't have darkvision, well usually things with darkvision have darkvision 60, so you get darkvision 60. If you already have darkvision 60, maybe you get darkvision 120, or maybe you get the ability to see normally in the dark instead of it counting as low-light. If you pick sense of smell, maybe now it's super keen like a dog's and gives you advantage on checks using scent.

The final line is meant to encompass stuff that's extremely on-theme but also consequently way too bespoke to list out or even anticipate, like, "descended from an oracle spirit and thus has spidey-sense (+5 to initiative rolls)" or "touched by a spirit of madness (dissonant whispers 1/day)" or whatever. Could the entire feat essentially be just this line? Well, yes. Generally I find people are more creative when you give them something to build on, though, rather than just dumping them completely unprompted into the ocean (myself included), and obviously it's much easier to measure traits against each other and the rest of the game when they're pre-planned and analyzed vs ad hoc.

[Kane0]

Yeah seems fine to me, thumbs up

[Deepbluediver]

Doesn't seem overly wordy to me, and feels reasonably balanced, especially if you're spending the extra feat from being Human on it. I'm not sure the "build your own background" has as much impact for the RP perspective though.

Just as an alternative, what I did for my homebrewed setting was make Aisimir and Tiefling exotic variants (i.e. needing GM permission), but you could apply them to any standard race. So it doesn't HAVE to be half-human/half-outsider. You could make a Aisimir Orc or Tiefling Gnome if you wanted. And I kept the base stat-adjustments from the race (+2 Wis, +2 Str, -2 Dex for example) but swap the other standard racial abilities for ones more suited to displaying your Outsider heritage.

What exactly those OTHER racial abilities are... well, I keep changing them. Energy attacks and/or resistances repeatedly switch in and out, along with a whole host of random minor abilities, many of them passive. I can't settle on a good suite of abilities, but what you want sort of depends on the player. I do like the component of player-choice in your version; I may steal borrow that since I can't seem to settle on a fixed version of my own.
I don't want to derail the thread, but if anyone has good ideas for ACTIVE abilities for racial abilities, I'm all ears.

Edit: Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't let players choose to swap either the standard racial specials for Outsider specials, OR swap the basic racial ability-score adjustments for different ones. For example, you could choose to exchange either Orcish Savagery for an energy attack and resistance (or whatever), or you could swap Orcish boosts to Str & Con for bonuses to mental ability scores, maybe (Int/Wis/Cha/whatever).
Just kinda spitballing at this point.

[MrStabby]

It looks pretty good and in addition to being broadly balanced, it looks like it could be a good addition to the game in terms of fun and building themes. It does look like you have gone round most of the outer planes and made sure there is something on the list to represent each of them. This is good - I can be happy plating a planetouched of bytopia for example, or the beastlands.

It's hardly a super powerful feat for optimisers, though there are potentially a lot of strong defensive benefits - depending on what you can take. If you can take resistances multiple times it could be good for some classes (warlock using spells like armor of agathys might want some resistances) and it could be very strong in some campaigns when combined with its condition immunities (though the grappler feat is maybe the only thing I can think of that would proactively use this - be immune to the restrained condition and then pin people with no disadvantage to yourself). Other than that, being defended against frightened or charmed is still nice to have and a worthy part if a feat.

It looks a good job.

Edit: just realised it allows Frenzy barbarians to be immune to exhaustion. That is maybe a big deal. The resulting character might be very strong at low levels though maybe not too much give a) that barbarians are not really overpowered and b) it costs a feat.

Still, immune to exhaustion and some improved defences for a barbarian would be valued highly.

[Sindeloke]

Huh, good point about exhaustion. It's kind of unique as conditions go, though, it would make sense to carve out an exception. Or maybe just to ban frenzy barb because that's hardly the only thing that makes that subclass messy.

I do think it would feel more interesting with a more proactive bent, but the cantrip choice allows you to be reasonably creative with mage hand/thaumaturgy/minor illusion in the right type of campaign. Or mold earth/encode thoughts/etc once you branch out past core.

[MrStabby]

Huh, good point about exhaustion. It's kind of unique as conditions go, though, it would make sense to carve out an exception. Or maybe just to ban frenzy barb because that's hardly the only thing that makes that subclass messy.

I do think it would feel more interesting with a more proactive bent, but the cantrip choice allows you to be reasonably creative with mage hand/thaumaturgy/minor illusion in the right type of campaign. Or mold earth/encode thoughts/etc once you branch out past core.

I am not that sure how big a deal it is. At low levels there will be no maxed stats so taking this feat instead of an ASI means -1 to hit and -1 to damage. At the mid levels, if you take this you are displacing something like GWM or PAM, and whilst for some fights it will be a step up its a pretty small one.

At high levels that extra attack is on a class that stopped getting good abilities several levels previously. It honestly doesn't seem like it would break anything there.

