Unsurprisingly, it's been a busy time for me and new content. When I take a hiatus, I usually generate a backlog of ideas that I come up with, half-finish, and then move on from before completing, because that's just kind of how my mind works. When I get back to work on my homebrew, then, it usually becomes a pretty simple task to complete my assortment of half-done ideas, give them a proper treatment, and produce some new content.
The daggermaster was a paragon path in 4e and a prestige class in 3.5, and both times (naturally) focused on using daggers to their fullest potential. In 3.5, 4e, and 5e, a dagger is usually an inferior weapon to use, strictly speaking, its utility in 5e coming mostly from the thrown property, making it an effective offhand weapon for when an enemy is just out of reach, and honestly not much else.
One of the popular conceptions of the rogue class is a character with a daggers in both hands, which is odd considering that such a build is usually suboptimal. The daggermaster has traditionally been the answer to this: part mechanical solution, part carnival knife-thrower, and part person-who-is-way-too-into-their-knives, the daggermaster has been a fan favorite in both editions immediately before 5e.
And now, with luck, I might be able to produce a viable 5e version of this beloved classic.
FEATURES:
- Use daggers for everything! Say goodbye to your thieves' tools, you won't be needing them.
- Trickshot anything you see, from the apple on someone's head to the sword in their hand.
- Two-Weapon Fight, but only with daggers because we need to make sure you're not just using this as a convenient 3-level dip.
- Hide knives anywhere you feel like, no one will ever find them.
- Strike with incredible accuracy, from far, far away! Give your daggers slightly better range than a hand crossbow.
CONCERNS:
- This has a lot front-loaded at 3rd level, but most of what's there are ribbons aside from Two-Weapon Fighting and the trickshot disarm. Not sure how much that matters.
- Unerring Precision is very good. I crunched the numbers though, and it does about as much as a dual-wielding thief rogue. Less up-front, but it catches up by the 5th round of combat.
WHAT I LEARNED:
- It's nice to do something simple and knife-y after making new invocations, spells, and all those bizarre sea-themed warlock features.
Yeah, i always thought that the rogue archetypes were more for flavor than anything, and the abilities were very situational, but this one gives a more broad use for the abilities. Also, it makes daggers finally worth using!
ReplyDeleteThe design space roguish archetypes exist in is really interesting.
DeleteUp until 17th level, NOTHING they get directly affects their damage. At most, they receive features that confer advantage or Sneak Attack, and have a great deal of quality-of-life and fluff features. It makes designing a roguish archetype a really good exercise in thinking outside the box.
You have no idea how long I have waited for a class like this... and it's exactly what I had hoped for.
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it!
DeleteI like what you did here, but I feel the trick shot disarm is a tad too strong.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm not a fan of immediate effects. I think if you add a strength saving throw equal to 8+prof+dex it would balance and scale pretty well.
Also, will you be putting any more work into Dragoon or Midnight Hour, or do you consider those pretty complete?
>I think if you add a strength saving throw equal to 8+prof+dex it would balance and scale pretty well.
DeleteOne thing I want to avoid is having two rolls to achieve an effect. If you hit the attack and miss the saving throw, for example, you'd end up dealing half damage and getting no reward for it. This would severely disincentivize using the ability in the first place.
The half-damage is the price you pay already for the disarm, and the roll to-hit is the check to see if it's functional. It DOES seem like a bit much to do it every single round, but I can't really think of an effective limiter for it that isn't very game-y.
The secret, hidden limiter there is that most people probably prioritize landing a full-damage Sneak Attack over a disarm. Thus, the disarm is mostly for the two-weapon fighting attack, if the main attack has landed and done Sneak Attack already, because a non-Sneak Attack hit does pretty negligible damage to begin with, anyway, so it matters less if that damage is halved.
There has to be a more elegant way of doing that, though.
>Also, will you be putting any more work into Dragoon or Midnight Hour, or do you consider those pretty complete?
I'm putting more work into pretty much ANYthing at this point. I think the Dragoon could probably use an extra pass, fighters are pretty hard to balance out, especially doing the things I'm having the dragoon do. I'm a little happier with how the Midnight Hour turned out, but when I start looking at it again I guarantee I'll change SOMEthing.
