Level Up (A5E) Looking for advice on mixing

[WaltyCole]

Hello,

I was just wondering on everyone's opinion on allowing people to choose an o5e subclass is? Like, allowing a rogue to choose swashbuckler or an Adept choose way of the shadow in place of an a5e archetype?

Would you allow it? If so would you modify it or just leave it as written?

Thanks!

 

[Morrus]

We pretty much designed the game with that in mind!

 

[Stalker0]

I mean they are compatible sure, but balanced?…I’m less convinced.

Take the Fighter: If I can combine a battlemaster with the core maneuvers, I mean that is just pure gravy, creating tons of combos and effectively doubling the "maneuvers" you can perform. Or the Echo Knight, which adds incredible versatility.

The LU Fighter subclasses seem fine in context of LU classes, but if I can combine O5e subclasses it gets a little wonky to me personally.


Now the ranger for example, I think O5e ranger subclasses would work well in many cases, and help to provide archetypes that don't exist with the LU ones currently. The O5e cleric ones are in the same boat (minus the hokey twilight or peace cleric kind of stuff).

 

[Faolyn]

I think it really depends on the combo.

With o5e fighter archetypes, for instance, don't give any extra maneuver traditions (obviously) whereas all the A5e archetypes do, so you're going to have slightly less versatile characters. But some of the o5e archetypes are very magical, which makes up for that. In my mind, there's no reason to take the nonmagical o5e archetypes with the A5e class.

Without actually going through every A5e class/o5e archetype combo (I'm sure someone will), it's impossible to say if any of them are going to be broken. So far the only thing I noticed--way back during playtest time, so I don't know yet if it's still an issue--is that the different number of druidic wildshapes may not work well with o5e archetypes that rely on spending wildshapes for different things (like Spores druids). I haven't tested this out yet, though.

 

[Larnievc]

Hello,

I was just wondering on everyone's opinion on allowing people to choose an o5e subclass is? Like, allowing a rogue to choose swashbuckler or an Adept choose way of the shadow in place of an a5e archetype?

Would you allow it? If so would you modify it or just leave it as written?

Thanks!

Yeah, I do. There might be some edge cases but I’m sure they are easily fixed.

 

[Anselm]

There might be some edge cases

I think I will encourage looking at the A5E subclasses to fill the players goal first to avoid this, but if they can't find something I'll definitely open it up to the list I had previously allowed for subclass. That's a mix of official things that are allowed, official things that are banned, and 3rd party things I allow. I've done a few comparisons from A5E version of a similar subclass in O5E and I see no cause for concern beyond the minor tweak (mostly coming from expertise, honestly). And to Morrus's point, they were primarily built to allow this so they should overall work smoothly and not be any more broken than they were in O5E.

There's a couple things I probably will not allow like a fighter taking battle master. That just isn't something I want to try to navigate.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I will even allow it in the opposite direction: O5e base class with A5e subclass.

The only issue that immediately arises that way is that some A5e subclasses need exertion pools and maneuvers to work.

I figure the ones that give you access to a combat tradition and let you swap out a maneuver should just give a maneuver from that tradition to the O5e class.

Not sure how to handle the exertion pool though. It seems like it would be too much to give them the full Prof x 2. I‘m thinking maybe just gaining an exertion pool equal to Proficiency bonus (x1).

That seems balanced if you look at an O5e fighter taking Brute and gaining those benefits compared to taking Battle Master for example.

(By the way, I personally have no problem letting an A5e fighter go Battle Master. That gives the player a lot of stuff to keep track of, but compared to the other subclasses in both games that grant completely new features, Battle Master is mostly just giving an A5e fighter more uses of maneuvers and extra damage with some of them.)

 

[Larnievc]

I think I will encourage looking at the A5E subclasses to fill the players goal first to avoid this, but if they can't find something I'll definitely open it up to the list I had previously allowed for subclass. That's a mix of official things that are allowed, official things that are banned, and 3rd party things I allow. I've done a few comparisons from A5E version of a similar subclass in O5E and I see no cause for concern beyond the minor tweak (mostly coming from expertise, honestly). And to Morrus's point, they were primarily built to allow this so they should overall work smoothly and not be any more broken than they were in O5E.

There's a couple things I probably will not allow like a fighter taking battle master. That just isn't something I want to try to navigate.

Yeah, the only bit I find a bit confusing is the side bar in the Ranger part about magic. Seems to me that you can just bolt on a magic using ranger subclass from another source and swap out the spells for manoeuvres. Better at magic but worse at fighting. I don’t really see when the sidebar applies. Unless you wanted to play a spellless gloomstalker but retain the bonus spells that the subclass gives.

 

[Anselm]

Unless you wanted to play a spellless gloomstalker but retain the bonus spells that the subclass gives.

That's exactly what its for. The sidebar states:

Some ranger archetypes can grant spells. If you are using a ranger archetype that grants spells, you learn to innately cast those spells once each between long rests using material components found in nature (such as a handful of dry leaves or loose gravel instead of the tiny silver bell for the alarm spell). The spells that you cast in this way are always cast using the lowest spell level. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for these spells.

The intention of this is to cover O5E subclasses that grant spells so if you pick up the A5E ranger and gloom stalker subclass, you can cast rope trick and disguise self once per day even though you don't have spell slots.

 

[Larnievc]

That's exactly what its for. The sidebar states:

The intention of this is to cover O5E subclasses that grant spells so if you pick up the A5E ranger and gloom stalker subclass, you can cast rope trick and disguise self once per day even though you don't have spell slots.

Ah, okay. I just knocked out the manoeuvres and cantrips from the A5E and kept the O5E spell progression.