I would be tempted to keep the ability as it is, you pay enough for it. It also works thematically as a number of extra-planar creatures do have exhaustion immunity (though the logistics of a fire elemental ancestry do not stand up to close inspection).

[togapika]

Select one sense. If you do not already have that sense, you gain it, at an average potency. If you already have it, it gains exceptional potency (talk to your DM about what this entails).

Does this mean you can take tremorsense? Blindsight? Heck, Truesight is a "sense" when it comes to monster stat blocks...

[Sindeloke]

Does this mean you can take tremorsense? Blindsight? Heck, Truesight is a "sense" when it comes to monster stat blocks...

Sure, at least tremorsense or blindsight. Probably not truesight; apart from breaking a lot of interesting gameplay at low levels, it's hard to rule on whether it's even a unique sense at all. Seeing into a border plane feels like its own unique biological function, but the stuff about illusions and being able to see what's there visually only really makes sense if it's a modification of normal sight. On the other hand, for some planar backgrounds, at least some aspects of truesight would be extremely thematic and offer some interesting roleplaying and plot opportunities, so I can see letting a player have it if I trusted them enough. Definitely a judgement call, though, yes.

But neither blindsight nor tremorsense are particularly impressive in 5e. Blindsight just means "you don't need light to be able to tell where a creature is." It doesn't let you read in the dark or see through walls or even stop you from walking into a closed glass door. It doesn't prevent stealth or give you any advantage on a search check whatsoever over a normally sighted character when trying to find a hidden creature in the dark. RAW it's even obscured by fog and defeated by normal invisibility. Basically it lets you do the Devil's Sight+darkness combo without spending an invocation, or on a shadow monk. Tremorsense might be better (provided your enemy's not flying, of course, or up a tree, or standing on a vehicle or piece of furniture, depending how lenient the DM wants to be), but even if you do come down on the side of the interpretation that it automatically locates Hidden creatures, they're still hidden. You just know what square they're in. The disadvantage/advantage mechanics still apply as long as you can't actually see them visually. They're both nice, to be sure, but if I look at the last five encounters I ran for a Tier 1 party, either sense would have mattered exactly once. Plain old darkvision was significant in three of them. That seems like a reasonable level of utility and/or power to me.

[sidhe_blooded]

Blindsight just means "you don't need light to be able to tell where a creature is." It doesn't let you read in the dark or see through walls or even stop you from walking into a closed glass door. It doesn't prevent stealth or give you any advantage on a search check whatsoever over a normally sighted character when trying to find a hidden creature in the dark. RAW it's even obscured by fog and defeated by normal invisibility.
do you have a source for this? the only rules for blindsight that I'm aware of are


A creature with blindsight can perceive its surroundings without relying on sight, within a specific radius.
Creatures without eyes, such as oozes, and creatures with echolocation or heightened senses, such as bats and true dragons, have this sense.
which doesn't say anything about not working on invisible creatures/stealth (that isn't hiding behind actual cover), inanimate objects, or through fog.

I don't think blindsight is particularly overpowered even with that as long as the range is lower, but it's stronger than darkvision or tremorsense within its radius.

[Sindeloke]

The source is just that the way 5e rules work is "a rule applies universally unless another, more specific rule grants an exception," and that line is, indeed, the entirety of the explanation of blindsight.

The universal rules that matter here:
Something can hide from you if it's heavily obscured.
Heavily obscured blocks vision and line of sight and causes blindness within its area.
If you're blind, you auto-fail vision checks, have disadvantage on attacks, and grant advantage to attackers.
If you're blind, everything is heavily obscured to you.

The only thing that blindsight changes:
You can perceive things while blind.

It doesn't say that you perceive things better than if you could see with vision. There's no clause about automatic detection, auto-passing Search checks, or anything along those lines (notably, in 3e, it did have specific verbiage about that). It doesn't say anything about objects and line of sight. It doesn't say anything about invisibility, which admittedly already is a piece of crap condition that doesn't work properly out of the box with any special sense, which is its fault and not blindsight's fault, but nevertheless. It doesn't even actually override the direct mechanical consequences of blindness (everything obscured, auto-fails, adv/disadv), but that's the obvious intent so we'll at least give it that one.

It just says you can perceive your surroundings when blind. That's the only thing it overrides. Everything else works normally. With no other caveats or exceptions, mechanically you're just seeing as though you weren't blind.

Which, in particular, means that "heavily obscured" still exists from any source other than blindness itself, and "cover" still exists, and those are the two things that actually gate hiding and line of sight.

Now, you might think, "well that's just a bunch of stupid, butt-clenched rules lawyering. An illusory wall shouldn't block blindsight even if it does say it heavily obscures, that's deranged. Come at the trait with a modicum of common sense and it's obvious how it's meant to function."

