Things that have happened since last we met:
- Worked on the next intended expansion for Strongholds for over a month until I was fully burned out and my brain couldn't crunch numbers any more.
- I think the tipping point was trying to make fantasy farms both balanced and somehow profitable. I possibly succeeded, but broke my will trying.
- My laptop, with all my content on it, now refuses to charge. Fortunately my content is cloud-stored and the laptop is being fixed.
- Work picked up. Quite a bit.
- Started building the third draft of my PSD template. You can see it at work in this project.
- And I'm starting a move from San Francisco to Seattle, so my house is slowly becoming the Land of Boxes.
I needed something nice and relatively light to make to reset my brain back into a homebrewing groove, and so I settled on this little project.
This originally started as a remaster of the Knavery paladin from so long ago, which, along with the Divine Arbiter warlock, I consider outmoded and imbalanced earlier work. The Knavery paladin was something I made to test the limits of a class' central theme, to see how far I could push the envelope before I pushed too far.
Turns out, making a paladin into a rogue is definitely pushing too far. Still, though, there's plenty of room for paladins to be dark and stealthy without stepping on any of the rogue's kit, and so I started re-themeing and re-creating a stealthy paladin option from the ground up.
How's this different from the last one? What a handy segue into
FEATURES:
- Variable Oaths to allow different patrons to have their own, personal say.
- Unique Channel Divinities allowing for small AoE damage or sneaking in heavy armor.
- Re-position your allies by having them jump through shadow itself.
- Go invisible, sneak up on your foes, all without expending spell slots!
- Transform into the stuff of nightmares and make sure your enemies have a really, really bad day.
CONCERNS:
- Flavor could be heavier, but I tried to make the option versatile to appeal to paladins of all alignments. The option practically calls out for it, but I'm still not fully satisfied.
- Hard to know the balance on Swarming Shadows. It feels alright, but might scale poorly.
- Umbral Jaunt may or may not be the most intuitive way to achieve that effect. I'll think more on this later.
- Nightcloak doesn't seem imbalanced at first glance, but I may be forgetting something about how invisibility functions.
WHAT I LEARNED:
- It's never too late to go back and start again from scratch.
