So, I disagree, and I’ll tell you why!
What you’d need in 5e to make it work are the following:
- Attack effects like booming blade, where if you hit they suffer damage if they move willingly. A feature that makes every attack do that is totally within 5e’s design parameters. One that deals the secondary damage if the target makes an attack that doesn’t include you would work just fine.
- Auras that do things like create difficult terrain and/or cause damage or restricting effects for enemies around you.
- Limited but not hyper limited or later level abilities to transform into a Guardian Form that buffs you defenses and your punishment/sticky features, and change your basic attacks. Sounds like a great central feature for a class! Could even be what defines subclasses, though that would then potentially restrict variety.
- Bonus: something like your aura grants allies THP and enemies take damage when they hit a creature with that THP. Maybe model it on Armor of Agythis so you can scale it.
I hadn't considered taking inspiration from
booming blade, that is a potential direction to take things, sure. The big issue, to me, is that third point. 5e enforces pretty strict limits on what characters are allowed to do, and the community at large is
hypervigiliant about certain things being "overpowered." (Consider, for example, how even people on this forum who scoff at the concept of "balance" react with dismay or scorn at the suggestion that you could have a Warlord regularly granting attacks to allies due to how allegedly unbalanced it would be if paired with Rogue Sneak Attack.)
Perhaps I am cynical and jaded, but at least the 5e books we have (more on that momentarily) are, as I said, a weird mix of too restrictive and too open-ended to make a lot of this work. The restrictions enforce some actually pretty draconian limits on what classes are even allowed to attempt, especially if they don't use spells. (Spells, as usual, are a huge problem point for D&D design...) And then on the open-ended side, there's so much that the books are silent on, or worse, don't even seem to consider in the first place. That is, the difference between "an empty space where maybe rules
could have been written, but there aren't any," and "rules for that
can't be written for this system, at least not without pulling out its guts and completely rewiring them," a la Level Up.
It doesn't help that there's an
intensely conservative fanbase that fights back against even the smallest deviations. I floated the trial balloon of a PrC once, years ago. The response, in multiple places not just here, was somewhere between "completely ignored" and "drowned out by negative responses." The very
idea of a PrC gets peoples' backs up, not because the concept of a restricted-length alternate class option is actually bad, but because several people think "ah, that crappy thing from 3e? Absolutely not ever, doesn't matter how much you change it." (If you're curious, I can send you a link. I never got the chance to playtest it--literally never found a group willing after more than six months, so I eventually gave up--so I can't actually promise it's balanced. But I gave it my best shot.)
Oh also
@EzekielRaiden I think the anniversary core books will make the game more compatible with having defender type characters, judging by the playtest thus far.
Just having a slowed condition helps a little.
It certainly seems like the "One D&D" playtest lacks the anti-4e animus present in the D&D Next playtest. We'll see what that ends up actually producing in the end. I've been burned enough times to not bother having any expectations, other than "more of the same." (E.g. the playtest dragonborn was deeply disappointing, even if technically the new version of dragon breath did a bit more damage than the PHB version.)
