Flat vs Rolled Blood Tax — Which Should Your Table Run?

The v8.0.0 vote is ongoing, and a fair number of you have asked some version of "okay, but which one is better?" Honest answer: neither. They're the same cost paid in different currencies, and which currency your table prefers is a temperament question. Here's the full side-by-side so you can pick deliberately.

First, What's Identical

Everything except the moment you pay. Same features, same tiers, same 1:3 ratio (T2 = 3× T1), same Overload Mastery, same psychic-resistance halving. And — this is the engineered part — the same average cost. One flat unit is PB; one rolled unit is your base MS die, and those track within ~1.5 at every level band. Over a campaign, both Vanguards pay roughly the same total HP for their power. The difference is entirely in the shape of the payment.

The Case for Flat (Mainline)

Absolute predictability. Before you declare, you know the exact cost. "Can I afford this turn?" has a yes/no answer, every time. The L15 sequence tables aren't estimates — 8×PB means exactly 40, plan around it to the hit point.

You cannot accidentally kill yourself. This is the big one. With flat tax, a Vanguard at 20 HP knows a T2 Overload costs exactly 15 and declares it with certainty of survival. Blood Tax debt is a price you read off a menu, never a debt collector showing up with a surprise.

Zero added table time. A nova turn already involves attack rolls, damage dice, saves, and rider dice. Flat BT adds no rolls at all. Over a session, that's real minutes.

Stable attrition for the DM. Encounter budgeting around a flat-tax Vanguard is arithmetic.

The Case for Rolled (v7.18.0A)

The fantasy is felt, not bookkept. This is a class about tearing yourself open for power. With flat tax, the recoil is a subtraction. With rolled tax, it's an event — the whole table watches the dice to see how badly you hurt yourself. Sometimes you push past your limits and walk away clean. Sometimes you don't. That's the throttle made visceral.

Sometimes the gamble pays. About one turn in eight, a 3d10 Tier 2 tax comes in at 10 or under — cheaper than the flat 15. Variance cuts both ways, and the cheap rolls feel great.

Every Overload is a decision with stakes. Flat tax answers "is this worth it?" once, in the abstract. Rolled tax makes you re-ask it at the table, at your current HP, with your gut involved.

The Number That Decides It

Here's the same declaration under both rules. Level 15 Vanguard, 20 HP remaining, declares one T2 Overload:

• Flat: costs exactly 15. You survive with 5 HP, guaranteed. You knew that before you rolled.
• Rolled: costs 3d10 (3–30, avg 16.5). Roughly 28% of the time — better than 1 in 4 — that roll comes in at 20+ and drops you. The same declaration that's mathematically safe under flat is a genuine coin-flip-adjacent gamble under rolled.

That's the whole choice, compressed: under flat tax, "suiciding via Blood Tax debt" is impossible by inspection. Under rolled tax, it's a live possibility you manage with judgment and luck. Whether that 28% reads as thrilling or unacceptable tells you which version your table should run.

One more data point: below level 10 the two systems are nearly indistinguishable (1d4 vs flat 2–3, no T2 yet). The fork only matters in tier 3+ play, when the dice get big and the novas get greedy.

A Suggestion

If you're unsure: run rolled for one session at level 11+, with at least one desperate low-HP Overload decision in it. You'll know within an hour which game you're playing. Then come tell the thread — session reports are what decide the v8.0.0 promotion, and "we tried both" posts are worth their weight in gold.

Mainline v7.18.1 (flat) · v7.18.0A (rolled) · The player sheets and DMQR serve both rules.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.

Kinetic Vanguard v7.18.2 — Quick Fix

Spotted a layout slip on the Cryokinesis player sheet: Overload Mastery II and Inner Reserve had wandered into the middle of the Cryo discipline block instead of sitting at the end of the Advanced Training list like they do on the other sheets. They're back where they belong. Nothing mechanical changed anywhere — all five docs bumped to v7.18.2 purely for version cleanliness.

The v8.0.0 flat-vs-rolled trial continues — v7.18.0A pairs with these sheets as before.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present.

Kinetic Vanguard v7.18.3 — Barrier T2 Toned Down

Small, surgical nerf. Barrier was too juicy a pick, and the culprit was one specific clause on its Tier 2.

The Change

Before: Barrier T2 raised the duration to 10 minutes and let you spend a bonus action each round to swap one active effect for another, free of Psi and Blood Tax.

