Kender
by Prince Phantom
The Kender are one of the most hated races by the player base in all of Dungeons and Dragons. This is thanks to their penchant in their lore for being kleptomaniacs, stealing so much that they often forget where they even stole an item from. This led to inter-party conflict when the Kender player took this lore as an excuse to steal from the party. Thankfully, their lore in 5e has seemed to stay away from this side of the Kender, but you should never be stealing from your own party anyway. If your excuse is “it’s what my character would do”, then your character sucks and you need to make a new one. Now that I’ve got that disclaimer out of the way, let’s dive into their actual mechanics.
Kender Features
Fearless: This is advantage on all saves versus fear effects, and a once per day legendary resistance against fear effects. It’s rare to see a player character get an ability that lets them automatically pass a saving throw, so this is quite notable and powerful.
Kender Aptitude: Stealth is the best choice here, but if you’re already getting it from your class or background, there are some other great choices like Insight here as well.
Taunt: This is an actual, literal taunt effect, something that is incredibly rare in 5e. What’s more, it’s a taunt with a 60ft range. This is most easily comparable to the Defender Armorer Artificer and Ancestral Guardian Barbarian, both of which can inflict the same taunt status that this inflicts when they hit with an attack. Ancestral Guardian Barbarians can (and probably should) use a ranged weapon to inflict their taunt, but the Artificer has to be in melee. With a ranged taunt, we can use the ability and then move away, placing ourselves so far from our target that they cannot reach us to attack. The only downside is that we have very limited uses of this, whereas the other options have unlimited uses. That makes finding a build for this ability tricky, because we want to be a build that only sometimes wants to taunt. I’ll leave it to you to come up with that build, because I haven’t had much luck with it, but I’m sure it’s out there.
The Kender only really gets two features, and while both of them are good, they’re not really standout. If you want to play the taunter role, this is one way to accomplish that fantasy, but it’s probably the weakest as it relies on the target failing a save and has limited uses. Still, this race certainly isn’t bad, I just haven’t found the build for it yet.
Final Rating: 3/5
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