D&D General D&D 6e ala Steampunkette: Structural thoughts

[Steampunkette]

As a designer, I don't see a problem in splashing.

Cool. So we're coming at class design from wildly different angles.

Sorcadin is fun! Coffeelock is kind of neat, but whatever. I haven't played Lockadin (and am not sure how it works? Doesn't warlock already have access to smites? I must be missing something) but I imagine it's pretty fun too.

Heavy Armor Proficiency, d10 hit dice, full weapon and shield proficiency. Take Paladin 1, then Warlock a few levels, then Paladin the rest of the way in order to always have short-rest recovery smites on hand even if you run out of Paladin spell slots for your long rest. Makes a strong "Death Knight" vibe.

And Sorcadin is fun! Because it ignores the identity of the character in favor of maximizing gameplay functionality. It's playing the game as a spreadsheet for maximum value.

Now that's not the WORST thing, obviously, lots of people enjoy it. I'd just prefer it to be more narrative and identity focused, personally. Which is why multiclass feats granting class abilities works better in my mind than just multiclassing straight up.

Sure, they are strong, arguably busted, but at least Sorcadin is, at least, interesting. Both sorcerer and paladin as singleclasses are less rich in depth than sorcadin is: she has to constantly evaluate two largely orthogonal options that solve different problems — is raw damage of smites better than utility of spells? The answer is constantly changing depending on what's going on.

I mean... no. Not really. The answer remains pretty consistent once you've decided to play D&D as a path to maximum efficiency: Whatever hits hardest is the most important thing to do. And that will typically be smites since eliminating one target from the encounter, entirely, is better than damaging a bunch of targets that will remain in the encounter after your turn.

Paladin mostly spends her spell slots on smites, sorcerer mostly spends her spells slots on, well, spells. The only reason not to throw smites (or fireballs) every turn is that you might want to save them for later. Such resource management might be interesting, but paired with a test of valuation skill it becomes deeper.

You even acknowledge that, here. Smites vs Fireballs is pretty much the gold standard of Sorcadin tactical evaluation. AoE vs ST damage.

But even a straight Paladin has to make the "Smites vs Utility" assessment. Which is why some PalPlayers prefer to smite only on Crits or when their target is low enough on health that the smite guarantees they go down, rather than doing it as often as they can.

Sorcadins use the larger spell slot availability to REDUCE that issue so they can smite more often without considering the utility question quite as much. And use Sorcery Points to make it even less of an issue.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine multiclass stat requirements just kill Paladin/Druids or Paladin/Wizards. I don't remember how the actual mechanic works (I think there are just number requirements? Like 15 CHA, 15 STR to multiclass to paladin?), but I'm sure it's just more feasible to combine two classes that share the primary stat. Having high INT to qualify for multiclassing from/into wizard and high STR and CHA to qualify for paladin is unlikely.

Eh. No. Not really.

It's Str 13, Cha 13, and then whatever the other class's requirement is. (hint, it's not a 15 for any class!) Sure, it's easier to multiclass as a Paladin/Sorcerer or Paladin/Warlock, but someone could multiclass into Wizard, Druid, or Cleric by having a 13 Int or Wis.

But let's go for "It's just easier".... so why is Bardadin not as popular as Sorcadin or Lockadin? You just need a Charisma of 13 and as a Paladin multiclassing you already have that. And since a Bard is a full caster you get "Just as Many" spell slots as a Sorcerer... Right?

It's because of the Sorcery Points. And for Warlocks the short-rest slots. Hell, Sorlock/Coffeelock is popular because it breaks the Short/Long rest dichotomy by giving the Sorcerer more sorcery points every short rest. Bard can't do that.

I don't see why a very high-stated character going Pal/Wiz would be weak. Especially since wizard is the only one who has access to many utility spells (which of higher priority — damage is handled by smites/fireballs) it must be perfectly workable. Necromancer/Paladin (Hell yeah! Death knight!) especially sounds like an amazing time.

But it isn't a popular pairing. Because the class mechanics don't line up, just like the Bard. It's the Sorcery Points that make Sorcerers more attractive, and the Pact Magic that makes Warlock attractive. In both cases it provides more resources beyond the game's standard values for smiting.

Overall, I think there should be more of that, not less — elevate all other cool combinations instead of removing/nerfing sorcadins.