After: T2 still raises the duration to 10 minutes and still carries two effects (inherited from T1) — but those effects lock in once Barrier is active. No more mid-combat swapping.

Why

The swap clause quietly turned Barrier into an always-correct defense. Caster comes out swinging? Bonus-action into Spellward. Now they switch to weapons? Swap to Blade Shield. Grappler closes in? Steadfast Guard. One pick was answering every threat in the encounter, re-tuning itself round by round for zero cost. That's more than a single Advanced Training slot should do — it was crowding out the actual decision the feature is supposed to pose: read the fight, pick your two, commit.

Locking the effects restores that decision. You still choose the right two for the situation when you cast Barrier — you just have to read the room at cast time instead of hot-swapping after the fact. T2 remains a clear upgrade over T1 (double duration, same two effects); it's just no longer a Swiss-army shield.

Nothing else changed. No other feature touched, no Blood Tax math altered.

Both Tracks Updated

This change ships to both rule tracks — mainline (flat Blood Tax, now v7.18.3) and the rolled-Blood-Tax variant (now v7.18.3A). The variant's Blood Tax rules are untouched; it just inherits the Barrier fix like everything else. The player sheets and DMQR serve both tracks as always.

The flat-vs-rolled v8.0.0 vote stays open — this patch doesn't tip it either way.

Documents

Previous patch: v7.18.2 (Cryo sheet layout fix).

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.

Kinetic Vanguard v7.18.4 — Barrier T2 Swap Restored (Now With a Cost)

You asked, and here's the compromise. Two patches back I hard-locked Barrier's Tier 2 effects. You pushed back. So it's getting un-locked — but it's not free anymore.

Two-Patch Quick Recap

• v7.18.3: Barrier T2 lost its mid-combat effect swap entirely. The two effects locked in once Barrier was active.
• v7.18.4 (now): The swap is back. While Barrier is active, you can use a bonus action to replace one of your chosen effects with a different one from the list. Each swap costs psychic self-damage equal to a Tier 1 Overload's Blood Tax — your Proficiency Bonus on the flat track, one base Manifested Strike die on the rolled track.

The 10-minute duration and the two carried effects are unchanged. Same action economy as the original swap; the only new thing is the price tag.

On the Fast Turnaround

I want to be upfront about the whiplash here, because some of you noticed: a hard nerf in .3, a partial walk-back in .4, two patches apart. That's not indecision — that's the development loop working as intended. Fail fast. Ship a change, watch how the table reacts, correct. The hard lock was a real hypothesis (that the swap was the problem), and your feedback was real data (that the swap wasn't the problem — the free part was). Better to find that out in two days of patches than to sit on a half-baked version for a month "to look decisive." The version number is cheap. Your play experience isn't. I'd rather iterate in public and get it right than guard a wrong answer.

Why a Cost Instead of a Lock

The original swap was an always-correct defense: bonus-action into whatever resistance the current threat demanded, round after round, for zero cost. That's too much for one Advanced Training slot. But the hard lock over-corrected — it killed the adaptability that made Barrier interesting, not just the part that made it broken.

A cost fixes the real problem. Swapping now hurts, so you don't do it reflexively every round — but when the fight genuinely turns and you need to re-tune, the option's there for a price you can pay. That keeps the decision live instead of removing it.

Why T1 Blood Tax and not T2: T2 (3×PB / 3 dice) was on the table, and playtesters called it too punishing for a defensive utility — you'd never pay 15 HP at level 15 just to swap a resistance. T1 (PB / 1 die) is enough to make a swap a real choice without making it a trap.

Important interaction: the swap cost is not an Overload, so Overload Mastery does not waive it. No free swaps on your nova turn. This was deliberate — otherwise the OM turn becomes "swap to everything for free," and we're right back where we started.

Both Tracks

Ships to both rule tracks: mainline flat (v7.18.4) and the rolled-Blood-Tax variant (v7.18.4A). The variant's underlying Blood Tax rules are untouched; it just inherits the Barrier change with the cost expressed in dice. The flat-vs-rolled v8.0.0 vote stays open — this patch is track-neutral and doesn't tip it.

Documents

Keep the session reports coming — that feedback is exactly what turned .3 into .4.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.

Kinetic Vanguard v7.18.5 — Barrier T2, Final Cost Pass

Last Barrier patch for a good while. v7.18.4 put a price on the Tier 2 effect swap; this tightens that price to where it actually bites, and then Barrier goes quiet.

