Tinkering in the Lab: From Concept to Creation Part 1

The Homebrewing Process

On Monday, we discussed what homebrew does to a game and I presented the Starhelm Homebrew Protocol. Over the next couple articles I will take us through my process of homebrewing after going through the questions presented in the homebrewing protocol as I introduce the three base classes that are coming out in The New Challenger Pack.

Homebrew: The Concept Stage

When we start homebrewing we usually have a concept in mind, if we didn't then we've already hit a wall. Usually homebrew starts by wanting something you have noticed is missing or not fully supported in your game. Before you start you try to answer the protocol's first question: "Can what you want flavor-wise be achieved through archetypes, multiclassing, or simple flavor changes or interpretations?" This stage requires the most legwork. You must be extremely well-versed in the system you are working in. Sometimes, what you want in a more concise manner is officially released later on, or at least the same concept is covered in a different way.  I'll cover that phenomenon later. Usually, in the case of D&D 5e and Pathfinder you have the additional option of creating a homebrew as opposed to another base class (or some other form of rules) the d20 system has one of the most "hackable" structures. The Apocalypse System is also constantly being used as a base to create new systems. Dungeon World, Masks, and City of Mist are all derived from the Apocalypse World game system. (Which I highly recommend trying in one of its forms, Starhelm and I are to try City of Mist soon) This characteristic of some games determines if homebrewing is possible or not. So, for our purposes, we'll focus our discussion on D&D 5e, as usual. 

The Magus versus Question 1

So more specific than a concept, in homebrewing we also have a specific character in mind. In the case of The New Challenger Pack, I have three characters in mind. You guys asked to see a 5e version of the Duskblade/ Magus, so you're getting it. When I changed from Pathfinder to 5e, my Magus character, who you have already met, (see Clash and Conflict: Combat Made Compelling), Arrador, suffered conceptually in 5e. My only option was to make him an Eldritch Knight from the Player's Handbook. Well, not only would it hurt how it felt to play him, his spell casting would be heavily diminished. So, in order to maintain his spellcasting, I had to multiclass into wizard, which as many of you know and I have said previously, multiclassing is harder on a character's progress. However, for the sake of his spell strike ability, one might suggesting converting into Paladin, further stressing the character's concept, and adding on a slew of abilities he never had. Although Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide's bladesinger is thematically close to Magus, it does not have enough combat support, the focus is still being a wizard. Compare the war domain cleric to paladin. If there can be those two similar concepts, why can't there be a magus/duskblade class? Eldritch Knight still focuses on being magical, but a lot of the Eldritch Knight's most notable flavor heavy abilities come later in the game. Why be left out? Let's also examine my other homebrew that is comparable, the War Mage thaumaturge. The War Mage is focused on spellcasting and is more similar to the evoker Wizard than the Eldritch Knight or Magus. multiclassing in Eldritch Knight and War Mage could be an interesting combination, but there are several redundancies between them, such as the proficiencies, extra attack, and the spell casting and attacking abilities. multiclassing would also inhibit the ability to attain the higher powered abilities of one of these classes. Question 1 for the Magus is answered. We can create in the half-caster design space that Paladin and Ranger exist in. 

The Duelist vs Question 1

The second class concept that I am incorporating is the Duelist (may be renamed later to Myrmidon), the Duelist 3.5 class was a fairly weak prestige class that had a hard time keeping up with other PrCs. The class was best designed for fighters, rogues, and swashbucklers to use. The Daring Outlaw build quickly made this class obsolete. Several other classes rose in similar design spots, such as the Shadowblade, and the Arcane Duelist that all fit into that same design space of the mobile fighter with abilities that helped them interact in combat and manipulate the opponent. Pathfinder's Swashbuckler really brought the concept of the Duelist to life while further improving on the 3.5 PrC as well. As I discussed it before, I played with Daerthalion's concept a lot from his start in 3.5 but I didn't fully do my research back when. It caused a messy design that I tinkered with over and over. Even though I love the Swashbuckler archetype from Sword Coast Adventurer's guide, and if a DM said, "Only use that." I would gladly do so. The part of me that doesn't want to compromise often gets the better of me. Fortunately for me, I have to work on a new iteration of Daerthalion, so here we are. When I had his crazy bladesinger/swashbuckler combination it suffered from MAD (Multiple Ability Dependency). I liked the concept of a swordsman who uses essentially hedgemagic on top of swordplay. Magic isn't the main concept behind the duelist, it is that finesse with a weapon, the embodiment of a fighting style. The question is does the concept of the duelist fit into fighter? From the concept I would want to bring to it, perhaps. However, if you look at the Pathfinder Swashbuckler, it doesn't fit into fighter by utilizing different aspects of mobility, evasion, and being an all around swiss army knife on the battlefield. A rogue in 5e is more of a glass cannon with evasion tacked on. Fortunately they have a d8 hit die rather than d6 like previous incarnations. Mobility and skill is the hallmark of rogue, sneak attack helps them level their damage. The swashbuckler archetype augments the mobility of the rogue further and guarantees sneak attack more often making it a more offensive rogue option. It doesn't offer the same utility as say, monk. Within monk is where we find the most similar concept to what we want. Monk has a lot of utility and greater mobility than the rogue. The monk offers a more supernatural version of this design while limiting what they can use and modifying the damage dice of whatever they prefer to use. They also can net more attacks on demand, and have an extremely high evasion against damage. However, the concept of the monk and duelist differ while sharing similar concepts, a highly trained fighter and has a specific set of usable weapons. The class we are after also has similarities to the superiority dice driven archetypes, especially the Battle Master, the battle master is a fighter with greater utility, but a far more limited utility. It is between the lines of fighter, rogue, and monk that we will find duelist. This multiclass would be a disastrous combination if not designed perfectly, especially if we use all of the approximate archetypes too. The duelist thus far, can move on to question 2 of the protocol. 

