Moving back to the topic at hand, I've been itching to ask folks what they think would be cool replacement features to homebrew. For me, I mentioned earlier in the thread I would have liked a replacement for the Bard's Countercharm, and this morning I had the idea of replacing it with something like this:
Focused Performance: As a reaction, you can expend a use of your Bardic Inspiration when making Constitution saving throws to maintain your concentration on a spell.
Also, on a question pertinent to both this thread and the campaign I'm running, I mentioned earlier that I have a Rogue with proficiency in firearms with rules loosely based on those used in Critical Role, and I was wondering: would it be game breaking/overpowered to let her use her Cunning Action to reload her weapons as a bonus action rather than an action? I reeeeeaaaaally want to throw that out there for her to use, but I'd hate to have to pull it out of the game if it ends up causing problems...
I think this would actually work better in the homebrew section of the forum. That being said, I'd feel mean if I only wrote that....so
Focused Performance: The issue with this is two-fold. The first is that Bardic Inspirations refresh too often and are too plentiful. The second is that it doesnt say when you have to choose to roll.
I'd recommend the following edit
Focused Performance: Using this ability the Bard can automatically make their next Concentration check to maintain Concentration on a spell or spell like ability. This ability can only be used once per long rest. This ability must be used before any Saving Throws are rolled.
I've removed the reaction and separated it from Bardic Inspiration, but I've severely limited it to 1 per day. I've also given an element of gambling to it. You have to choose this INSTEAD of rolling. so you might have passed, you might have failed, but you'll never know. Any player who tends to hold onto their abilities for just the right moment will find this aspect agonizing.
If you think the long rest is too long, you could move it to short rest, but given Warcaster/Resilience Constitution are both things that Bards generally like and avoiding being targeted isn't too hard in my experience playing a Glamour Bard for the last year I think the ability will still only come into play 1 time per day at most. Plus, losing Concentration is generally not the end of the world for me. By the time it drops, I usually have a more appropriate Concentration spell to replace it with based on the changed battlefield.
I feel this would pretty good, reaction spend bardic inspiration to have advantage on concentration would be pretty good, but still no guarantee on the save. If you were worried about abuse you could make it two but I feel like having more options for bardic inspiration uses is pretty good. The flavor is also nice in that if you are an experienced performer you keep going even when something goes wrong. Having been a choral performer I can say some weird things can disrupt a performance and the best ones can keep right on going as if the person next to you didn't just pass out because they locked their knees...
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"Where words fail, swords prevail. Where blood is spilled, my cup is filled" -Cartaphilus
"I have found the answer to the meaning of life. You ask me what the answer is? You already know what the answer to life is. You fear it more than the strike of a viper, the ravages of disease, the ire of a lover. The answer is always death. But death is a gentle mistress with a sweet embrace, and you owe her a debt of restitution. Life is not a gift, it is a loan."
Another recent encounter with flying creatures just came to mind from an encounter I was running with harpies. The party had no flyers, but they did have a hexblade warlock, a sorcerer, and a wizard.
After suriving a first round against the harpies who where aremed with longbows and firing at long range (disadvantage), the warlock came up with a plan which he informed the party of. He would cast Darkness, the wizard would cast Rope Trick, and all but the wizard would use Readied actions to climb into the extra-dimensional space. This would lave only the sorcerer and the warlock out side the space..
The warlock had rolled a 21 initiative (19+2). The sorcerer used the Invisibility spell. The harpies fired randomly into the darkness and didn't get lucky..
On his round, the warlock driopped his darkness so the harpies could see him climbing and disappearing into mid-air.
Thinking the players were hiding behind illusion, the harpies tested the situation going so far as to have one of their number go into freefall then use its actual movement to fly through what thought was the area of a silent image. When nothing happened, the rest of the harpies repeated the scouts actions, coming in to investigate. The sorcerer let loose with his best fireball, enhanced with metamagice. The rest of the party came out of the space to finish off the harpies except for one who through luck got away bloodied.
This encounter took place in Droaam in Eberron. The harpies had served in the Last War and knew how to work together drawing on their war time experiences. Unfortunately, the adventurers worked together, came up with a plan, and got lucky in that plans implementation.
Is flying a powerful ability? Yes, but it doesn't make the flyer invincible.
