Lately, the rough drafts I've released have been really well-received, except for their mechanics. People love the themes and vision for certain class options, but (reasonably) hate the way I've done certain things.
Things like overload the last rough draft's first level with literally everything a cleric could possibly need. Whoops.
But you guys are very good at keeping my mistakes from being permanent mistakes, and the Winter cleric got a truly stellar round of criticism. Let's see what I ended up changing:
CHANGELOG:
- Added semicolon; intro is now more grammatically complete.
- Split Winter Acolyte into both itself and Frost's Fortitude, giving caster/melee options at first level similar to how the Nature domain does it.
- Frost's Fortitude applies medium armor to Strength characters, keeping the actual AC numbers very close to what heavy armor would provide, anyway.
- Rime moved to 6th level, and now gives its target disadvantage on their first STR/DEX/CON save, rather than disadvantage on ALL the DEX saves.
- Blizzard retooled slightly, now heavily obscures an area rather than providing half cover, and combos with itself to inflict disadvantage when re-applying Rime.
CONCERNS:
- I didn't change the level 8 ability choice at all. I know a few people raised concerns, but both options it offers are balanced, and I think having one facet of choice in the path is much more palatable than the two facets in the rough draft.
- Blizzard is still hard to gauge, but it feels about right for a once per long rest power.
WHAT I LEARNED:
- If it seems like I shoved too many things into one feature, I probably did.
This seems great, now, time for a suggestion, how about a blackguard prestige class, since your vampire class was soo good!
ReplyDeletePrCs are mostly a thing you want multiple classes to have access to. It makes sense that multiple classes can be a Vampire, because a vampire is a state of being. However, you'd almost never want a Wizard (for example) to be a Blackguard.
DeleteBeing a paladin variant, Blackguard feels like it should be a paladin subclass, likely one with special rules that allow you to switch into it if you "fall."
This brings it into direct competition with the Oathbreaker in the DMG, though, which I'm 95% sure is intended to be the 5e Blackguard anyway.
An Evil-leaning alternative paladin oath would be an interesting thing to have, though, so long as it's differentiated from what the Oathbreaker represents. I'll think about how I'd want to do this when I'm finished with my current project.
blackguard is more of an evil knight than a paladin subclass, it was its own class for quite a while too, and i can see fighters, rogues, barbarians, clerics, paladins warlocks, and bards becoming blackguards. thats like half of the classes! And i was thinking more of a cavalier/rogue mix with some utility or debuff spells, like hex or darkness, with some extra abilities like conjuring weapons or an evil mount, maybe even some new fiendish abilities as well. I'm only thinking this Prestige class would get 5-7 levels at most, but its great for players who want to be feared. but a new evil paladin oath would be great, maybe an oath of tyranny that had some intimidate or fear effects, that eventually allowed you to become a powerful demon, growing to huge and getting some powerful natural weapons and a fear aura.
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