Bee race

[sleepyhead]

Bee
Ability Score Increase: Your Wisdom score increases by 2.
Age: Live around 20 years.
Alignment: Tend to lawful neutral .
Size: Largely based on role in hive.
Speed: Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
Flight: Your base flying speed is 30 feet. Bees are unable to fly with heavy armor.
Hiveblood: During short rest you regain extra health equal to your Constitution modifier for each hit die spent. You may not regrow missing limbs with this ability.
Venomous Sting: You can use your stinger as a natural weapon that does 1d6 piercing damage and poison damage equal to your constitution modifier.
Languages: You can speak, read, and write Common.

Worker Bee
Ability Score Increase: Your Constitution score increases by 1.
Workers Unity: Whenever you use the help action your target may roll an additional dice.
Produce Honey: You can produce up to 10 servings of honey per day as an action. This honey functions exactly as the spell Goodberry.
Size: Your size is small.

Warrior Bee
Ability Score Increase: Your Strength score increases by 1.
Relentless Endurance: When you are reduced to 0 hit points but not killed outright. you can drop to 1 hit point instead. You can't use this feature again until you finish a long rest.
Savage Attacks: When you score a critical hit with a melee weapon attack, you can roll one of the weapon's damage dice one additional time and add it to the extra damage of the critical hit.
Size: Your size is medium.

First race for Hollow knight in D&D

[nickl_2000]

I assume this is for 5e.

A few small issues, but overall it seems fine.

Flying speed often has a rider that says you can't have heavy armor, did you leave it out on purpose?


Workers Unity: You gain advantage on help actions - Here's the bigger one. I have no idea what this is supposed to be doing? The help action doesn't require a roll and if anyone is helped they automatically get advantage. What is this supposed to be doing mechanically?

[sleepyhead]

Spoiler: Quote

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I assume this is for 5e.

A few small issues, but overall it seems fine.

Flying speed often has a rider that says you can't have heavy armor, did you leave it out on purpose?


Workers Unity: You gain advantage on help actions - Here's the bigger one. I have no idea what this is supposed to be doing? The help action doesn't require a roll and if anyone is helped they automatically get advantage. What is this supposed to be doing mechanically?

Forgot armor thing, I'll fiddle with it.
My group has been using the help action wrong then. We usually make it so that the person doing the help action has to pass it first to give the other person advantage, which is kinda silly now that I think about it. I'll figure out something else for Worker bees

[BerzerkerUnit]

You could go with super helpful. When the worker takes the help action you can reroll one of the dice.

You could also allow them to make a natural attack with a stinger where they roll their hit dice as poison damage.

[sleepyhead]

You could go with super helpful. When the worker takes the help action you can reroll one of the dice.

So like triple advantage?

You could also allow them to make a natural attack with a stinger where they roll their hit dice as poison damage.

Oh shoot yeah gotta get that in there.

[nickl_2000]

Spoiler: Quote

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Forgot armor thing, I'll fiddle with it.
My group has been using the help action wrong then. We usually make it so that the person doing the help action has to pass it first to give the other person advantage, which is kinda silly now that I think about it. I'll figure out something else for Worker bees

Yup, help is actually quite simple. I use my action to help a specific ally against a specific enemy. Before the beginning of your next turn the next attack they make against that enemy it is made at advantage.

Maybe triple advantage (ala Elven Accuracy) when you use a help action?

You could go with super helpful. When the worker takes the help action you can reroll one of the dice.

You could also allow them to make a natural attack with a stinger where they roll their hit dice as poison damage.

Yes, but once they sting they die.

[sleepyhead]

Maybe triple advantage (ala Elven Accuracy) when you use a help action?

Triple advantage sounds popular so I'll slap that on

Yes, but once they sting they die.

Oof
Good point but doesn't happen in the game so I'll let it slide.

[MagneticKitty]

Triple advantage sounds a bit powerful.. Maybe help action as a bonus action?

Either way, I think with their tiny wings they should have like fly 15 or fly 20. After all, according to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyways. Because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.

Are these half bee humanoids? Giant intelligent bees? Some description of appearance would be nice.

[sleepyhead]

Triple advantage does seem a bit powerful but I'm worried about breaking action economy with giving people advantage for a bonus action. I'm making 30ft standard for the races I'm putting out for the hollow knight setting. Compared to everyone else they are average height.
An example of what they could look like.

[Balyano]

Venomous Sting: You can use your stinger as a natural weapon that does 1d6 piercing damage and poison damage equal to your constitution modifier.

Hive blood seems too powerful. As written a level 10 bee with an unimpressive con of 10 gets an extra 100 healing per day. A bee with 20 con and level 20 gets an extra 400 healing per day. Seems a bit much.