Related to this, and I know we are SERIOUSLY off topic vs UA but What are people's thoughts on whether or not a creature can SEE someone at 600 ft up to shoot them with a longbow? Do most people feel that rolling with Disadvantage is the key which balance's shooting from that distance? I feel like if I had a character flying and they wanted to shoot at things 800 ft away, I would maybe ask for a perception roll first.
600 feet is a two hundred yard shot. Having made 200-yard shots myself (if with a rifle rather than a longbow), I can say that perceiving a man-sized target which is making no attempt at stealth at two hundred yards is not an issue. Hitting something at that distance is another thing entirely, thus the disadvantage on attacks at that range. Cover and any attempt at stealth are heavily magnified by distance, however - seeing a seven-foot goomba in platemail is easy, seeing half of someone's head poking up above a rock to scope you out is another thing entirely.
Seeing a target beyond two hundred yards, as is occasionally a thing when considering Spell Sniper/Eldritch Spear, definitely starts becoming an issue worthy of Perception rolls, but two hundred yards is doable.
Another recent encounter with flying creatures just came to mind from an encounter I was running with harpies. The party had no flyers, but they did have a hexblade warlock, a sorcerer, and a wizard.
After suriving a first round against the harpies who where aremed with longbows and firing at long range (disadvantage), the warlock came up with a plan which he informed the party of. He would cast Darkness, the wizard would cast Rope Trick, and all but the wizard would use Readied actions to climb into the extra-dimensional space. This would lave only the sorcerer and the warlock out side the space..
The warlock had rolled a 21 initiative (19+2). The sorcerer used the Invisibility spell. The harpies fired randomly into the darkness and didn't get lucky..
On his round, the warlock driopped his darkness so the harpies could see him climbing and disappearing into mid-air.
Thinking the players were hiding behind illusion, the harpies tested the situation going so far as to have one of their number go into freefall then use its actual movement to fly through what thought was the area of a silent image. When nothing happened, the rest of the harpies repeated the scouts actions, coming in to investigate. The sorcerer let loose with his best fireball, enhanced with metamagice. The rest of the party came out of the space to finish off the harpies except for one who through luck got away bloodied.
This encounter took place in Droaam in Eberron. The harpies had served in the Last War and knew how to work together drawing on their war time experiences. Unfortunately, the adventurers worked together, came up with a plan, and got lucky in that plans implementation.
Is flying a powerful ability? Yes, but it doesn't make the flyer invincible.
Related to this, and I know we are SERIOUSLY off topic vs UA but What are people's thoughts on whether or not a creature can SEE someone at 600 ft up to shoot them with a longbow? Do most people feel that rolling with Disadvantage is the key which balance's shooting from that distance? I feel like if I had a character flying and they wanted to shoot at things 800 ft away, I would maybe ask for a perception roll first.
All comes down to Wisdom )Perception) checks there IMO.
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Watch your back, conserve your ammo, and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
600 feet is a two hundred yard shot. Having made 200-yard shots myself (if with a rifle rather than a longbow), I can say that perceiving a man-sized target which is making no attempt at stealth at two hundred yards is not an issue. Hitting something at that distance is another thing entirely, thus the disadvantage on attacks at that range. Cover and any attempt at stealth are heavily magnified by distance, however - seeing a seven-foot goomba in platemail is easy, seeing half of someone's head poking up above a rock to scope you out is another thing entirely.
Seeing a target beyond two hundred yards, as is occasionally a thing when considering Spell Sniper/Eldritch Spear, definitely starts becoming an issue worthy of Perception rolls, but two hundred yards is doable.
Yeah I can see your point. I've hit archery targets at about 100 yards but it was tough. Though I would argue that hitting a standing target which is sitting atop a horizontal plane at 200 yards would be much easier to perceive than being 200 yards away up in the air. That's more what I was getting at- at that distance your depth perception is shot so knowing where the target is as distinguished from the ground is more what I was getting at. This is why Disadvantage is sometimes a poor "catch all" debuff. Disadvantage doesn't seem like enough of a debuff to me if trying to hit something from 200 yards away while flying. Just my 2 cents.
Sure. But remember - your character is much more skilled and trained than you are. One would assume an aarakocra archer would have experience gauging depth and distance from the air the same way birds of prey do IRL, and they would've spent years honing their talents where you and I both (presumably) just shoot at the range on the weekend sometimes.
