[5e DnD] Runeseeker Class (arcane half-caster)

[Sadrik]

Just talking to theme and not mechanics. An idea to open it up further potentially for players to conceptually explain where their character's powers come from. Runes are neat and all but some may not be able to fit it into their game. What about binding spirits, or binding magic, or pulling a sliver of your minds magic potential, all these in addition to runes as a potential for how these powers are granted/work. I like this better than the warlock, which fills the same design space. Well done.

 

[Ezel]

As I say in the fluff, the runes themselves can be completely refluffed:

There are many more runes than the traditionally known ones that evolved into the dwarvish script, most magical runes are ideographic, not phonographic, and their shape can change greatly from culture to culture, runeseekers learn their hidden meaning in order to activate their magical powers. While runeseekers most commonly use runes with a norse style, sometimes they take the shape of oriental ideographs, detailed glyphs, tiny alchemic circles, cuneiform pictographs found in pyramids or even simplified doodles found in caves that were inhabited by the first men.

In that sense using the word "runeseeker" for the class name might be misleading. It's like some sort of glyph master.

What about binding spirits, or binding magic, or pulling a sliver of your minds magic potential

The first one sounds like 3e binder or warlock, the second one like psion. It's not impossible to refluff this way, but some features are heavily linked to the weapon and to the whole concept of the runeseeker "engraving" his runes, especially the archetypes.
More than working by binding spirits or your mind's potential I can see the runeseeker easily refluffed as an "artisan version of a bard" getting magic out of the perfect mastery of his art, making stuff so good that magic comes out of it. This would still require intelligence since it's all about technique, not performance. That's not too far from the current runeseeker's soulsmith archetype. In this case instead of having runes on the weapon you can have just very beautiful engravings that give you inspiration to cast your magic.
Do you think this type of "artisan/artist" fluff might be better to fill in any campaign? I wonder how I could call the whole class at that point. Master Artisan? Mastersmith? Spellsmith?

I like this better than the warlock, which fills the same design space. Well done.

Thanks!

 

[Sadrik]

The first one sounds like 3e binder or warlock, the second one like psion. It's not impossible to refluff this way, but some features are heavily linked to the weapon and to the whole concept of the runeseeker "engraving" his runes, especially the archetypes.
More than working by binding spirits or your mind's potential I can see the runeseeker easily refluffed as an "artisan version of a bard" getting magic out of the perfect mastery of his art, making stuff so good that magic comes out of it. This would still require intelligence since it's all about technique, not performance. That's not too far from the current runeseeker's soulsmith archetype. In this case instead of having runes on the weapon you can have just very beautiful engravings that give you inspiration to cast your magic.
Do you think this type of "artisan/artist" fluff might be better to fill in any campaign? I wonder how I could call the whole class at that point. Master Artisan? Mastersmith? Spellsmith?

This runs up against the artificer too. The idea that you craft your magic is what the artificer is all about. I think this could fit that too. As a magic craftsman, this would be a pretty neat character. I like the martial-ness of the class. It is clear what it is doing and how it contributes to the party.

What I was meaning about those other things: binding spirits, or binding magic, or pulling a sliver of your minds magic potential, or drawing a rune; I like the possibility of those to be just additional flavor text for the abilities and features you outlined. So a runic weapon may just be a special attuned weapon and you may be binding spirits, or binding magic, or pulling a sliver of your minds magic potential, or drawing a rune to empower it. Those were just some ideas.

 

[Ezel]

Well, the artificer is more about crafting many different magic items, but I see what you mean.

I'm not sure about adding so many flavor choices by default, even now the players can easily come up with them themselves if they want to use a different flavor. 5e has usually very precise flavor for what fuels the magic of the class, wizards get it from study, bards from performance, clerics and druid from faith, warlocks from their patron, sorcerers from something inside them. But I guess you might be right, runeseekers have a specific flavor of what exactly they are studying to fuel their magic, which might be a little too specific. Going the road of a magical blacksmith/craftsman might require a lot of refluffing and rewriting, but I might do it at some point in the next months if I'll have time (unlikely). From that you can define the way you infuse magic in your weapon (or in your body, or on another creature's mind) as long as while you do it you add some sort of decoration: runes you study, simply too-gorgeous decorations, embedding spirits or a piece of your mind.

 

[RSIxidor]

Hi Ezel!
I may be trying this class out in a new campaign. It looks like a lot of fun. There's some stuff that our group was looking at that I thought I'd provide some feedback on. See what you think and if you have any responses to it.

The Elemental Burst is an awesome feature. We're looking at doing the area damage with a save (using the save of the spell whose damage is used). It seems like this fits better into the general system of 5E.

On Permanent Runes, we're limiting the number of spells I can have active from this feature to my Int modifier (assuming we get to 20, of course).

Blood Bounty seems strictly better than the Warlock's Blood Magic (Fiend Patron). Maybe I'm misunderstanding it.

I'm unsure on the runes that do damage+condition. There's not really any features that players get that do damage+condition that don't require a save for the condition (such as the Battlemaster manuevers, Monk's stuff, Warlock features, spells in general). We're thinking the save here will be the same as spell-casting DC on most of the condition-implementing runes.

Please do let me know your thoughts on this or if you've got any reasoning behind what we've been talking about. Thanks for writing up this awesome class and thanks for any input!

 

[Ezel]

Hi there! Thanks, I'm really happy you are interested in the class!