The Change

Barrier T2's mid-combat swap now costs 1 Psi point in addition to the Tier 1 Blood Tax it already cost. So each swap is 1 Psi + T1 Blood Tax (your Proficiency Bonus on the flat track, one base Manifested Strike die on the rolled track). Everything else about Barrier T2 is unchanged — 10-minute duration, two carried effects, bonus action to swap.

Why Add Psi

When I priced the swap at Blood Tax only in v7.18.4, I had it half-right. Here's the hole: at the levels where you actually have Barrier (15+), the Tier 1 Blood Tax is tiny relative to your hit point bar — 5-ish HP at level 15, a near rounding error on a Fighter. A cost you don't feel isn't a cost; it's flavor text. You'd still swap every round because why not.

Psi is the fix because Psi is the resource the whole subclass is built to keep scarce — no in-combat recovery, a pool you're constantly rationing between Overloads, Deflection Screens, and your riders. Spending 1 Psi on a Barrier swap means not spending it on offense or defense that round. That's a real decision, and it's the same kind of decision Kinetic Vanguard asks you to make everywhere else. It also closes a gap the HP-only cost left open: a tanky, high-HP build could shrug off the Blood Tax indefinitely. Nobody shrugs off Psi.

The two halves are priced independently and that matters for one interaction: Overload Mastery still does not waive the Blood Tax (it's not an Overload), and the 1 Psi is always spent regardless of OM. So even on your nova turn, swapping isn't free. That was deliberate — a free-swap OM turn would put us right back at the always-correct defense this whole arc was about removing.

Why This Is the Last One

Three patches in a row touched Barrier T2: a hard lock (.3), a Blood Tax cost (.4), and now a Psi cost (.5). I want to be clear that's a mechanic settling, not thrashing — each step moved less than the one before, and we've now taxed every axis a swap can be taxed on: the scarce resource, the health bar, and the action economy (it's always been a bonus action). There's nothing left to add without crossing from "priced" into "punished," and punishing a feature you paid an Advanced Training slot and 3 Psi to have would be bad design.

So this is the resting point. Barrier T2 gives you adaptable defense that costs real resources to re-tune — available and useful, but never reflexive. If it still reads as a problem after tables run it, the answer won't be a v7.18.6 nerf; it'll be a ground-up reconsideration of the feature. But I don't expect that. This feels right.

Both Tracks

Ships to mainline flat (v7.18.5) and the rolled variant (v7.18.5A). The variant's Blood Tax rules are untouched; it just expresses the cost in dice. The flat-vs-rolled v8.0.0 vote stays open and this patch is track-neutral.

Documents

Barrier's done for now — back to the table. Session reports welcome as always.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.

Balance Health-Check: Kinetic Vanguard vs the Field — Full Methodology, Nothing Hidden

I modeled where Kinetic Vanguard actually lands on single-target damage against standard benchmarks, and I'm posting it with all my work shown — the spell list I gave the wizard, the Blood Tax I make KV pay, and every place the model is generous or strict. A damage chart on its own always flatters somebody by leaving out the cost. Here's the version you can audit.

The Chart

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13d_7OdGPOa6mPuREZFym6ghTsyKwqXTD/view?usp=sharing
(I am sorry for the link but directly pasting the chart does not work for some reason)

Ground Rules (the same for everyone)

• Single-target damage per turn, levels 3–20.
• 65% hit chance on everything that makes an attack roll.
• Saving-throw effects discounted by save type: save-for-half ×0.775, save-for-none ×0.55 (assuming ~55% target fail rate vs a level-appropriate DC). This distinction matters — see the wizard section.
• Primary stat 16→20 by level 6 for everyone; standard PB progression.
• Only the two Fighters (Kinetic Vanguard, Champion) get Action Surge. They're drawn with it and, for Champion, without it too, so you can see the gap. Casters have no surge line because they don't get one.
• Casters are opened all the way up — full best single-turn play, best spells, full slot dumps. I deliberately did not hobble them.

The Key KV Constraint — Two Blood Tax Caps

KV's nova is throttled by Blood Tax (psychic self-damage on hit). I modeled two ceilings:

• 25% of max HP — the default. The sustainable everyday nova. This is the solid green line.
• 50% of max HP — the "kill-commit" ceiling. You only push this hard when the extra overload actually drops the target, because half-killing yourself for an enemy that's still swinging is a bad trade. This is the faded green line.

The gap between those two green lines is the "delete swing" — the damage you buy by doubling your self-harm, and you only buy it when it finishes the job.

