Right! And their effects are all basically the same. XdX+X damage of X type filling a X ft radius. DC X Dexterity saving throw to halve the damage.
These items provide a great outline of how to design explosive area effects in general. I can take that outline and plug in whatever damage dice, damage types and radii I like to balance my Saboteur's bombs as a resource-free action (rather than a consumable item or a feature with limited uses per rest).
And if that's all I wanted—a balanced AoE action—I'd be done. The Speedshooter subclass in the
Revised Fighter I linked in the original post already has exactly that, in the form of its Volley Fire action.
The hard part is putting a uniquely Roguish spin on this: making a subclass that can't just look you in the eyes and throw an AoE at you (like a Fighter might), but who has to be sneaky or otherwise underhanded to make the AoE effective: to make the AoE equivalent of Sneak Attack rather than the AoE equivalent of Extra Attack, if that makes sense.
I've written a rough draft for
the Saboteur since your last message. It has an AoE roughly on par with the Speedshooter's in terms of damage and radius, with three twists:
- It takes 1 full round to take effect (giving enemies time to flee)
- It does not allow the target to make a saving throw. If you are in the area and you don't have full cover, you take full damage.
- The bomb is hidden if the Rogue is hidden when they threw it.
The idea is encourage the Rogue to hide and throw the bomb into unsuspecting crowds or towards immobilized creatures, and to encourage enemies to use their actions to Search for the Rogue/bomb or use their movement to get out of the bomb's way. But I worry about verisimilitude (how do I justify an infinite supply of bombs? how do I prevent enemies from just hurling the bombs back at the party?) and I don't have ideas for 11th or 15th level features.
Sorta! The Poisoner should definitely be able to inflict the poisoned condition, as well as other status conditions. But it ideally
shouldn't be on top of Sneak Attack damage, since goal #1 is to provide alternatives to Sneak Attack rather than bonuses on top of it.
And similarly, dealing poison damage makes perfect sense thematically. But then, the choice between two damage types is hardly a choice at all: you'll just pick whichever hits hardest every turn.
The
Revised Rogue I linked in the original post has an unfinished Poisoner subclass, which basically gains the following:
- At 1st level, the power to craft poison during rests.
- At 1st level, advantage on attacks against poisoned creatures (and hence the incentive to use poison to set up Sneak Attacks)
- At 3rd level, the power to give up Sneak Attack damage in order to make multiple uses of one vial of poison: my way of turning poison into an at-will alternative to Sneak Attack instead of a resource-limited bonus on top of it
- At 11th level, the power to craft non-magical potions in the same way that it crafted poisons: my way of keeping the subclass useful in encounters against poison-immune enemies.
Still, there are a few issues that I could use help with:
- The list of poisons is quite small, but it's hard to brainstorm additions that would be balanced as at-will options.
- The list of potions is even smaller, for the same reason.
- I have no 7th or 15th level features
- The 3rd level feature strongly favors melee builds (who can attack repeatedly with the same poisoned weapon and expose grappled targets to inhaled poisons). This is sorta by design, since 5e's poison rules favor ranged weapons (e.g. one vial can poison one weapon or three pieces of ammunition), but it's unfortunate for ranged builds to get nothing at 3rd level.
They're definitely much harder!
I have a very loose idea for
the Trapmaker subclass: basically a 1st level feature that lets you set traps consisting of (a) a trigger mechanism of your choice and (b) a weapon or hazardous object of yours that the trap wields on your behalf. It's a versatile mechanic, but also
terribly wordy, and it hardly scales at all as you gain levels, meaning that a 20th level Rogue would basically be setting trip wires and unleashing crossbow bolts and caltrops, same as a 1st level Rogue.
And maybe the biggest issue is that very poor incentives for setting traps rather than using items outright in most encounters. It's great to have traps
already set and
already hidden to tilt the odds in your favor, but there isn't much use to setting them in plain sight and hoping that enemies run into them, rather than just shooting at the enemy or whatever. I wrote a 3rd level feature that gives the Trapmaker a little bit of a head start, and a 7th level feature that helps the Trapmaker sneak around in plain sight, but I'm not confident that that's enough to make the Trapmaker a truly effective area controller.
