Editing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (section)

===No Monster PCs===
"Monster" races have a long, ''long'' history as PC options in D&D. And even 5e did give the nod to them. But, as mentioned above, it is ''very'' obvious that the creators' hearts weren't in it. Most of the most traditional monster adventurer races - [[orc]], [[goblin]], [[kobold]], [[bugbear]] and [[hobgoblin]], alongside surprise newcomer the [[yuan-ti]] - appeared in Volo's Guide to Monsters... except that the section outright states that they might not be "balanced". This itself would be bad enough, as it gives stricter DMs every excuse to ban the races, but it's carried out; the races were all over the place, with some being shockingly weak (the orc's harsh ability score penalties basically make it a worse half-orc) and others overly strong (between the yuan-ti pureblood's full magic resistance poison immunity, racial spellcasting, ''and'' darkvision, it basically gets an as-good-or-better selection of several other races' best racial powers). For Kobold fans, it was basically designed to make for a cowardly joke character with two strong support powers but a boatload of drawbacks, making them great for certain Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue builds but pretty lousy in everything else. The revised version in Multiverse of Monsters is a lot more versatile.

Fans of the Monster Adventurers trope were outraged, because with WotC's recent policy on reprinting being basically "we're never ever going to print out any revisions, ever", then they're always going to officially suck.

One sub-aspect of this complaint is found amongst fans of [[gnoll]]s, whose history as PCs goes right back with the orcs and goblinoids. See, despite the really mechanically strong and well-developed article on gnoll PCs that 4e got, 5e decided to render them completely off the market as potential PCs. From a race misled by a bad choice in patron gods, 5e gnolls were reinvented as little more than demonically-tainted hyenas turned humanoid lacking in higher thought patterns who don't even breed, but instead use black magic rituals to turn the corpses of their kills into new gnolls. Some people feel they might as well be fiends, since they lack the actual moral choices or thinking ability of literally any other humanoid, which makes their "humanoid" creature type feel rather lacking.

Happily, ''Eberron: Rising From the Last War'' has actually put some effort into most of these things, including giving all goblinoids plenty of write-up and focus, introducing a (mechanically-superior) orc playable race, and generally doing everything the rest of the edition hasn't in terms of enabling some of the most basic monster PC concepts. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything followed on by officially retconning the orc and kobold to lose the ability score penalties.