Which is fair - certainly I don't think anyone runs invisibility the way it's written, that would be stupid - but if we come at it from a common sense angle, we pretty much end up with exactly the same result. A bat, whose blindsight is meant to represent echolocation, comes to a thicket of incredibly dense shrubs. What happens? Its screeches bounce off twigs and leaves and debris without ever reaching the insects behind them. It can tell the thicket is there and can see what it is, but not really into and certainly not through it. That's exactly how that thicket would work in daylight for a normal creature: heavily obscured, blocks line of sight, obviously allows hiding. The bat's not blind despite darkness, but all the other considerations are still in place.

Or, in short, RAW, blindsight offers normal perception to an otherwise blind creature, and so all normal visual rules, like Hide/Search, lightly and heavily obscured, and line of sight, apply normally. Common sense ruling, the same thing, but probably with judgement calls made here and there based on the nature of the special sense.

[sidhe_blooded]

The source is just that the way 5e rules work is "a rule applies universally unless another, more specific rule grants an exception," and that line is, indeed, the entirety of the explanation of blindsight.

The universal rules that matter here:
Something can hide from you if it's heavily obscured.
Heavily obscured blocks vision and line of sight and causes blindness within its area.
If you're blind, you auto-fail vision checks, have disadvantage on attacks, and grant advantage to attackers.
If you're blind, everything is heavily obscured to you.

The only thing that blindsight changes:
You can perceive things while blind.

It doesn't say that you perceive things better than if you could see with vision. There's no clause about automatic detection, auto-passing Search checks, or anything along those lines (notably, in 3e, it did have specific verbiage about that). It doesn't say anything about objects and line of sight. It doesn't say anything about invisibility, which admittedly already is a piece of crap condition that doesn't work properly out of the box with any special sense, which is its fault and not blindsight's fault, but nevertheless. It doesn't even actually override the direct mechanical consequences of blindness (everything obscured, auto-fails, adv/disadv), but that's the obvious intent so we'll at least give it that one.

It just says you can perceive your surroundings when blind. That's the only thing it overrides. Everything else works normally. With no other caveats or exceptions, mechanically you're just seeing as though you weren't blind.

Which, in particular, means that "heavily obscured" still exists from any source other than blindness itself, and "cover" still exists, and those are the two things that actually gate hiding and line of sight.
Not quite, it explicitly is not your sight that you're using to do it. That's the whole point. I never said it let you auto succeed investigation or perception checks, but it removes the need for you to make some entirely. The things that offer heavy obscurement to sight don't automatically do the same to blindsight. If you're perceiving without sight in a fog or darkness or murky water or whatever then the things you're perceiving aren't actually obscured to you, so creatures can't hide from you unless they duck behind a wall or a reef or something, at which point perception and stealth scores come into play as normal.

Is blindsight not a special sense? It's directly under the sentence "special senses are described below" on pg. 8 of the monster manual. Sure seems like that satisfies the special sense requirement to detect something invisible to me.


Now, you might think, "well that's just a bunch of stupid, butt-clenched rules lawyering. An illusory wall shouldn't block blindsight even if it does say it heavily obscures, that's deranged. Come at the trait with a modicum of common sense and it's obvious how it's meant to function."

Which is fair - certainly I don't think anyone runs invisibility the way it's written, that would be stupid - but if we come at it from a common sense angle, we pretty much end up with exactly the same result. A bat, whose blindsight is meant to represent echolocation, comes to a thicket of incredibly dense shrubs. What happens? Its screeches bounce off twigs and leaves and debris without ever reaching the insects behind them. It can tell the thicket is there and can see what it is, but not really into and certainly not through it. That's exactly how that thicket would work in daylight for a normal creature: heavily obscured, blocks line of sight, obviously allows hiding. The bat's not blind despite darkness, but all the other considerations are still in place.

Or, in short, RAW, blindsight offers normal perception to an otherwise blind creature, and so all normal visual rules, like Hide/Search, lightly and heavily obscured, and line of sight, apply normally. Common sense ruling, the same thing, but probably with judgement calls made here and there based on the nature of the special sense.
Incredibly dense shrubbery offers cover to larger creatures if it's big enough, a bug hiding inside it certainly has the same benefit. That's not just obscurement.


or even stop you from walking into a closed glass door.

RAW it's even obscured by fog
I've got a couple questions from your previous post that weren't addressed
What is it about "you can perceive your surroundings" that makes you think it doesn't include inanimate objects? Are they not in your surroundings somehow?

Nothing in the rule for blindsight specifies darkness, why do you think fog obscures it?

Edit: I looked at the actual text of the obscurement rules and it doesn't appear that it's possible in RAW to gain environmental obscurement from blindsight at all.

without relying on sight

A heavily obscured area—such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage—blocks vision entirely.

[SyntheticHuman]

I worry about the ability to gain resistance to a type of damage like Slashing as early as level one with variant human. I would suggest potentially limiting it to elemental damage types so it doesn't get too strong for the early game. Other than that, it looks great!