Dear Heartleaf Games,

I would like to introduce you to a character I made using

your playtest material for “The Delver’s Guide to Beast
World”.

This is Boof.

Boof is a Bovine of the Bison variety.

He is a level 3 Champion Fighter.

He is incredibly broken.

Allow me to explain.

On the surface, Boof doesn’t seem to be all that offending. He’s using fairly basic features all found in
the Players Handbook.

He is using a Standard Array to arrange his Ability Scores, combined with his racial bonuses. The
Champion is a staple subclass well-known to even newer players.

The problem, of course, does not stem from his subclass or statistics. It stems from his racial features
and how they conflict with the subclass and an obscure set of rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
First, allow me to point out the lesser of the issues, which is present in Bovine in general.

Moving “at least 10 feet in a straight line toward a creature” is a very vague and easily abuseable
condition to fulfill.

With how this feature is worded, Boof can reasonably move out of range of his target and then run back
at them, sacrificing 20ft of his movement to gain free advantage on his first attack. Boof does risk
taking a hit from an opportunity attack doing this, but having a better chance to not only land an attack,
but also to triple the 1d12 damage of a Battleaxe on every first attack in combat, is well worth such a
trade-off.

In addition, there is no once-per-turn clause on the attack. If enemies are lined up in such a way, Boof
(at level 5, with Extra Attack) could theoretically split his movement to run straight at one enemy,
attack with advantage, then run straight at another and attack with advantage again. Again, doing this
will provoke attacks of opportunity, but Boof is attacking two enemies with advantage, with a
Battleaxe, with a better possibility to triple his damage on each attack.

Finally, this racial feature is affected heavily by the Champion’s third level feature, Improved Critical,
which doubles the critical hit range of Boof’s weapon. I shouldn’t need to explain why this makes the
feature stronger than it already is.
The other offending feature that I wish to point out is the core of the Bison, the reason you’d want to
pick this race.

I understand that this feature may have been worded in such a way because of a misconception that we
do not have “official” rules for large weapons in 5e.

However, we technically DO.

A D&D animator by the name of Zee Bashew brought this to my attention a couple months ago with a
video he made, and I would recommend looking at that video “Why No Large Characters?”, in which
he goes into detail about the myriad of problems with having a large character in 5e.

To summarize his biggest point in the video, there’s an obscure set of rules on page 278 of the
Dungeon Master’s Guide, in one of the sections under Chapter 9 focused on creating monsters.

This, in essence, implies that if Boof is able to pick up a large Battleaxe, the weapon should deal 2d12
damage, instead of the usual 1d12 damage.

The problem is only exacerbated further when “Head Down, Feet Forward” is taken into consideration.

With these two features combined, on his turn, Boof could potentially deal 5d12 + 2d4 + 3 slashing
damage on a crit range of 19-20, with reach and advantage, at level 3. The only restriction is that he has
to move 10 feet towards his target before he swings, and he makes opportunity attacks at disadvantage.
Now, Dungeon Masters are more than welcome to omit the DMG rules and use Unreal Grip as it is
most likely intended, but that doesn’t change that the DMG rules exist and players will attempt to use
them within the context that I just described.

Regardless, it doesn’t change the fact that the Bison’s features require finer tuning before they can be
shipped as part of the final product. I didn’t even go into how the Rune Knight subclass from Tasha’s
Cauldron of Everything could make Boof even more broken than if he were a Champion, but I’m sure
you can imagine.

I want to see The Delver’s Guide to Beast World succeed, and so I provide this PDF document to bring
these issues to light.

I hope you will take my feedback into consideration. I look forward to playing with this supplement in
my DM’s upcoming campaign!

Sincerely,

KardboardKing__