The Slayer vs Question 1

The slayer is a class introduced in Pathfinder that touches on the highlights of ranger and rogue without incorporating spellcasting. My character concept that inspires the slayer is a character you may meet soon named Akyas. Akyas is a Drow who served as an investigator, assassin, and spy for his city. He is a tactician above all else, and he uses his detective like ability in every situation. Immediately we approach rogue and three of it's archetypes, Mastermind, Inquisitive, and Assassin. The Revised Ranger would easily incorporate more of the assassin like stealth abilities but Akyas has very little experience with nature, what he understands is how creatures (mostly humanoid) behave. In tandem with this knowledge, he employs his training that focuses on ambush tactics, ending fights faster than most combatants. This could be a multiclass build, but it forces a very difficult choice upon the player. As I have envisioned Akyas, he would be something very similar to the Assassin's Creed brand of assassins. This is not entirely a perfect example because the settings of Assassin's Creed and D&D work differently. The design space that I find Akyas' concept hovering around is located between fighter, ranger, and rogue. This homebrew concept lie in a gray area. The multiclass option seems to suggest that I may not get everything I want, and works out of what feels like a losing compromise, and after having tested them, it feels like more convoluted than were I to pick a base class. I do know that I can try to design a class that will function as well as other classes and uses other concepts in it as archetypes. In this case we will use the other questions to determine whether this is viable or not. 

The Integrity of Setting

At this point we must now test each concept against question two, to see how well it integrates as part of the main setting for D&D 5e based on question two of the Starhelm Homebrewing Protocol:
Does what you want conflict with the setting for the game you are trying to play and is more suited to be created in an entirely different game?
We can pretty quickly sort through all three of these homebrew concepts. The magus is yet another telling of the "gish" concept, and as we said falls anywhere between eldritch knight, bladesinger, bard, and paladin. With some work in the fiction behind the magus class we could very aptly place the magus into a setting, consisting of orders of duskblades, kensai, hexblades and the like. Nothing is radically upset by the implementation of a new hypothetical order of warrior mages into the setting, with a little bit of creative backstory as to how they function in the world, you have yourself a magus. Final Fantasy's Genesis Rhapsodos, Dragon Age's Knight-Enchanter, and Guild Wars 2's Revenant characters are all examples of what would represent a magus. They employ magic into their fighting boosting their combat abilities by harnessing magic, channeling it through their weapons or in the form of spells.

The duelist, would not in principle upset the idea of the fighter, rogue, or monk. If we in our setting, wanted to play a character such as this, perhaps, to differentiate from the fighter, the duelist is less a combatant who has a preferred fighting style, but like the monk, is trained in a certain path of fighting, honing his acrobatic and athletic skill, while mastering a single style of combat and weapon, some may be magically augmented, or have learned to control particular energies and incorporate it into their swordplay. There would potentially be many mundane duelists of course, fencers, pit fighters, and the like. It may take more differentiation than a fighter to make that clear but no more than it took to differentiate, say, fighter from monk. Mechanically, they are totally different, but one might argue that a monk could be a brand of fighter. I would imagine that duelists work in a sort of an exclusive master and apprentice nature. That in order to fully learn to be a duelist, someone who is not only a fighter but a master of a style of fighting and not only the broad spectrum, an intense regiment of training is necessary. The three musketeer's D'Artagnan, Princess Bride's Inigo Montoya, and Sword Art Online's Kirigaya Kazuto (Kirito), would all be examples of Duelists. These characters wield their weapons as not only extensions as themselves.

The slayer is perhaps the easiest. There are many possible archetypes, but I would imagine that on top of standard assassins, slayers tend to also be employed in assassin organization, as spies, and as bounty hunters. Granted, rangers don't have to be solely nature oriented, but I would imagine that rangers, would be the fighter-like comparison to the slayer. In essence, the slayer is a killer. That is where his specialty lies. I'd imagine such characters as Ezio Auditore, Dishonored's Corvo Attano, and Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher are all good examples of the type of style that slayers embody. They can hold their own in a fight, and especially Ezio's case, can fend of multiple attackers at once, but are most dangerous when they are after a particular target at a time. They come in many different forms, from slayers that focus on leading a team and serving and orchestrating large attacks. Some will dismantle an entire fortress leaving a pile of bodies in their wake. Other seek their target, never noticed, and slipping away like the wind. They are not the elaborate infiltrators assassins are, they are living weapons, forces of  destruction.

