D&D 5E Tasha’s cauldron character thread

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Level 3 is the new level 1. Levels 1 and 2 are dead to me.

I honestly wouldn't be disappointed or surprised if 6e got rid of level one and level two. Everyone has their subclass features by level 3, and that's when the campaign actually starts.

 

[Don Durito]

I honestly wouldn't be disappointed or surprised if 6e got rid of level one and level two. Everyone has their subclass features by level 3, and that's when the campaign actually starts.

And we're getting closer and closer to 13th Age.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Okay, I have some characters brainstormed:

• Mountain Dwarf Guardian Armorer/Bladesinger that uses Booming Blade with his Thunder Punches, dressed in plate armor and wielding a shield.
• Ravenite Dragonborn Rune Knight that hunts down giants. He stole the secrets of carving runes from a giant in order to help the dragons eradicate the giants.
• High Elf Arcane Trickster/Bladesinger using Booming Blade and a Double-Bladed Scimitar (Revenant Blade feat).
• Fire Genasi Wildfire Druid
• Shadar-Kai Phantom Rogue, the Assassin of the Raven Queen. She kills enemies of the Raven Queen and delivers their soul trinkets to ravens, who bring them back to the Raven Queen.
• Kalashtar Aberrant Mind Sorcerer
• Kobold Beast Barbarian that uses their rage to try and turn into a dragon.

 

[cbwjm]

I honestly wouldn't be disappointed or surprised if 6e got rid of level one and level two. Everyone has their subclass features by level 3, and that's when the campaign actually starts.

At that point you may as well start at level 1 and make PCs as tough as a level three class, kind of like the power level of a 1st level 4e character. They can take a few hits and have a few abilities to make use of.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Okay, I have some characters brainstormed:

• Mountain Dwarf Guardian Armorer/Bladesinger that uses Booming Blade with his Thunder Punches, dressed in plate armor and wielding a shield.

Both plate armor and shields disable bladesong.

 

[Don Durito]

At that point you may as well start at level 1 and make PCs as tough as a level three class, kind of like the power level of a 1st level 4e character. They can take a few hits and have a few abilities to make use of.

Yep. As I intimated, 13th Age does exactly this. 1st level characters start with 3 levels worth of hit points.

But this is really not necessary. One just has to accept that it's not necessary to always start at level 1.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yep. As I intimated, 13th Age does exactly this. 1st level characters start with 3 levels worth of hit points.

But this is really not necessary. One just has to accept that it's not necessary to always start at level 1.

5e does it to a degree, by giving 1st level characters maximum hp, which is roughly double what they would have had in 1st edition.

 

[humble minion]

Choose the feature you want at the appropriate level - no more garbage like my Arcane Trickster level 9 feature that will never ever see use.

I think the rationale for WotC not going that way was because they deliberately wanted to limit choices to avoid the build-planning minigame that 3.x could turn into, and to avoid the necessity of balancing features against each other one on one. The subclass system has its weaknesses, but it gives a lot more design leeway if you think of a cool, interesting, powerful level 11 feature and want to design a subclass to use it, you can the subclass by giving it a weak level 14 feature, rather than having to do your balancing on the granular feature level. If people can pick and choose features from a list as they go, the decision spaces for system mastery shenanigans and broken combinations becomes much bigger, and you inevitably have to prerequisite-gate some of the features and then you're basically right back where you started in 3e with Pun-Pun.

It does limit character development choices as you level up though. Unless you're playing a spells-known caster, the only meaningful character customisation choices you'll make after level 3 are your ability score increases or feat selections, once every four levels. Which I do find a bit of a lack in the system at times, I admit - I'd prefer more but weaker feats, but of course that would open up the decision space for char op, as mentioned above...

 

[briggart]

At first glance, I did not realized that Tasha included additional subclasses for the Artificer, so I started to play around with ideas for psy warriors and soulblades. Then I went back to the Artificer, and now all I can say is:

"I am ... Ironman!"

 

[FitzTheRuke]

That's more a general complaint about 5e. I really don't like the subclasses kicking in after level 1 and feel they should all begin at first level.

Makes sense. I'm pretty sure they felt forced to do that to avoid front-loading classes when it came to multiclassing. Of course, that still happens, and they found a way to avoid the worst of it when they came up with multiclassing anyway. On top of that, they created feats that allow enough "little dips" into other classes to make multiclassing less important, so they could have gone with level one subclasses anyway.