Dissecting the 5E D&D Humanoid Creature Type

January 22, 2022

Salutations, nerds! Today I’m examining what makes a man. And by this I do not mean what makes an adult or what makes a male and more like what makes a sapient biped. I’m taking a closer look at humanoids as a fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons creature type.

Humanoid creatures in 5E D&D

I know — it sounds so weird for something largely in a fantasy setting. Add the suffix “-oid” to anything and it makes it sound like an alien, am I right? I know. But basically it means human shaped and while there are a few outliers out there that are playable and not humanoid, like the centaur, for the most part humanoid means basically a person who can be reasoned with and reasonably played as a 5E D&D character.

“But Robin,” I hear some of you saying, “not all the humanoids are playable and what if some of them are evil and—”

Look, yes, this has been the discourse. We don’t have to do the song and dance here. We’re going to go ahead and put this to rest and not mention it again for the rest of the post. Humans kill each other at war all the time and there’s no reason you can’t have humanoids be the enemy in your 5E D&D campaign. It just means you have to actually show them doing things that aren’t beneficial for the adventuring party instead of saying it’s because they’re always evil. Bad logic, bad writing, no biscuit. We’re on the same page now? Good. [NERDITOR’S NOTE: It’s also worth noting the 5E D&D Monster Manual explains how, “The alignment specified in a monster’s stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster’s alignment to suit the needs of your campaign. If you want a good-aligned green dragon or an evil storm giant, there’s nothing stopping you.”]

At this point it’s easy enough to just look at it like this. Humanoids are just people. Some of them have bad tempers, some cry easily. Some of them are just normal dudes by our standards and some of them can do things like fly and breathe under water. Which brings me to…

“Humanoids are the main peoples of the D&D world, both civilized and savage, including humans and a tremendous variety of other species. They have language and culture, few if any innate magical abilities (though most humanoids can learn spellcasting), and a bipedal form. The most common humanoid races are the ones most suitable as player characters: humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings. Almost as numerous but far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds.” — from the 5E D&D Monster Manual

Things Humanoids Do

Boy golly is it a lot of things, guys. We’ve got ones with wings, ones with resistances to damages, ones who spit poison. Most of the things you can find other monsters do there’s probably a humanoid who does it too.

Humanoids in 5E D&D are classed as bipeds with few natural magical abilities. Of course this probably means the ones who don’t come from your class. Not mentioning any names, sorcerers.

As far as classifications go this one is kind of a default. But the most important thing a humanoid does is have a culture humans can understand. If you can sit with them for a while and sort of get what they’re up to and participate in it if they allow then they’ve made the cut.

Five Humanoids of Note

Elf. They’re a fantasy staple and have been from the get go. See, you think I’m talking about Tolkien but there are elves in Norse mythology. Alfheim and Svartalheim are the realms of the elves and dark elves respectively, you see. And 5E D&D just can’t get enough of adding different elf types. I can’t blame them.
Goblin. Some species are classed as goblinoid. We’re talking actual goblins, hobgoblins and bugbears — the ones who are usually cast in the role of monster terrorizing the village. But they’ve made a real comeback for themselves of late and tend to be more, “I built this out of bubblegum and paperclips.” I love them.
Halfling. Here I come with a soft spot for the little ones. I’m a sucker for a good David and Goliath story. For heroes who have to think their way out of trouble. And being pretty short myself, and pretty fond of a good meal, there’s definitely a spiritual connection there.
Human. I mean. Obviously. Humans tend to be the default because presumably we’re humans playing this game, so when we’re writing about what’s different about other species it is from the human perspective. If you change the lens, humans become strange. To halflings they are tall and full of themselves. To elves they are stocky and a bit clumsy and tragically short lived.
Orc. It is not a secret I love orcs. They’re the bad boys of fantasy humanoids, all right? They started off basically just zerg rushing everyone and then by the time you got to 3.5 D&D it was a standard practice to roll a half-orc if you got a 3 because if you put that 3 in Intelligence it wouldn’t screw you over as bad mechanically as putting it anywhere else with anything else. Lo and behold, the orc barbarian. Now they have a reputation for being big, beefy and kind of stupid. You know what else is big, beefy and kind of stupid? Himbos. Give me himbo orcs. Give me smart orcs. I’m here for them.

Unless you’re Brian Colin you probably have humanoids in your setting. (And if you’re reading this, hi Brian! I’d love to play in Revilo again sometime!) Most of the playable races are of the humanoid type, the standard fantasyland is full of them and you have definitely been exposed to them before. So the question is what do you do differently with yours? Please, tell me all about it in the comments below and of course, stay nerdy!

*Featured image — A selection of humanoid creatures from 5E D&D. [Composite images courtesy Wizards of the Coast]