Disadvantage represents them pushing their talents and training, or at least it always has in my mind. it's why Sharpshooter works, narratively - you train your ass off until you're comfortable making shots at the limits of your weapon's effective ballistic range (i.e. the range where the projectile still has enough energy to harm your foe). Spell Sniper, on the other hand, is just weird :P
Ask virtually anyone in this board - AL is held up by the vast majority of them as The Golden Standard of D&D, and the best way to play the game. Many players scoff at any sort of homebrew or deviation from the rulebooks, considering it to be little different than cheat code mods in an Elder Scrolls game or the like and decrying any attempt at breaking beyond the books to be broken, poorly designed and unfun nonsense - generally before they've even read it.
My group, lucky for me, is different. I don't know how anybody here has any actual fun tho x_x
I think you really over-estimate how many people actually follow AL rules. What they are, is a great benchmark...if it's AL legal you're not likely to hear many complaints about it.
I agree with you. Just curious if there are any statistics or proxy measures of what percentage of D&D 5e players are actually involved in AL? To me, AL sort of defeats the purpose of playing D&D by bringing way too much structure and regiment to a pursuit that is by its very nature free-flowing and imagination-driven. But's maybe that's just me!
For a home game, I'd agree. For folks who can't find a regular home game to get involved in, there has to be some standard between character. My first character when I was in middle school in the 80s, was a ranger. The DM was dropping all sorts of magical items for me, his little brother and his DMPC. In addition to my red dragonhide armor and my two frost brand longswords (to go with my 18 97% str), I ended up with HIS and HIS BROTHERS crap when they died and I carried it all around in a portable hole. I had game breaking levels of stuff in my portable hole that the DM was lining up for himself. I don't even remember all the crap I had, aside from my two swords, I recall there was a luck blade, a cloak of the bat, bracers of protection...it was quite rediculous.
Now, how is that supposed to work when I show up to a community game with a character that is completely unfair? How do you keep munchkins from showing up with characters that are completely optimized, but someone else who put a lot of thought into their quirky, not optimized but FUN (for them) character? How do you let both sorts of people sit at the same table and not have one totally overshadow the other? Heck my current table has the same problem to a certain extent with some of us who prefer more min-maxxed characters (guilty as charged) while others like quirky, weird stuff that may or may not work very well.
AL rules address that to a certain extent. Do they take away player agency? Yes, a bit. They also take away DM agency too. For example, I personally HATE wild magic sorcerers and would straight out ban them if I was a DM. Now, the quirky player I mentioned earlier, he loves him some wild magic sorcerer. Is it fair to him? No, and it's also not fair to me that I'd have to deal with mechanics that I hate. AL rules prevent DMs from outright banning things that they just dislike on GP. I don't like WMS? Tough luck to me, AL rules say I have to permit it. It's just a baseline, and a very necessary one for organized play purposes.
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Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Athletics is thematic, only reason I can imagine they didn’t was to avoid enabling a +19 with advantage grapple check at 20. Grappling WAS niche, but with the new feat and fighting style maybe some builds will open up...
i still say it should be on the list, bizarre that it isn’t.
I believe the intent was that Survival Instinct was more of a shamanistic thing, helping to differentiate the screaming-ragemonkey barbarian from the Spirit Walker/native-warrior type that you see less of. It gives the barbarian a chance to be actually pretty awesome at a couple of their secondary skills. I can definitely see the argument for putting the barbarian's primary skills on the list though, even if the feature honestly seems a bit more flavorful when you're forced to pick things you don't use thirty times a combat.
I believe the intent was that Survival Instinct was more of a shamanistic thing, helping to differentiate the screaming-ragemonkey barbarian from the Spirit Walker/native-warrior type that you see less of. It gives the barbarian a chance to be actually pretty awesome at a couple of their secondary skills. I can definitely see the argument for putting the barbarian's primary skills on the list though, even if the feature honestly seems a bit more flavorful when you're forced to pick things you don't use thirty times a combat.
I think the Survival Instinct design was more based around the idea that Barbarians out of combat had little they could do. Once the blood stopped flowing they went back to being a spectator for the other pillars.
So for those Barbarian players that are willing to sacrifice some combat capacity for some viability in the Exploration pillar of the game, here's survival instincts. Since the point is to sacrifice some combat viability, it wouldn't make sense to put Athletics on the list.
But the thought of a Barbarian successfully using Intimidation to light a campfire is pretty fantastic.