I'm literally talking about setting up Multiclass Feats to take Class Features without Multiclassing. That would include the Sorcerer or Warlock picking up Paladin Smiting for themselves. That doesn't "Remove/Nerf Sorcadins" it just makes it unneeded to take 2 levels of Paladin to access and doesn't grant the armor proficiencies or increased hit points.

A different way to achieve the same overall goal which is meant to be less obstructive to class designs themselves.

features need to be tied with class level for power.
usage number can be tied to overall level(proficiency bonus)

As stated, barbarians rage damage bonus of +2 is no problem for MC, it would be if it would scale in power to +4/5 irrelevant to level of barbarian

paladin smites can be "normalized" in a way that you need 5th level paladin to spend a 2nd level slot on smite and so on, sure as a sorcerer you can juggle spell slots via sorcery points for extra 1st level slots but you would be still limited by paladin level in smite power. OFC it would be easier with spell points and say that you need 1 SP for +1d8 smite damage, amount limited by paladin level.

Definitely a way to go about it, sure. If I were hewing closer to 5e's level structure I might even go for it. Though it would GUT the Sorcadin in the same way that the Eldritch Knight got Warlock-Nerfed.

And to me that screams of bad game design. If you have a "Loophole" which allows people to play in a way you didn't anticipate and your response in the revamp is to close that loophole to stop people from playing what they're enjoying, you've gone the wrong way.

WotC should've embraced people wanting to multiclass Warlock-Fighter by making the Eldritch Knight -more- of a Warlock-Fighter, not less of one, while reining in the damage values to expectations. (Or altering expectations)

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

In any setting where XP is granted by killing goblins or accomplishing goals, every Wizard School will have a headmaster who passes out daggers and staves and says "RIGHT! If you want to learn magic we need to go kill some goblins."

"But Master, shouldn't we study magic?"

"HAH! No. You'll never learn magic that way! You need to quest to learn spells!"

If only there were some way to make leveling up a Downtime activity, rather than the explicit and exclusive result of killing people and monsters or finishing quests...

The DMG has the optional rule (Variant: Training to Gain Levels), where the PCs have to spend time and money to level up. I am using that rule in my current campaign. I am also using downtime and bastions to slow things down. The PCs started at level 3, and it has been 7 months of in-game time and they just dinged level 8.

 

[Distracted DM]

Re: multiclassing it really depends on what you want out of it. I hate the splash/dips, they're purely for #SickComboz. Multiclassing has been with us for a looong time, but I really dislike 5e's way of doing it (to be fair, it was originally supposed to be optional, stated that it wasn't tested for balance, but became assumed-core pretty quickly due to all those crazy synergies). @Steampunkette your above thoughts on multiclassing described it best in my mind, very well put!

 

[Faolyn]

I was thinking of that, yeah. Though, personally, I infinitely prefer a shifter to a tabaxi or leonine or whatever name someone wants to give 'catperson'.

Well (in case I wasn't as clear as I thought), I meant like "animal person" with traits done like those of a shifter, rather than an actual shifter, so you pick "Vicious Predator: Get claws and fangs as natural weapons that inflict 1d6 piercing (bite) or slashing (claw) damage" and then decide on your own if you're a wolf-folk, lion-folk, bear-folk, grasshopper mouse-folk, or whatever. Or your "Speedy Runner: Move increases by 10 feet and you can Dash as a bonus action" could be a horse-folk, rabbit-folk, or cheetah-folk, depending on whatever you want. It would be one race with maybe 5-8 traits to choose from.

(Personally, I prefer shifters too.)

That's not bad, yeah. Though maybe fluency in one and a couple points to spend, then add in Intelligence as points rather than languages? That way you could speak Ellowyn and Common well, and poorly speak 2-4 other languages.

S'truth. I'd be aiming for narrowing it SIGNIFICANTLY.

There wouldn't be a Dark Elf, Dark Dwarf, Dark Gnome, and general Underdark culture as four separate versions of the same thing. There'd -just- be the Underdark culture.

How you do the culture doesn't super matter so long as you cover the bases you need to cover and don't go overboard...

Because trust me: Someone pedantic enough could write 30 environments, 60 organizations, and a thousand upbringings.