Maybe instead of they add their con score once during a short rest when they spend a hit die to heal. So if you have con 15 and spend 3d8 hd you dont gain +45 healing you gain +15 instead.
Basically you get to heal you con score recharging on a short rest.

[sleepyhead]

Spoiler: Balyano's comment

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Venomous Sting: You can use your stinger as a natural weapon that does 1d6 piercing damage and poison damage equal to your constitution modifier.

Hive blood seems too powerful. As written a level 10 bee with an unimpressive con of 10 gets an extra 100 healing per day. A bee with 20 con and level 20 gets an extra 400 healing per day. Seems a bit much.

Maybe instead of they add their con score once during a short rest when they spend a hit die to heal. So if you have con 15 and spend 3d8 hd you dont gain +45 healing you gain +15 instead.
Basically you get to heal you con score recharging on a short rest.

I'll snag that sting if you don't mind.
Meant constitution modifier not score my bad.

[Bjarkmundur]

Sorry about this post, didn't realize you were doing Hollow Knight. I don't know that game so I can't help with the conversion.

Spoiler

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Yeah I'm on board making it more thematic.

We can use the bee wikipedia and the Giant wasp as baselines and add some features.

Awakened Giant Bee

Speed 10 ft., fly 30 ft.

Sting: Your sting counts as a natural weapon with the finesse property, dealing 1d6 piercing damage on a hit.

Honey: You can spend one hour foraging in a forest or a meadow to provide food for up to 5 creatures.

Beeswax: As a part of a long rest you can make a shell-like construction out of wax. You create enough wax to build a wall that's 10 feet across, 10 feet high and about 1 foot thick. Breaking through the wax requires a successful 13 Strength ability check and is perfect for securing caves or alcoves during resting periods.

Potent Poison: Starting at 3rd level, you can use your sting attack to deliver a poison, once per short rest. The target must make a DC 13 Constitution saving throw, taking 3d6 poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. If the poison damage reduces the target to 0 hit points, the target is stable but poisoned for 1 hour, even after regaining hit points, and is paralyzed while poisoned in this way.

You can use pretty much any poison you like, this is just a straight copy from the wasp, so not very imaginative.

You can even go full tolkien and instead take inspiration from folklore, where bees have strong ties to divination magic. This could be a special nectar the Bee creates and allows you to cast Augury once per day. I think it's cool, although kinda niche.

The bee symbolizes community, brightness and personal power. Follow the bee to discover your new destination. The ancient Druids saw the bee as symbolising the sun, the Goddess, celebration, and community. At festivals, mead was usually drunk - the main ingredient of which is fermented honey. source

Making a homebrewed race is a great opportunity to make every single feature represent the entire race. It's easy to get greedy and just give it all your favorite features, but that's usually doing the race a disservice. You should instead look at every single attribute and think "If this were the only feature of this race, and I would show it to someone, would they be able to tell me something about the race"

My kobold is a good example of this. Every single feature tells a story, and I think that philosophy helps your players to see a race as a living being, rather than a pile of stats.

Let's take a look at your features and see what they represent:

Hiveblood: From this I can guess that the bee has almost troll-like regeneration. This also would extend to giant ants and giant wasps, and as a player I would expect those creatures to be incredibly tough.
Worker's Unit This tells me that the bees are not hostile, and are almost always found in groups of two or more.
Relentless Endurance: If this were the only feature you'd show me, I'd assume you're creating an orc subrace.
Savage Attacks: From this I'd assume you'd be creating a natural predator of some sorts, or an orc subrace.

As you can see, only one of those features would ever help me get to the answer of "bee". Maybe these decisions were all conscious, and part of your design goal. But since you didn't share your design goals, it's impossible for me to tell.

[Lord Torath]

After all, according to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyways.

No, we've figured it out. Humans are good at stuff like that. Here's another (shorter) article: Explained: The Physics-Defying Flight of the Bumblebee.

The short of it is that each sweep of a bee's wing creates a small vortex above the wing, which creates a low-pressure area that "pulls" the bee up.

[MagneticKitty]

No, we've figured it out. Humans are good at stuff like that. Here's another (shorter) article: Explained: The Physics-Defying Flight of the Bumblebee.

The short of it is that each sweep of a bee's wing creates a small vortex above the wing, which creates a low-pressure area that "pulls" the bee up.

I know. It's from a meme. Don't explain a meme... XD

[KittenMagician]

Triple advantage sounds a bit powerful.. Maybe help action as a bonus action?

Either way, I think with their tiny wings they should have like fly 15 or fly 20. After all, according to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyways. Because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.

Are these half bee humanoids? Giant intelligent bees? Some description of appearance would be nice.

as a fellow cat im am inclined to let you know that when that quote was said (about bees not being able to fly) we didnt have all the laws of flight down (aerodynamics and whatnot). technically a human could fly provided they could flap their arms fast enough. just though id let you know. otherwise i think this race is alright more or less