D&D 5E Any ideas for re-flavored mechanics?

[Giltonio_Santos]

Well, in the thread about fighters vs. barbarians, someone suggested a character with rage mechanics that is, in fact, a very disciplined warrior able to enter a battle trance. That got me thinking about other flavor changes that could be made to mechanics, in order to create characters that fit both the concept you want to play and the rules you want to use.

Someone has already talked about the possibility of using the eldritch knight with spells re-flavored as combat maneuvers, and I also like the idea of using the warlock mechanics to create a jedi-like character, but I’d like to know what other re-flavoring you’d be willing to use/see in your games. Any thoughts?

 

[77IM]

Depending on what you expect out of the Psion, you could do it with Sorcerer or Warlock with minimal changes.

It would also be trivially easy to change Eldritch Knight or Arcane Trickster to cast spells as a Sorcrer from the Sorcerer list. Arcane Trickster casting Cleric or Druid spells would also be a pretty sweet option. (You don't need this for Eldritch Knight because Paladin and Ranger work better.)

If you want firearms in your games, using the stats for crossbows should work just fine. If you feel compelled to differentiate firearms from crossbows mechanically, I'd do so via a custom feat rather than muck with the weapons' base stats, since a feat seems easier to balance and less impact on the game.

I've considered reskinning (heh) the Dragonborn traits to represent half-dragons that look a lot more human than dragon. You can also revamp the Tiefling appearance and back story to match earlier editions, while keeping the same game stats.

 

[McTreble]

I did a simple trick by renaming Monks to be Adepts (inspired by Shadowrun's magically enhanced warriors) to keep my theme western fantasy.

 

[trentonjoe]

We do it all the time. Some examples are:

Our Barbarian is a rich kid who wears blouses. He doesn't rage, he goes into a "precision strike".
We reskin demihumans and make them humans sometimes. A dragonborn with fire breath weapon has a tool that allows him to breath fire like a carnival dude.
Hold person can be almost anything. I have had shadows tackle a PC, fire surround a character, an earthen hand come out of the wall and grab a person.
The first time I ran shadow guardians it was with a goblin shaman. I had him surrounded by hundreds of 1' tall little shadow goblins.


It works really well with spells. THe players don't know exactly what is happening (they thought cloud of daggers was blade barrier recently and were scared) and it gives a real reason to try to make an arcane check to identify spells cast.