True, but it also depends on how broad they are. Draw Steel has five environments: nomadic, rural, secluded (meaning things like monasteries, castles, prisons--places you don't normally leave), urban, and wilderness. There's two organizations: bureaucratic and communal. And then six upbringings: academic, creative, labor, lawless, martial, noble. There's definitely room for additions there--I can see three or four without even thinking about it--but not "30 environments" worth, because they're deliberately broad both in scope and in what sort of skill it grants (DS has skill groups, so you get a skill of your choice from, say, the intrigue group).

The first thing would be to figure out what each culture actually grants you. In LU and Tales of the Valiant, they give you lots of stuff. In Draw Steel, they give you three skills (one from each section you choose). In Daggerheart, you get one trait. Then you'd need to decide whether culture leans more heavily to, well, environment or upbringing.

You might also want to decide if there's anything else a character can have that can be used to indicate culture. In Daggerheart, there's a Wanderborne community--you're a nomad. But the game also has you make Experiences, which you can "invoke" to get a bonus to appropriate rolls. There's a list of examples, but you can make anything you want as long as it follows the guidelines. So you could pick "Circus Performer" as an Experience, and that means you don't need, in Level Up terms, Circusfolk. You could represent this with a free skill or tool kit.

Three big reasons come to mind.

1) Breaking Expectations
A player who is playing an orc raised among elves gets to be over 120 years old while most of the rest of the party is in their 20s and shock the rest of the table when they find out she's a grandma widow who outlived 3 human husbands. Some players are gonna love that kinda thing.

2) Establishing Narrative Weight
If the Wartorn Kingdom's life expectancy is a REDUCTION of how old you can get, rather than an expansion, it helps to sell the threat and make the party member who grew up under the oppressive regime into a bit of a martyr when they kill that tyrant and die from old age only a couple of winters later.

3) Gameplay Mechanics
"I've just stolen one year of your life. Tell me, how do you feel? and remember: Be honest. This is for Posterity."
piteous whimpering noises
"Fascinating..."

The first two things are flavor, though, and not mechanics. And the latter matters only if you bring back things that can drain life.

Now, I'm all in favor of the latter, especially if there are also things you can do that can make you get young again (which can be either an interesting quest for the party or eevil things that would make for a good villain). And I'm in favor of the former as well, because Gran'ma orc would be a lot of fun to play in the right party. But I'd advise against making actual mechanics for lifespans unless you are also going to have aging effects be enough of a part of the game for it to be worth it. Ghosts that age you through fright, fey or demons that trade you magical trinkets for just a year of your life, spells, magic items, and monsters that suck the life out of you and its represented by you aging rather than through attribute drain or lowered hp max.

(Speaking of which, bring back level drain in some variety--maybe not actual levels, because that's a pain to calculate, but permanent-until-magically-reversed drops in stats, hp level, or in number of spell slots.)

So, if you're planning on doing that, then by all means stat out lifespans--and for the love of all things shiny, don't have them all live over a century. But if you aren't, then just write it as flavor. "People of other ancestries who live in or were raised in Elven or Dwarven cultures tend to live as much as half-again as long as those who live in or were raised in their own cultures."

Also, I'd wager that city-dwellers would not have an extended lifespan in comparison to their rural counterparts--not unless that city has really good sanitation. Crowded areas turn into disease vectors, plus there's lots of water and air pollution. People may live longer in Elven cities simply because they're magically clean, not because there's better health care or fey magic in the air.

I don't like Pathfinder 2e. Why would I make 10 level Pathfinder 2e?

Honestly, I've barely even glanced at P2, so if I copied that, it was accidental.

wibble wobbles hand a bit

It's a matter of exponential growth of complexity, more than anything. I'm pretty good at eyeballing balance and then refining... but I don't think I'd want to try to balance every possible combination of "Barbarian" class features when they're each 2-3 "Feats" that need to be balanced against each other -and- against and with the rest of the class features moving up the tree.

I mean, you could disallow multiclassing... or get rid of classes entirely and turn everything into either feats or subclasses for a single Adventure class....

 

[loverdrive]

It's because of the Sorcery Points. And for Warlocks the short-rest slots. Hell, Sorlock/Coffeelock is popular because it breaks the Short/Long rest dichotomy by giving the Sorcerer more sorcery points every short rest. Bard can't do that.

