Not As Clumsy or Random as a Base Class
I consider the thaumaturge officially dead at this point. This may come as a shock, but once again, in the simplest implementation, Wizards of the Coast, have defeated Thaumaturge with a single archetype. I'm not upset by this, but in fact, I'm amazed.
When I was working on my associate's degree, I had a programming teacher named Tom. Tom was always pressing that we program in a more elegant fashion. He would often criticize long drawn out programs consisting of long lines of computer code when in reality, the same effect could be accomplished in considerably less. Whenever Tom revealed this "secret" to us, I was never upset or frustrated but inspired to be as proficient in design. By the end of the class, I had learned this supposed elegance and rose to the top of my programming class.
A More Elegant Weapon
The thaumaturge was a fun idea. It combined the ideas of all of the arcane classes and added it to the spectrum with one major flaw. It was such a pain to balance! Then a week ago, the Lore Master archetype for the wizard class is released. I read it and immediately realized they had achieved everything I wanted to with one major difference: It took up all of four class features. For those of you who haven't read the lore master, you can find it here. It comes along side some really cool content for warlock. The ability to modify your spells on the fly were what I wanted from an Intelligence spellcasting class. It was not school specific either! What I spent weeks on, I could have done in no time.
A More Civilized Age
For those of us that play 5e, we live in a very comfortable lap of constant updates from the creators and designers, a comfortable and understandable system to tinker with, and large homebrew communities. Now I'm not saying I won't homebrew anything again, but what I do definitely encourage you to do is to compare the two; Lore Master to Thaumaturge. When you see the similarities/differences, you will understand what I mean. Homebrew content is great as long as the official material does not out do it. The work will become obsolete, and that is a constant fear of any creator such as myself. I have a hard time using my own work though, I do use Tribality's Alchemist rather than the WoTC Artificer, because of the time that was put into it, and how well made it was. My problem is, if I use a homebrew class, I am always thinking too critically about how something will turn out, or how something compares to a similar class.Don't think that I have forgotten about Summoner though. I hope to work on it more as my schedule begins to relax, I do have an abstract concept though.
This week's homebrew is an item made for the Tylvein campaign, Tide&Tempest, Twins of Storm and Sea:
I honestly still enjoy the thraumaturge personally, but those scimitars are sweet.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you do, and you're welcome to continue to use it and make it suit your gaming needs. This article is simply an acknowledgement on my part that it did what I wanted thaumaturge to without 7 pages of content.
ReplyDeleteGlad you like Tide & Tempest. I'm on a kind of legendary item crafting phase. I'll post one today even.
It's unfortunate the Lore Keeper was released a while after you put so much time into the Thaumaturge. I still enjoy it and am making good use of it in a campaign I'm in so thanks.
DeleteI'm glad you're getting use of it. I may muster the courage to try a new draft over the summer. What with no homework, base classes will be easier to develop.
DeleteBut the lore wizard is crazy overpowered...
DeleteWell, stay tuned this week, and we'll delve into that idea. I was actually going to do an analysis of it, because r/UnearthedArcana has been in an uproar about it, and I have some thoughts about it that I'd like to share.
DeleteI think thaumaturge, perhaps, was a misnomer anyways. The name has a real-world historical context, much like an alchemist.
ReplyDeleteThe name literally means "miracle-worker," and has an inherent tie to engineering in much the same way alchemy is tied to chemistry and classical physics. John Dee, the most recent thaumaturge I can think of (he lived around the time of Shakespeare) constructed mechanical devices that caused people to believe he was a Wizard or Sorcerer.
I think, then, you can take the ideas of your Thaumaturge and connect them to the actual historical context of the name, specifically John Dee, and actually make something unique and interesting. An intelligence based class built around constructing and utilizing nonmagical devices that seem magical is extremely interesting, and fills a niche unfilled by any other class: it works without magic.
I say this partially from personal experience: I have been experimenting mathematically with a John Dee-style Thaumaturge and the results are interesting, to say the least. But I am interested to see if you can take the seeds of the idea and turn it into something better than my math-mess.
It is definitely a good thought you have there! Originally what I had made was going to be called the Adept (because they were good at one particular school of magic), but upon checking with my group they liked the sound of Thaumaturge better.
ReplyDeleteMy concern with doing a non-magic, tinkering sort of class is that it conflicts with both the Wizard's Artificer, and Tribality Alchemist, both of which I use. Granted, they do use magic. The major argument would be foreseeable as "Why not use magic?" as I do intend on sorting out some new crafting rules in the near future, but I'd be curious to see what it is you have been working with. Math is, in a way, the antithesis of 5e, so it depends on how much math you have going on.