The three of these, I believe, can be integrated into a D&D setting with minimal issue, none of them in concept upset the idea of already existing aspects of the game. The most important question comes next:

Does what you want make another player option obsolete, or too heavily overlap with another player option?

Protecting the Old While Creating the New

This is the part where you must already have some idea as to how to implement the homebrew. You can't simply take pieces of various similar classes and mash them together. One of the flaws of the 3.5 system was often times one class be irrefutably better than another. This is where an intimate knowledge of design comes into play.

My designs are not complete, but I will give an example of how I am implementing each class, and you can see where the challenge is.  As I previously discussed, the magus class is based on the duskblade from 3.5 and the class of the same name from pathfinder. The 5e paladin sits around the same design space. However, what is often the best implementation that I discovered while creating the thaumaturge, was that what is best for these hybrid-esque classes is to find a method to employ similar features that work differently. For example take Arcane Strike feature:

Beginning at 2nd level, once per turn whenever you hit a creature with a melee attack, you deal an extra 1d6 force damage for every level of spell slot you have remaining. 

This is, of course, analogous to Divine Smite, but it works somewhat differently and creates a different dynamic between spellcasting and the feature. As I have DM'ed for various paladins, I find that they prefer Divine Smite over their spellcasting, and rarely use their available spells. In this model for the magus, the advantage of using spells will be netting different effects for the sake of overcoming challenges. Paladins normally would happily trade spells for damage, as their spells usually affect only one target to begin with. As I have played a paladin before, I found myself desperately wanting more area effect spells. The magus will have plenty of this type of spell to go around where the trade in damage is acceptable, hitting more creatures and in the long run doing potentially less damage. 

In the case of the duelist, the duelist uses a resource called Talent. Similar to the variance of the thaumaturge, the duelist has a different source and use of Talent depending on the type of duelist they are. Each duelist has a number of talent points equal to a mental ability score. So in the case of the Fencer, it is called Prowess and is based on the fencer's intelligence score. Unlike the thaumaturge, the base class progression gives abilities that each talent can access, but also abilities each archetype has specific to it. The talent points of a duelist fluctuates. Whenever they reduce a creature to 0 hit points with a duelist weapon, or score a critical hit with a duelist weapon, they regain a talent point. Each archetype offers a third method. In the fencer's case, a successful parry and riposte (you'll see).
Given the ability score rules, we can assume the max talent points a duelist will ever have is 6. Monks do not replenish ki until a short rest, but they have far more ki points than a duelist will ever have of talent points. If you will, duelists are to monks as warlocks are to sorcerers. The types of abilities we will want to incorporate are going to be abilities that are less powerful than monk's uses, to where it is acceptable if they happen more frequently. That is demonstrated from the warlock's at will abilities. That will be key in implementing the duelist and differentiating it's abilities from the monk's.

The slayer's concept demands the most attention to the rules as it deals with, for lack of a better term, straight up murdering people. What is also important is to not interfere with rogue's design space. Rogue has the highest amount of consistent "burst" damage in the game. In fact, it is one of the appeals of the class. That being said, it is necessary to create a similar appeal in slayer without stealing the main concept of the class. For instance, let's remove the idea of utilizing sneak attack to create an assassin. Not to say we won't use a form of "burst" damage in slayer, but I am sure it will not be anywhere near as much as the eventual 10d6 that rogue boasts and will not use the same conditions that sneak attack requires. That is a huge difference in choosing a class, and choosing between the two classes. You may prefer a set of conditions for the burst damage over another, if you feel like your party is mostly spell casters, or other characters that do not "flank" much than sneak attack will be harder for you to achieve. Take for instance the 6th level ability of Slayer:

Eliminate the Weak
Beginning at 6th level, whenever you hit a surprised creature with a weapon attack and its challenge rating is below a certain threshold, it must make a Constution saving throw or be reduced to 0 hit points. 

The thresholds work almost exactly like Destroy Undead, later on the slayer will be able to stealthily cut his way through opponents that would normally take longer for other characters to deal with despite the power level. It also alleviates potentially bad damage rolls. Nothing hurts more than watching a 6d6 sneak attack be plagued by 1's. Four 1's, a 5 and a 6, is only 16 damage, plus whatever weapon damage is not very much. This guarantees that the slayer will have a very different role in infiltration than the rogue and could be very valuable. However, this way, it is still valuable to have a rogue in a fight.

This way we answer three of the five questions in such a way we can move on. The next part is less about balance, and more about the philosophy of the game. Next time, we'll take a look at the final two questions, and discuss what is important about the integrity of the game balance for the sake of the players and the system itself in part 2.