Right! I know I was missing something! Sorcery points can be spent on casting a melee attack cantrip as a bonus action, with main action being freed for spells. And since you have virtually infinite spell slots, you both smite and cast.

Yeah, now I remember.

And Sorcadin is fun! Because it ignores the identity of the character in favor of maximizing gameplay functionality. It's playing the game as a spreadsheet for maximum value.

Now that's not the WORST thing, obviously, lots of people enjoy it. I'd just prefer it to be more narrative and identity focused, personally.

I don't think that's a splashing problem, and certainly not a sorcadin problem. That's just a player problem, and I'm not sure if it can be solved with design (or even if it's desirable to solve at all!) — if a plain fighter was busted, people would be playing plain fighters as spreadsheets. If very flavorful elven bladesinger was busted (or maybe it was? I don't remember), people would completely ignore all that rich lore. Hell, I'm playing in a Grimwild organized play, and that's a system with pretty much zero depth for optimization — and even there, there are some "spreadsheet" characters.

A friend of mine runs several games in the same running-on setting for a few years, and that setting has Xenon, a messianic kind of figure. He is based on a character I've played in a two-year long campaign, Xien Long, Dragonborn Sorcerer/Warlock respeced into Sorcerer/Paladin midway through. Completely broken character, after passing through the initial growing pains of any multiclass —GM had to give out powerful magic artifacts to let the rest of the party to catch up (I got a mostly useless trinket).

It also was one the best fantasy characters I've ever played, with nice arc of being a weak sickly schemer and turning into a strong warrior and even stronger sorcerer in the face of adversity, to save and protect those dear to him. Elric of Melniboné, anyone?

I'm not sure if that would happen if I was playing a character that isn't starts weak and ends up busted.

 

[Horwath]

If you want to solve multiclass problem completely, there is a problem in balancing feature value around a "Feat" as a unit of power scaling.

I.E:
every class gets class features at every level that is worth a feat and one free feat choice.

That free feat choice can be used for general feat(GWM, SS, PAM, HAM, etc...), a "multiclass feat", or a class feat that improves already gained class features.

multiclass feat would simply be gain one level of class features of another class. This could be limited to 1/2(round up) your character level, so at 9th level, with spending 5 free feat slots, you would get 5 levels of other class features.
So in theory, if you spend all 10 of your "free" feats you could get 5 levels in two classes.
Making you IE fighter 10/wizard 5/rogue 5, but with only 10 levels worth of HPs(fighter) and 10 levels worth of proficiency bonus and other level based mechanics. And no general feats to speak of, well, maybe 1 if you are human.

 

[Faolyn]

If you want to solve multiclass problem completely, there is a problem in balancing feature value around a "Feat" as a unit of power scaling.

I.E:
every class gets class features at every level that is worth a feat and one free feat choice.

That free feat choice can be used for general feat(GWM, SS, PAM, HAM, etc...), a "multiclass feat", or a class feat that improves already gained class features.

multiclass feat would simply be gain one level of class features of another class. This could be limited to 1/2(round up) your character level, so at 9th level, with spending 5 free feat slots, you would get 5 levels of other class features.
So in theory, if you spend all 10 of your "free" feats you could get 5 levels in two classes.
Making you IE fighter 10/wizard 5/rogue 5, but with only 10 levels worth of HPs(fighter) and 10 levels worth of proficiency bonus and other level based mechanics. And no general feats to speak of, well, maybe 1 if you are human.

Depending on how this is worked out, this could be very helpful in the monster department.

I'm looking at monsters from 3x and there's a lot of that "monster's favored class is rogue" type of thing. Only back then, you'd have to spend a bunch of time statting up a monster with rogue levels and then recalculating the CR based on... I can't even remember; 3.x monster design was a byzantine process.

Here, if each level is equal to one feat, then each level would increase the CR by a standardized amount, which would depend on how monsters themselves are designed (is CR 1 equal to a 1st-level PC or 1/4 of a 1st-level PC, for instance). It also would help to ensure that spellcasting monsters don't have unusually low CRs. Likewise, if you want to advance a monster, you could easily give them levels in a class. (Unless you want to bring back monster advancement more like 3x, where you just upped the HD and size, and then other things increased accordingly.)