D&D (2024) Should paladin's aura of protection be "normalized" a little?

[Guest 7037866]

That having been said, your DM either missed that note or didn't care (for most Kits, it's not really a big deal).

Since it wasn't a big deal, we didn't care. Like a lot of rules in AD&D -- racial level limits, for example.

 

[Horwath]

Given 5e only offers five feats to characters, and you give up stat improvement to get them, feats are already out the window as it is. Even if they weren't, "a la carte" character building absolutely does lead to much more bland character-building. That's...literally the intended consequence: the onus is absolutely, purely on the player, and unfortunately a lot of the time, all you're going to see is people picking up the smart choices, or (IMO worse) feeling terribly punished because they built something that sounded cool but was absolutely crap at actually DOING anything.

this is why you do not make garbage feats.

also you can make slots for combat an noncombat feats.

so GMW or PAM is not competing with Skill expert or Skulker

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

IMO it's too strong. I admit my bias, as our first 5E game was with an oath of the ancients paladin with a rolled 17 Str and 18 Cha. So not only was it +5 to saves, but also half damage from magic.

Saves are roughly analagous to AC, but for whatever reason it is deemed OK to buff them beyond bounded accuracy limits. You wouldnt see a class that gave everyone +5 to AC.

I would probably expand the area, drop the bonus, and add something else if designing again. That said, they did reduce some of the effectiveness of the ancients damage resistance.

 

[mellored]

ONE of the biggest misses of 2024 is backing down from universal class level progression.

That would of messed up a lot of backward compatability. All the old subclasses would need redone.

It was hard enough just to move the starting level to 3.

Otherwise. I agree.
Especially if you got species specific subclass.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When I say that the Wizard should be the Books/Rituals subclass of sorcerer I'm only slightly joking.

Whereas for me, I want them to pare back its "ALL THE SPELLS, ALL THE TIME" emphasis, and instead turn it into an actual experimentalist spellcaster. Not metamagic, but rather, actually developing spells over time. Testing things, trying combinations, finding out what works and what doesn't. Sort of the careful, procedural mirror to the Chaos Sorcerer; where Chaos embraces the weird (and sometimes stupid) stuff magic can do, the Wizard interrogates it, slices it six ways from Sunday, trying to puzzle out the true rules that hide behind the seemingly-capricious mystery.

They should be the omnidisciplinary scientist trope from sci-fi, just implemented in a fantastical context. Throw in techno arcanobabble, actual (non-magic) research mechanics, and some ribbons for academic connections and publication allegiances and you've got the core of a genuinely really interesting, deeply thematic, and better-balanced class that actually lives up to the hype of being the "complex" caster that is harder to play.

The fighter takes more finesse to fix because there's no one class that's almost like it but a lot in its space. I do wonder how much of the strength fighter you could melt into giving the barbarian a choice between rage-as-is and a mix of heavy armour and grit. (The armoured fighter gets barbarian rage damage resistances while wearing heavy armour even while not raging - but misses out on danger sense). There's a big pile-up between the dex fighter, the rogue, and the ranger (who is currently as much hedge wizard as anything).

Well. You know how I feel about the Fighter. I think we should be a lot looser about feats of heroism (not Feats, to be clear), letting the Fighter verge into the space of characters like Guan Yu, Hercules, King Arthur, Joan of Arc, Atalanta, etc. And that, whatever their chosen approach to fighting, they should be one tough son-of-a-beech, implacable and really difficult to take down, hence, a Defender at heart, whatever they choose to actually do in combat.

I'd be interested. And probably disagree about some.

Here you go. Those marked with a dagger are the ones I think are most likely to be implemented. All of them have at least one class from at least one edition (counting PF1e as effectively a further edition of 3rd edition D&D, because it was.) I have similar X-as-magician or warrior-as-Y writeups for the existing thirteen classes, but that's not super relevant here (unless, again, you'd like those for comparison purposes or the like.)

• Alchemist†, the chemist-as-magician, who uses magical ingredients and concoctions to control the world...or themselves.
• Assassin†, the warrior-of-shadow, whose skill with all the subtle ways to stalk (and un-alive) someone transcends mortal limits.
• Avenger†, the warrior-of-zeal, whose absolute focus is both shield and sword against their enemies, who executes the turncoat apostate.
• Invoker, the emissary-as-magician, who calls down disaster upon the foes of the faith, Elijah calling fire down against the altar of Baal.
• "Machinist" (not my fav name), the warrior-of-technology, who uses guns, machines, and tools to overcome their foes.
• Psion† (etc.), the telepath-as-magician, who draws on ESP, the paranormal, occult "science" etc. to bend the rules of reality in their favor.
• Shaman, the spiritualist-as-magician, who straddles the line between material and spirit, the bridge connecting these realms.
• Summoner, the overseer-as-magician, whose magic lies in getting other beings to use magic for her.
• Swordmage†, the warrior-as-magician, for whom swordplay is magic, and magic is swordplay (or other weapons), one and inseparable.
• Warden, the warrior-of-the-land, who wears Nature's power like a cloak, and wreaks Her wrath where he walks.
• Warlord†, the warrior-of-tactics, who transcends limits by cooperating with others rather than purely through her own mettle.

More accurately most people care about balance to a point. They don't care about minutae but if they are too far behind the curve things feel bad.

The bigger problem is, it's very easy to be in the no-man's-land between "obviously bad" (whether that be OP or weak) and "obviously good," where it's deeply unsatisfying but you just can't quite put your finger on why it's so. Even if such a person does realize that there's a pattern of dissatisfaction, there's no guarantee they'll simultaneously see what the problem is. That sort of thing is, unfortunately, a lot more likely than stumbling into something you genuinely love but can't express why. As with far too many things in life, there are a LOT more ways for things to be broken than there are ways for them to be excellent.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

that is because both fighter and wizard are "skeleton" classes.

both can be removed as full classes and be renamed as "mage" and "warrior".

then you can have wizard a a subclass of mage that does not "know" spells, but has a book and can be more versatile than basic mage.
sorcerer is better for basic mage than a wizard.

as for fighter, they had a chance now to make battlemaster base class feature and it wouldn't break anything, comparing to full casters, but OFC because of "muh compatibilitah" they backtracked on that also.

and yes, assassin can be any class,

I.E:
3rd level features:
1. proficiency+expertise in stealth.
2. advantage on initiative.
3. 1st attack that hits on the 1st round of combat deals +2 damage per level.

And I'm saying I consider this whole approach, genericization and decoupling and having to make it so every feature can interact with every other feature forever always....is what leads both to worse game design and less interesting games AND fewer people actually wanting to engage with them because they don't want to deal with zillions and zillions of choices.

People like to act like classes have no utility whatsoever and could be completely swept away and replaced with fully point-bought mishmash everything. This is not true. Class systems actually have a LOT of utility, if you use it well. D&D, unfortunately, often does not use it well, and 5e in specific almost completely wasted the significant potential of subclasses. Only a tiny handful actually make good on it. Druid, and to a lesser extent Cleric, do actually make some fairly decent use of the structure (e.g. compare Wildfire, Stars, Land, and Moon), but by and large, subclasses in 5e are barely more than grace notes on the base class....and many base classes are themselves extremely thin already.