@guytza My bad >.< I'll see about finding the relevant homebrew forum. And thanks for the observations, I hadn't considered either of those points.
As for the Unarmed Fighting Style for Order of the Lycan, that's a pretty interesting take (although I confess, I'm not sure I see why you wouldn't be able to use your Crimson Rite damage with your fists, seeing as the Predatory Strikes feature simply states that your unarmed strikes count as a single weapon)
Why do people seem to think sorcerers have all their spells hard coded into their genetics? Thematically they have a ton of raw untapped power within them but the way the natural talent manifests is in their metamagic not their spell list. The way magic works in D&D is you manipulate the weave to manifest spells, each class has a different way of doing it but the sorcerers are the most naturally talented at just winging it and bringing whatever effect they intended out (wild magic notwithstanding). If you look at spell casting like that then it makes perfect sense that a sorcerer can decide he wants to practice a new way of manipulating the weave.
Mechanically sorcerers always had the ability to swap spells on level up and that is far more arbitrary but you dont question it because its published in the rules, unless you dont allow sorcerers to swap spells even then, which is exactly why spell versatility needs to get in whatever splat book is coming.
For clarification sorcerers can only swap spells for levels equal to the one they are swapping so its functionally a lateral swap as you would only have a single spell of your highest level due to spells known trickling in (5th level you have one 3rd level spell possibly two if you sack an earlier one on level up). Their entire spell list has like 180 spells which compares pretty well to the free swapping druid list of 150 spells and is nothing compared to the potential list of 300+ spells for wizards. Prepared casters all got the cantrip versatility as a minor buff while known casters did not. You shouldn't go around saying something is OP before seeing it in action and you shouldn't say something is not thematic when its your job to make it thematic.
Why do people seem to think sorcerers have all their spells hard coded into their genetics? Thematically they have a ton of raw untapped power within them but the way the natural talent manifests is in their metamagic not their spell list. The way magic works in D&D is you manipulate the weave to manifest spells, each class has a different way of doing it but the sorcerers are the most naturally talented at just winging it and bringing whatever effect they intended out (wild magic notwithstanding). If you look at spell casting like that then it makes perfect sense that a sorcerer can decide he wants to practice a new way of manipulating the weave.
Mechanically sorcerers always had the ability to swap spells on level up and that is far more arbitrary but you dont question it because its published in the rules, unless you dont allow sorcerers to swap spells even then, which is exactly why spell versatility needs to get in whatever splat book is coming.
For clarification sorcerers can only swap spells for levels equal to the one they are swapping so its functionally a lateral swap as you would only have a single spell of your highest level due to spells known trickling in (5th level you have one 3rd level spell possibly two if you sack an earlier one on level up). Their entire spell list has like 180 spells which compares pretty well to the free swapping druid list of 150 spells and is nothing compared to the potential list of 300+ spells for wizards. Prepared casters all got the cantrip versatility as a minor buff while known casters did not. You shouldn't go around saying something is OP before seeing it in action and you shouldn't say something is not thematic when its your job to make it thematic.
Thats a lovely sentiment, truly. But it's incorrect. It's not thematic or balanced for sorcerers to be the adaptable caster. Literally their class description ends with the following:
"making up for a comparative lack of breadth in their magical knowledge with enormous flexibility in using the spells they know."
Their flexibility comes from metamagic, not from being able move around spells every long rest. How many times has a wizard fired off a save or suck spell wishing the target rolled at disadvantage? Or buffed only one of his martial companions with haste wishing he could buff both of them? Or wished he could use a spell to stealthily change a bad social situation but knows he will get caught trying? The Sorcerer makes these things happen with impunity. And there lies their power.
Sorceror doesn't need spell versatility. They need metamagic versatility and a short rest sorcery point recovery mechanic. THESE would be thematic enhancements to the Sorcerer.
The way you have to look at it, though, is that the entire bar for versatility is shifting, not just for sorcerers. So in comparison to everyone else, or at least every other intuitive caster, they are just as inflexible. Even wizards got more flexible with cantrip versatility. So everyone's gotten more flexible, but the gap has gotten a tiny bit smaller. I think this falls under the rules as fun philosophy and I welcome it, though I suppose since Unearthed Arcana are all tuned to be over powered, we will probably see this tuned down a bit.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
And honestly since this seems like a partial revision to the base classes, I think we shouldn't cling so tightly to the "core" concepts of what we think the classes are or should be, since those things can change according to the years of feedback the devs have gotten from players.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I need you to crack open a dictionary and look up the word breadth. You will notice it mean in the terms of the maximum potential, an area that the sorcerer is far behind the wizard in nearly every metric.
