Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8403165" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Looks cool. Overall I find it appealing and distinictive while still having a broad enough theme that it could support a healthy variety of subclasses and character concepts.The biggest issue I see (and maybe I'm just missing something) is that the non-Seeker subclasses would be the only character options in 5e with no upgrade in their no-resource damage potential. Everyone else gets cantrips that upgrade, or an extra attack at level 5, or Rogue sneak attack dice, but they are stuck with a single unupgraded attack with simple weapons and hand crossbows as the fallback all game long. My recommendation would be giving one subclass attack cantrips and one some sort of lesser sneak attack equivalent (or something like the once per round weapon attack bonuses some clerics get), and probably giving the base class Rogue/Bard weapon proficiencies.Also is the intent that the Archivist's Dark Knowledge Tactics and Foe unlocks damage bonuses for "their allies" but not for themself? This neither makes particular lore sense (the Archivist has the knowledge why can't they also use it directly?) nor is it in line with how most 5e abilities work. I don't think either of these abilities are so powerful that also letting the Archivist take advantage of them themself is going to unbalance anything. Tactics should probably be a 1d4 bonus, or at least something better than a flat +1 (which is both hardly good enough to be worth the character's action much less a resource besides, and not really in keeping with 5e's avoidance of lots of tiny incremental bonuses). In 3.5 I think it was against all creatures of the same type and lasted a minute, so if you are narrowing it to one round and one target it seems like you can safely up the bonus.Finally I think the Truenaming ability has a few issues. One is that, lore wise, either you inexplicably suddenly have the enemies True Name, and can probably accomplish something greater than stunning them for 3 rounds, or else you don't have their True Name. Maybe you just use your knowledge to guess something similar to their True Name and know how to stun them with even that? Secondly, set number of rounds effects aren't really the norm in this edition and 5e players aren't generally used to counting rounds of being effected by things, and three rounds is often as not just the rest of combat (and if this is a solo enemy they done, stunned 3 rounds might as well be stunned for a minute). Thirdly there is very little point to making readers do math of dividing character level by 5 for an ability when the character is already 15th level. Just say three rounds and at level 20 four rounds, if that really is the optimal math. Personally I'd make it a 1 minute stun, and then it could have out of combat, get-past-the-guard uses as well. Maybe they get additional saving throws on their turn any round they took damage if 1 minute seems too powerful.</blockquote>

Verification