Quick Build Sundays #1 - Dryad
Hey everyone! This is the first in a new series of posts I plan on doing, where I take you through a simple character build for 5e that can let you play as your favorite homebrew race concept without actually using any homebrew at all. I can't promise it'll be every Sunday, but I'm going to make an effort to at least post them more consistently than my homebrew content, since they're a lot easier to do.
Before we start, some simple ground rules:
Any official WotC-published material is fair game, especially the Custom Lineage race option from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.
No homebrew or Unearthed Arcana, period.
Builds can't require higher than level 5, and should aim for level 3 or lower. Feats are allowed, and multiclassing is allowed but only as a last resort.
Flavor is free, but sticking close to official flavor or using features that directly encourage reflavoring in their descriptions is preferable when possible.
The goal is to have fun. These builds won't be optimized or involve any number crunching, just picking a concept and trying to recreate it as accurately as possible.
And so, without further ado, I present the first quick build of the series - the Dryad! This version is based primarily on the Monster Manual stat block for dryads, which are a CR 2 creature.
Race: Custom Lineage
This lets us get 60ft of darkvision along with the Fey Touched feat, which we'll use to increase our Wisdom and get the ability to cast misty step and charm person. We can't get a true Tree Stride ability this early on, but a little flavor on misty step can take care of that, and charm person is an excellent replacement for the dryad's charm ability. I recommend taking Sylvan as your choice of language as well.
Background: Outlander
You're a literal nature spirit, the incarnation and avatar of a single specific tree. It only makes sense that your background should reflect that isolated, naturalistic lifestyle. For your background language, I recommend you pick up Elvish, and I personally like the pan flute for the instrument proficiency, though anything can work nicely there.
Class: Ranger 3 (Swarmkeeper)
As a nature spirit, you're uniquely suited to being a druid or ranger. I'll go with ranger here for a bit of fun with Swarmkeeper flavor, but you could easily do this build with druid as well, since they both get all of the spells from the dryad stat block.
The Druidic Warrior fighting style lets us pick up a couple of druid cantrips, in our case specifically druidcraft and shillelagh.
For our other spells, we want to take goodberry, entangle, and whatever else you feel fits. Make sure to pick up barkskin and pass without trace when you reach level 5! The Primal Awareness optional feature will also give us access to speak with animals, which ticks another box on our list, though we can't quite pull off talking to plants yet.
Gathered Swarm encourages you to flavor the appearance of your swarm to your liking - in this case, we'll get a little extra creative and have our swarm be a mass of roots and vines that we control instead of a bunch of tiny fey creatures.
And there you go! By level 2, you can be playing a shockingly effective recreation of a dryad, and by picking up Swarmkeeper at level 3, we can lean even harder into that magical fey plant vibe with some control over the plants around us. There are a small handful of things missing from this build, though:
We can't really get a true equivalent to Tree Stride, but you can flavor misty step instead and it should work just fine.
We can't get the ability to talk to plants just yet, but with Primal Awareness giving us speak with animals we can manage the animals part at least.
We can't get magic resistance, which is probably for the best anyway, it's a bit overpowered.
As always, you can tweak things about this to fit how you want to play. Maybe you'd prefer to be a druid, or even a Nature cleric! Even beyond that, though I hope this post gives you some inspiration on how you can start to think more creatively about what you can do without homebrew in 5e, and maybe inspire you to play the character you never thought you could.
If you have any suggestions for ideas you'd like me to try for this series, let me know! A reblog, ask, or reply are all great ways to get in touch =)