Elemental burst is a feature that will be used pretty often, you see, it already requires you to hit the creature and I don't want to have too many rolls in one single attack action, it slows down the game. Also, since the damage is already lower than smites and smites simply add the damage to an attack that hit, it would be pretty weak with damage halved (or canceled) by a saving throw.
Currently it works like Sweeping Attack in the PHB, with the only difference being that it damages an area instead of one other creature. Since there is a precedent (and a place to lift the wording off) I don't think it's too strange to make it work this way.
If you still prefer to add saves I would advice you to raise the damage to d8 and make it so that winning the save halves the damage (this was my original design).

Permanent Runes is a level 20 feature, like the druid's "infinite wildshapes" it can bring to some exaggerated results, it's supposed to sound extreme and could need rebalancing to a gaming table that plays mostly at level 20. I don't think I'll change it, but I understand that it might be needed. Still, considering the extremely long casting time the best you can do with it is: become constantly blurry, gain darkvision, gain weak telepathy with permanent detect thoughts, become permanently large size (with all the problems that come with it), gain spider climb, give a +1 to a weapon (when you have already better weapons), etc. Invisibility, Mirror Image and other stronger effects have additional clauses to end the effect so they are not as permanent as others. Effects on the enemy are basically impossible to cast on them with 8 hours casting time, so this does not really apply. As you can see permanent level 2 support spells don't stack particularly strong effects, at level 20 when compared to what a wizard can do, it's hardly an issue.
Actually I just noticed that I didn't specify anything about spell slots, with the current wording you can cast a second level spell with a 5th level spell slot and have it permanent, while that's an issue only in very few cases, the intended design was that you can only use up to a second level spell slot to cast these spells.

Blood Bounty is strictly better than the warlock's dark one's blessing, but dark one's blessing is a level 1 feature and blood bounty is a level 3 feature in a half-martial class, and archetype features in martial/half-martial classes are usually better than archetype features in full-caster classes (or equivalent, like warlock). If it seems like that feature, in the context of the whole archetype, might make the archetype too strong, I might consider changing it to: "you regain hit points equal to the excess damage of your attack" or something of the sort. Yet I still think this will never get to the level of ridiculous sturdyness of a moon druid.

The damage plus condition is balanced usually by the "once per day" requirement and very very short duration (or pretty pointless effect, like the deafness one). In this case to see if it's balanced or not you have to look at the DMG and the magic weapons, because that's where these features are modeled from. Then again, it is supposed to have less annoying rolls during play. Some of these features add minor conditions that are modeled from cantrips, for example frost rune adds some damage and reduces speed by 10 feet, this is based on ray of frost that does its effect every time as long as it hits. Similarly Storm Rune is based off Shocking Grasp.
If you do add a saving throw I would advice to make the duration of the conditions a little longer than "until the end of next turn".

Thanks again for the compliments! Let me know how the playtest goes, I'm really excited about someone playing the class!

PS: I just noticed that I didn't update the file on the forum to 0.8, check if you have an old version of the pdf. The version that I copypasted on the second post in this thread is too much of a hassle to update and should be possibly ignored in favor of pdf versions.

 

[RSIxidor]

I've been using the one from the Downloads section showing 0.8 so no issue there. Thanks for the response, good stuff to consider.

 

[slightlyprime]

somehow you managed to get all my favourite spells and favourite abilities for magic weapons and put them into this class and still make it appear balanced.
I really like all the fluff and it seems like it would be fun to play. I hope one of my players choose it as a backup character just so i can have one in my campaign.
This class seems pefect thematically in my opinion, thanks for sharing.

 

[slightlyprime]

I just read the doc more carefully and was wondering if ultimate affinity was too powerful. I could be misinterpreting it though I'm reading it as when you make an attack and hit every creature within 20ft then experiences the same attack. The reason i feel this is so powerful is the rangers multiattack uses an action and is ony within 5ft, i know that theirs is only lvl 11 and you have to roll attack for each creature as a ranger, though soul runes ability still seems very powerful as they have 2 attacks where they can hit every creature within 20ft if you rolled a high enough attack roll. just curious about the logic for that ability, other than that everything seems very balanced, in my limited opinion.

 

[Ezel]

I could be misinterpreting it though I'm reading it as when you make an attack and hit every creature within 20ft then experiences the same attack. The reason i feel this is so powerful is the rangers multiattack uses an action and is ony within 5ft

Volley at level 11 hits a 10 foot radius, whirlwind attack is pretty weak instead. Ultimate Affinity is similar, but it comes at level 15 with a larger radius and lets you do it twice per turn (the way to roll doesn't really change anything math-wise on the damage-per-round output). Both features ignore allies in the area like the evocation wizard's main feature. I'll admit that I'm still not too sure if letting the soul runeseeker do it twice per turn is the right way to go. With the current mechanics, when facing many enemies at once it still doesn't let them get to the same damage output of evocation wizards, so that's a good start, but it does outdamage the hunter.
I might change it to a "use an action to attack everybody in the area", like the hunter's feature, eating up one attack in the process, making it a really good option only when facing 3 or more enemies. In general I feel like the whole feature probably needs a general rewording, I even wrote "You can move your runic weapon magically as long as your hands are free and the runic weapon is within 5 feet of you" which is not the way I intended it to work. If the weapon is one handed you should only need one hand free, not two.
I don't have time at the moment, but somewhere in the future I might release a new version with this change and, maybe, elemental burst modified to work with saving throws (I really don't like it that way, but I understand that many players will feel it more balanced and similar to the original features if it will work that way).

Thanks for your opinion, it's not limited and it opened my eyes to a possible balance issue. Let me know if someone chooses the runeseeker in your campaign and especially if anything seems too strong or too weak! Thank you so much for the compliments as well. If you notice anything else that sounds too strong let me know.