Show Your Work #1 — The Wizard Spell List

The wizard line is the easiest place to accidentally cheat, so here's exactly what spell it casts at each tier and the math. (I caught and corrected my own error here: Disintegrate is save-for-none, not save-for-half, so it's discounted ×0.55, not ×0.775. That knocked the mid-game wizard down meaningfully.)

That level-17 spike is real: a wizard absolutely will drop Meteor Swarm on a single big threat, and at 140 average it's the hardest single-target nuke in the game. It's why the green-dotted line jumps a cliff at 17 — that's not a modeling artifact, that's Meteor Swarm.

Show Your Work #2 — What KV's Nova Costs in Blood

Here's the bill for the Pyrokinesis nova on the chart, both caps. "Declared" is worst-case if every Overloaded hit lands; "Expected" is what you actually pay at 65% hit, since Blood Tax only triggers on hits.

*Fighter, d10 hit die, CON +2, average HP. T1 Overload Blood Tax = PB; T2 = 3×PB. Psychic resistance halves Blood Tax. Overload Mastery negates one full nova turn's Blood Tax per short rest. Note the default nova holds steady around 20–24% of max HP the whole game — that's the sustainable, repeatable spend. The kill-commit column roughly doubles it to ~48%, and that's the line you only cross to secure a kill.

What the Chart Actually Says

• On its everyday 25% nova, Pyrokinesis is competitive but not dominant. It runs near Champion-with-Surge and ahead of the focused casters through the mid-game — but the margins are modest, and the wizard's Meteor Swarm spike at 17+ briefly out-bursts the responsible Pyro nova.
• The 50% kill-commit ceiling buys ~15–18% more burst — enough to close a kill, not enough to make KV oppressive. And you pay for it in blood every time.
• Cryo and Psycho sit at the damage floor. That's intended — they trade raw numbers for lockdown and repositioning that no damage chart can show. Psycho's spikes at 15 and 18+ are Telekinetic Slam landing as a single-target nuke.
• Champion's surge/no-surge gap (bold vs faded red) is the cleanest illustration that Fighters are spike classes — roughly a doubling between nova round and every other round.

Show Your Work #3 — The Caveats (where to distrust me)

• The wizard is drawn at its best single-target turn, not its average. A real wizard can't Meteor Swarm every round all day — slots run out. Treat green as "wizard's good turn." It also ignores that wizards are AoE/control monsters; single-target is not where they shine, so this line slightly undersells their actual table value while overselling their sustained single-target.
• Champion's no-surge line is unflatteringly low because Champion leans hard on the surge round and has no spell slots to dump instead. Read faded red with that asterisk.
• Hexblade and Paladin are modeled simply — Hexblade as max(Eldritch Blast turn, two-attack pact-smite nova); Paladin as two attacks + best-slot smite on each + Improved Divine Smite. No crit-fishing for either, so both are likely understated on a true alpha-strike. Don't read them as ceilings.
• Save-nuke proxy (×0.775 / ×0.55) is an average; a single turn swings hard on one die roll. The attack-roll lines (Pyro, Champion, Hexblade weapon) use the stricter 0.65.
• The Ember Lance doubling primer is discounted to 65%² (~42%), because the setup hit AND the payoff hit both have to land. Charting it at flat 65% overstates Pyro — a mistake I made in an earlier draft and corrected here.
• Stat and HP assumptions are a single optimized build, not a range. Different CON, point-buy, or feat choices move every line.

Takeaway

With Action Surge shown honestly, the Blood Tax disclosed, and the casters uncapped, Kinetic Vanguard reads as a balanced spike striker: competitive on the responsible nova, a real but bounded extra gear when committing to a kill, and paying for the spike in HP every time. Pyro is strong but not a runaway; Cryo and Psycho look, if anything, under-rewarded on raw damage — which is fine only if their control is pulling its weight at your table. That control is the one thing I genuinely cannot model, and it's exactly what I want session reports on.

If any number above looks wrong, tell me which spell, which save type, or which assumption — I'd rather fix it here than have it surface at a table.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.

Kinetic Vanguard v8.0.0 — One Track. The Vote Is Settled.

After a long run of dual-track releases and a lot of session reports, the experiment is over: the rolled-Blood-Tax variant is retired, and flat Blood Tax is now the one and only ruleset. This is v8.0.0 — a major version bump not because the math changed, but because the project just got a lot simpler.