Just my opinion, but instead of reference the Two Weapon Fighting style, why not just make it so that you can add your modifier to a damage roll with an off-hand attack if you're using a dagger? This would serve to diversify daggermasters a bit in that one could use a shortsword for their main hand and a dagger in their off hand. When I design abilities I like to make them a little open-ended like that to encourage creativity with builds.
ReplyDelete"...because we need to make sure you're not just using this as a convenient 3-level dip." I don't personally agree with this. First of all, if 5E were designed to discourage dipping, Action Surge wouldn't be a 2nd level Fighter ability. And if someone wanted to just get a fighting style, they'd probably go one level of Fighter (and be tempted by level two for Action Surge), two levels of Paladin (and also get smite and some spell slots), or two levels of Ranger (and get advantage on all initiative checks, favored enemy, and Hunter's Mark).
I feel like Trick Shot can be restructured so that it allows enemy interaction, but still allows damage. I very much err on the side of wanting my players to succeed, but I don't necessarily like abilities that automatically do things, especially something that can be as powerful as a disarm (that also flings the enemy's weapon away). Instead, my suggestion is to make it use the Disarm attack action in the DMG (page 271), but on a successful Disarm, you also are able to deal half of your attack's damage. I'd also personally decrease trick shot's "throw range" to 5' instead of 10', because the Two-Weapon Fighting daggermaster can still chuck another dagger (with advantage, too) to knock the weapon away even further than the original 10' range, but if they choose not to, it doesn't more or less take an enemy out of the fight and suddenly make the encounter with a weapon-based boss easymode.
Once again, just my opinions. Looking forward to your future content. C:
>instead of reference the Two Weapon Fighting style, why not just make it so that you can add your modifier to a damage roll with an off-hand attack if you're using a dagger?
DeleteI want to make sure you can't make the offhand bonus stack with Two-Weapon Fighting. Don't want people to have a +10 to damage when they should be having +5, y'know?
> I don't personally agree with ... discourag[ing] dipping
Was mostly intended as a joke. As you pointed out, the most efficient way of getting TWF is through 1 level of fighter, which comes with a whole host of proficiency benefits besides.
>Disarm attack action in the DMG
This is a really good template for what I'd like the ability to look like. I'm not really down with the restrictions it puts on creature size or how a weapon is held, but it's a great base to use all the same.
> Don't want people to have a +10 to damage when they should be having +5, y'know?
Delete> I can understand wanting to caution that, though that's not exactly how the fighting style works, to my knowledge. In most cases, when an ability wants you to add a stackable modifier to something (such as Draconic Sorcerer's Elemental Affinity, or Warlock's Agonizing Blast invocation), it generally names the exact modifier to be used (in both examples, it states Charisma modifier). For the Two-Weapon Fighting Style, it just says you can add your modifier. In this case, I believe, it's referencing the original rule of Two-Weapon Fighting which tells you not to add it, and simply amends the rule for a character with that style to allow adding the modifier. As an example, it's like a program that opens a gate. If another command is given to the gate to open when it's already open, it's not going to try to open more, it simple has two modes; open and closed. In this case, with modifier and without.
> Was mostly intended as a joke.
> Ah, ok, I normally catch your jokes, too, don't know why that one slipped through, lol.
> I'm not really down with the restrictions it puts on creature size or how a weapon is held, but it's a great base to use all the same.
> I can understand the intent behind this, but what if it's a Gargantuan-sized creature that's holding a small hut in its clutches and you use trick shot, I imagine it would be a bit harder. Though, 5E is ultimately up to whoever is using it, anyway. That's one of its strong suits.
P.S. I hope I don't come across as condescending, that's not my intent, I just like to explain things in such a way that they can hopefully be understood the first time they're read.
>Two-Weapon Fighting and "you can add your modifier"
DeleteWell, that's about right, though I'd look at the text just to be sure:
"When you engage in two-weapon fighting, you can add your ability modifier to the damage of the second attack."
Now, that could be interpreted in a couple of ways. RAI, it seems to say that you'd add the ability modifier that you'd normally omit. However, RAW, it just says literally to add the ability modifier to that attack.
Thus, if you had two abilities that say "add your ability modifier to the damage," you'd add it twice, in the same way you could add two different ability modifiers from two different abilities (like CHA from a warlock's Lifedrinker invocation, and DEX from Two-Weapon Fighting).
