DMing with Charisma

The features in the last post don’t have a lot of points of divergence. There’s some that matter, like the condition immunities, and some that don’t, like whether an inflicted uses a slam or claws, but it’s still all mostly on a specific path. That’s fine. Not every feature has to provide several options for players, as long as there are enough choices in the class and those choices are sufficiently meaningful.

The first real choice we’re presenting in this series is the one at L3, when an inflicted basically decides what role they fill in the party: Continue reading →

The main problem I’m having in designing a class around monsters is deciding what features the class should have. One nice thing about class design in 5E is that I can give only some features to the class at large and give others to the subclasses, so I can limit certain features to a specific theme. For example, I may not want to let any old PC have a poisonous bite, but I could add it to the Weird Snake-Person subclass. Coming up with ideas that fit a specific theme is fun. Coming up with ideas that literally every monster could use is harder.

There’s one important thing I didn’t discuss in the post on class concept because it fits more nicely here: mechanical concept. That is, where does this class fit within the rules, or within a typical party? As paladins are intended for support and defense more than damage and sorcerers are intended for blasting and control more than tanking, what do I intend for the inflicted? I’ve ended up settling on “tough, physical front-line character”. An inflicted isn’t a magical class, nor is it expected to sit in the back row with a bow, nor should it be the face of the party in high-society negotiations. An individual inflicted can do all that, of course, but those aren’t character archetypes toward which the class is mechanically inclined.

With that in mind, and knowing that we’ll branch out from it further at certain points of divergence, what are the features all monsters get by default? In this in-progress, alpha build of the class, here’s what I’ve come up with: Continue reading →

5E is ripe for custom, homebrew add-ons. New material is coming out so rarely, it stands to reason that players themselves would feel a need to add the things they want into the system. The DMs Guild gives those players a chance to spread their materials out into the world at large with a bigger platform than any single website or blog could manage. Wizards has practically asked players to make the system their own, and that’s great. It means there’s room for me to add a new class. If there wasn’t room, that probably wouldn’t stop me, but it’s a nice allowance.

I do want to make the best class I can, and that means it has to follow good class design principles. I don’t want something I’ve slapped together on my lunch break; I want something that’s viable, that’s fun to play, that fits within the system but challenges some of its assumptions and provides an experience I can’t get from existing classes. There are plenty of materials out there for guiding a person through class design, and I’ve spent a lot of time in them, and a lot of time working on custom classes, over many years. I’ve found that the most important pieces of a class tend to be the following, in order: Continue reading →

I intended to have this post closer to the original one on the Warlock Problem, but I really wanted to get that post uploaded on the correct day. Such are the hazards of linear time.

It’s not a secret that I prefer having freedom in my character design possibilities. I’m of the opinion that a system should allow a player to design and run a character of their choice (within the limitations of the system and the narrative—if you’re trying to play a space smuggler in D&D, that might be interesting but you can’t be surprised when it doesn’t work). This role-playing game should allow players to decide their own role, not begrudgingly adopt one of the very few roles the game’s authors wanted the players to want. That means players should have some sort of options, so they can select the traits or skills or powers closest to their own vision of their character.

D&D doesn’t have a freeform character creation system where you can slap on any combination of traits as long as the math checks out. It uses classes. That’s not an issue, as long as the classes still allow some freedom of choice. If I’m going to be a fighter, I don’t just want to be the same fighter everybody else is. I want to put my own spin on it. It’s fine if all fighters get certain core abilities, even if they don’t fit the exact character I have in mind, but the fighter needs to gives me some sort of wiggle room so I can make it work for me instead of the other way around. Continue reading →