Fairy | Player Character Species, and on tiny creatures

I've actually seen more than one fairy or pixie player character species homebrew before. Even so, I think fairy stories and tropes are really cute and sweet, so I wanted to give the concept a try for myself. I think it was a good exercise, because I really like the way it turned out!

Most of this fair is pretty straightforward; the lore is probably more or less what you expect, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I think the features do everything you hope they would do. This isn't necessarily a sprite or a pixie homebrew, so there's no Heart Sight or polymorph feature. But Pixie Dust and Voice of the Forest seemed on-flavor, and Naturally Stealthy just made sense. Finally, Pixilate offers some innovation that I first tried out with some monster homebrew that I may share sometime. Also, if you get the reference Pixilate is making, I tip my metaphorical cowboy hat to you.

Flight is always a tricky subject on species. While they can in theory be easily countered with arrow-wielding foes, that still means 1st level flight may requires a DM to go out of their way to "balance" the effects of the feature. I've treated flight once before, in my Rito homebrew for the Temples & Triforces compendium. There I used a Wings trait to make flight a little unwieldy; because Ritos don't have separate arms and wings, flying doesn't leave either hand free for spells or weapons. With fairies, though, that limitation didn't seem appropriate; I think we all have a pretty clear image of what a fairy is in our heads, and it includes separate arms and wings.

I decided to try to lean into the fairy imagery in a different way that I felt could be appropriate: burst-flight. A fairy can't hover between turns and will fall at the end of their turn. This kept the flight a little more under control (no hovering out of range, basically) and felt in-tune with the flavor of a fairy. Being so small and spritely, they flit between points of interest and places to rest, rather than flying straight along.

There's a final aspect of the fairy worth discussing: size. Fairies are Tiny. Reading similar fairy homebrew and responses to such, one might assume that there are problems with Tiny player species. Aren't they too small and weak? Aren't there issues with grappling and shoving? Don't their weapons do too little damage?

However, these questions are more assumption than reality. But they're very common mistaken assumptions. I fell prey to such misperceptions myself; my first draft of this made the faeries small and instituted several "workaround" features, such as what I called Diminutive Build, to make them "act" Tiny.

But as I received feedback and design help, the best advice I received was that the rules for Tiny creatures are already as robust as the ones for Small and Medium creatures. There's no particular issue with having a Tiny player character. Their ability scores determine their strength, not their size; they grapple and shove at a different size than Medium creatures, but so do Small creatures; and fairies can wield any weapon any other Small or Medium creature can. In fact, per Rules As Written there doesn't seem to be anything besides a DM's common sense to stop Tiny creatures from using heavy weapons even though Small creatures wield them at disadvantage (though I did add a rule about this in the sidebar, because it felt appropriate).

So, I ditched the workarounds and just made fairies Tiny. It was simple, and it was unproblematic. If you're still wondering if the drawbacks to being Tiny are too severe, remember that there are many boons to being Tiny. You can Hide in smaller spaces and behind shorter cover, you can slip out of prisons that would trap a bigger creature, you can ride on your companions' shoulders, and more!

Even so, I added diminutive weapons as a mechanism to help with flavor. Mechanically there's no need for diminutive weapons, but I think it just makes a lot of sense. And it meant I got to slip in a line about having a nail as a sword. I think those sorts of of "tiny scavenger world" tropes are so cool.