Fairy
by Prince Phantom
I’m just going to come out and say it. This is the strongest race in the game, even stronger than races that grant feats at level one, at least on most builds. The only builds where this is not the best race are melee martials that rely on a large number of feats to function. Every other build works fantastically with this race, especially spellcasters who are already the strongest style of character you can make. Let’s get into why.
Fairy Features
Creature Type: Fey: Being a Fey actually has a few mechanical benefits and detriments. You are immune to spells like Charm Person and Hold Person, along with many other miscellaneous monster abilities that only target humanoids. However, there are also certain spells that you can’t benefit from like Protection from Evil and Good, and you are susceptible to similar spells. Also, if you write in your backstory that you are native to the Feywild, watch out for Banishment. I’d say this is more of a good thing than a bad thing, but just be careful when selecting and casting buff spells.
Fairy Magic: We get Druidcraft, Faerie Fire, and Enlarge/Reduce once per day for free and then we can cast them with spell slots. Druidcraft is a fine flavor cantrip, but the other two spells are great. Faerie Fire gives us an easy way to grant advantage to our allies or summons, giving us a great fight-winning spell that doesn’t really cost us anything. Enlarge/Reduce mostly exists here to fulfill the fantasy of being tiny sized, and while you can definitely do that to potentially fit into some places you couldn’t normally, the spell has much more utility than just that. Object blocking your way? Just shrink it to half its size and walk around it. Note that this has no restrictions on how big of an object we can affect, so have fun with that little nugget of knowledge.
Flight: Here it is, a fly speed equal to our walking speed. Yes, we are restricted to just light armor, but that’s just fine with me as we can still hold a shield, and flight will keep us out of the range of many enemy attacks. You’ll never realize how powerful flight is until you play with it, and there’s no praise I could give it here that is unwarranted.
So if flight brings this into the highest tier possible, what makes this better than the other races who grant flight? It’s the fact that we also get other great features, namely Fairy Magic. Flying races normally get about all of their power budget taken up by flight, meaning there isn’t much room for other abilities. Look at the other two flying races, the Aarakocra and Winged Tiefling. The Aarakocra gets useless talons and a bad spell, and the Winged Tiefling only gets fire resistance (though they also get to wear medium armor, so I’d say they are the second best). All it took was one other at least decent feature alongside flight to push it over the top, and it got just that.
Final Rating: 5/5, the best race in the game!
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