>I can understand the intent behind this, but what if it's a Gargantuan-sized creature that's holding a small hut in its clutches and you use trick shot, I imagine it would be a bit harder
Hah! I like the image, and point taken. The limiter I *would* probably add would be on the size of the object itself, i.e. "an object that could be held in one or two hands."
...Though it occurs to me, I should probably specify HUMAN sized hands what with your example and all. Hmmmmm.
>I hope I don't come across as condescending, that's not my intent
Don't even sweat it, if someone is putting in the effort to write a detailed comment, they probably have something worth reading and thinking about.
One of the first things I learned doing this is to always take critique as it's intended to be taken. No one is trying to be mean to anyone, we all just want to play the best possible version of the stuff I'm putting out there. =)
> Now, that could be interpreted in a couple of ways.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough! I can see potential where certain groups would rule it one way or the other.
> ...Though it occurs to me, I should probably specify HUMAN sized hands...
I'd likely stick to one size category larger than the user. A Large-sized creature is a common occurrence, like (if I recall correctly) and ogre or troll. Or, if the character is enlarged or shrunk (via Enlarge/Reduce), it would scale to their effective size. Though, 5E doesn't do a lot of size scaling very well, so you could just as easily get away with saying "Large or smaller creature" and be done with it.
> One of the first things I learned doing this is to always take critique as it's intended to be taken. No one is trying to be mean to anyone, we all just want to play the best possible version of the stuff I'm putting out there. =)
A lesson for the ages. I wish more people looked at it this way (or constructively critiqued), though, unfortunately, the internet is often not a nice place.
"Sized large or smaller creature holding an object in one or two hands" definitely is the way I want to go with it. That way, no disarming a mountain held by a god.
DeleteThe internet may suck sometimes, but I truly believe people like you and I are the ones that can change that. Putting even a little positivity out there usually finds positivity in turn, as (almost) everybody appreciates a small chance to feel good and not be an asshole online. =)
Finally, a class for us normal, upstanding knife fetishists.
ReplyDeleteBlade artistry is nice. It's just...one of those abilities that just *works*. It's mechanically perfect for basing a dagger using rogue on, it supports a cornerstone of being a rouge and it gives a nice buff to any fluff.
It's not super flashy or awesome but it hits the nail right on the head.
Same for Trick Shot.
Subtle Knife is pretty nice. Especially seeing as that advantage gives sneak attack. You can use this to open up a fight by throwing both your knives at people, hitting for sneak attack damage and then pulling out two knives immediately to defend yourself with next turn.
Longshot and Unerring Precision are nice accuracy buffs. I don't have anything to say about them really.
All in all, you aren't breaking any strange, new ground with this unlike, say, the Pact of the Fathom Horror or the Circle of the City, but the concept's been pulled of very well.
Some clarifications need to be made, like a size limit on the disarming of trick shot and the fact that drawing a dagger is a completely free action and there's nothing stopping you drawing all of them at the same time.
Still, that does mean that I can go wizard 17/Rogue 3, learn time stop, take the daggermaster subclass and then become DIO.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/977/306/b5e.png
Except that Time Stop ends as soon as you affect another creature, so you could only get some free movement and single free attack off of that combo. I believe you also need a free hand to draw a weapon, mechanically. That's a cool idea, though. Strangely enough, I've had a handful of discussions about Time Stop recently...
Delete@ Isaac Sasquatch
Delete>All in all, you aren't breaking any strange, new ground with this unlike, say, the Pact of the Fathom Horror or the Circle of the City, but the concept's been pulled of very well.
Yeah, there's something really nice about not having to get crazy with a concept to make it function right and be flavorful. Not every subclass needs to have magic sea tentacles or pet raccoons coming out its ears.
>Some clarifications need to be made, like a size limit on the disarming of trick shot and the fact that drawing a dagger is a completely free action and there's nothing stopping you drawing all of them at the same time.
Good points all. I would point out the number of hands you have inherently limits how many daggers you can draw, though I suppose RAW you could probably draw (but not wield as weapons) a ball of daggers in each hand.
Sometimes, you have to account for the really, truly silly stuff people are liable to do, just because they can.