What Happened to the Vote

For weeks the question was open: keep Blood Tax as a flat number (Tier 1 = your Proficiency Bonus, Tier 2 = 3×PB), or switch to the rolled variant where each point of Blood Tax became a die roll of your base Manifested Strike die. I held the decision deliberately — I didn't want it settled by whoever was loudest, I wanted it settled by what actually felt good to run at a table.

The tables answered. The consensus, especially from DMs: the rolled variant was a fun idea and a genuine pain to run at speed. Rolling a separate fistful of dice for self-damage, every Overload, every turn, on top of everything else a Kinetic Vanguard is already tracking — it bogged the turn down. The flat number is instant: you Overload at Tier 2, you take 3×PB, you move on. That speed matters more over a whole session than the extra swinginess the dice added.

So flat wins, and the separate alternate document (the old v7.18.xA line) is discontinued.

If You Were Already Playing Mainline — Nothing Changed

This is the important part: if you were using the standard (flat) rules, your character is untouched. Every number, every feature, every interaction is identical to v7.18.5. v8.0.0 is the promotion of the flat track to the sole official version, not a rebalance. You can keep playing without changing a thing on your sheet.

What Actually Changed — A Documentation Deep-Clean

With the rolled track gone, all the scaffolding that supported running two rulesets at once came out:

• The three discipline player sheets lost their "this sheet serves both rules" conversion notes and the N×PB-to-dice translation lines.
• The DM Quick Reference lost its rolled-variant bullet.
• The main rules document lost its pointer to the separate variant.

The result is a single, clean ruleset with no "if you're playing the other version, do this instead" caveats cluttering the margins. The five documents — main rules, three player sheets, DMQR — are all that exist now, all on v8.0.0.

I also folded in a small consistency fix while I was in there: the Advanced Training rider list in the "How to Play" section now correctly names Concussive Surge alongside Psychic Lance and Mind Blast (it was always an Advanced Training rider; the list just hadn't named it).

Documents (all v8.0.0)

If you have the old alternate (A) document bookmarked, you can let it go — it's no longer maintained.

Thank You

This is the version I've wanted the project to reach: one ruleset, fully cleaned, decided by people actually playing it rather than by me guessing. Genuine thanks to everyone who ran both tracks and reported back — the rolled variant was worth trying precisely because we found out it didn't hold up at the table, and that's only knowable from real play. That's the whole point of putting it in front of you.

Onward. Same subclass, same identity, one clean book.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.

Kinetic Vanguard v8.0.1 — Barrier Swap Is Cheaper

Quick one. You asked, and it made sense, so it's done: Barrier's Tier 2 effect swap no longer costs Blood Tax — it now costs only 1 Psi point per swap.

The Change

Previously, swapping one of your two active Barrier effects mid-combat cost 1 Psi plus a Tier 1 Overload's worth of Blood Tax. As of v8.0.1, the Blood Tax is gone. The swap costs a flat 1 Psi, full stop. Duration (10 minutes) and the two carried effects are unchanged.

Why It Holds Up

This isn't me caving to a complaint — it's removing the part of the cost that was barely doing anything. Think about where Barrier lives: levels 15+. At that point a Tier 1 Blood Tax (your Proficiency Bonus) is something like 5–6 HP, a near-rounding-error on a Fighter's hit point bar. It wasn't deterring swaps, it was just stinging — and stinging on a purely defensive option, which feels bad in a way it doesn't on an aggressive nova.

The part of the cost that actually makes you think twice is the Psi. Psi is the scarce resource — no in-combat recovery, constantly rationed between your Overloads, Deflection Screens, and riders. Spending 1 Psi to re-tune your defense means not spending it on offense that round. That's the real decision, and it's untouched. So the swap is still a deliberate choice, not a free reflex — it just no longer chips your health for the privilege.

Since there's no Blood Tax on the swap anymore, the old "this isn't waived by Overload Mastery" caveat is gone too — there's nothing left for Overload Mastery to interact with. The 1 Psi is always spent regardless.

Also Cleaned Up

While I was in there: the player-sheet shorthand for this cost still carried a leftover bit of rolled-track notation ("PB / 1 MS die") from before the v8.0.0 single-track merge. With the Blood Tax clause gone, that orphaned reference went with it. The sheets now read cleanly.

Documents (all v8.0.1)

Single track, flat Blood Tax, one clean book. Session reports always welcome.

Kinetic Vanguard by NixNinja. © 2024–present. Free for non-commercial use with credit.