The total spell selection isn't even close between them, the wizard has the entire sorcerer spell list +100 more. Level to level the amount of spells on your active spell list will have the sorcerer far behind. Ritual spells don't even need to be prepared, also sorcerers don't do rituals. Wizards can swap out cantrips sorcerers can't. Yeah I would say even with the ability to swap spells they are still overall lacking in magical knowledge.
Also you seem to be ignoring that they gave the sorcerer more uses for sorcery points outside of metamagic. bending magic so you are just good at everything you do seems plenty thematic to the class really making them seem gifted in general. You basically want the coffeelock build to be built in the base class while pretending the plenty powerful wizard is being hurt from this UA. Nevermind the competitive damage having the ever flexible sorcery points rechargeable on short rest would do to the warlock and four elements monk, both of which have a short rest spell casting mechanic in exchange for a tiny spell list.
I feel this would pretty good, reaction spend bardic inspiration to have advantage on concentration would be pretty good, but still no guarantee on the save. If you were worried about abuse you could make it two but I feel like having more options for bardic inspiration uses is pretty good. The flavor is also nice in that if you are an experienced performer you keep going even when something goes wrong. Having been a choral performer I can say some weird things can disrupt a performance and the best ones can keep right on going as if the person next to you didn't just pass out because they locked their knees...
"Where words fail, swords prevail. Where blood is spilled, my cup is filled" -Cartaphilus
"I have found the answer to the meaning of life. You ask me what the answer is? You already know what the answer to life is. You fear it more than the strike of a viper, the ravages of disease, the ire of a lover. The answer is always death. But death is a gentle mistress with a sweet embrace, and you owe her a debt of restitution. Life is not a gift, it is a loan."
Related to this, and I know we are SERIOUSLY off topic vs UA but What are people's thoughts on whether or not a creature can SEE someone at 600 ft up to shoot them with a longbow? Do most people feel that rolling with Disadvantage is the key which balance's shooting from that distance? I feel like if I had a character flying and they wanted to shoot at things 800 ft away, I would maybe ask for a perception roll first.
For context 600 feet is a 60 story building. I think those are considered skyscrapers by that point.
600 feet is a two hundred yard shot. Having made 200-yard shots myself (if with a rifle rather than a longbow), I can say that perceiving a man-sized target which is making no attempt at stealth at two hundred yards is not an issue. Hitting something at that distance is another thing entirely, thus the disadvantage on attacks at that range. Cover and any attempt at stealth are heavily magnified by distance, however - seeing a seven-foot goomba in platemail is easy, seeing half of someone's head poking up above a rock to scope you out is another thing entirely.
Seeing a target beyond two hundred yards, as is occasionally a thing when considering Spell Sniper/Eldritch Spear, definitely starts becoming an issue worthy of Perception rolls, but two hundred yards is doable.
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All comes down to Wisdom )Perception) checks there IMO.
Watch your back, conserve your ammo,
and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
Standing on a flat surface with your eyes about 5 feet off the ground, the farthest edge that you can see is about 3 miles away.
Yeah I can see your point. I've hit archery targets at about 100 yards but it was tough. Though I would argue that hitting a standing target which is sitting atop a horizontal plane at 200 yards would be much easier to perceive than being 200 yards away up in the air. That's more what I was getting at- at that distance your depth perception is shot so knowing where the target is as distinguished from the ground is more what I was getting at. This is why Disadvantage is sometimes a poor "catch all" debuff. Disadvantage doesn't seem like enough of a debuff to me if trying to hit something from 200 yards away while flying. Just my 2 cents.
Sure. But remember - your character is much more skilled and trained than you are. One would assume an aarakocra archer would have experience gauging depth and distance from the air the same way birds of prey do IRL, and they would've spent years honing their talents where you and I both (presumably) just shoot at the range on the weekend sometimes.
Disadvantage represents them pushing their talents and training, or at least it always has in my mind. it's why Sharpshooter works, narratively - you train your ass off until you're comfortable making shots at the limits of your weapon's effective ballistic range (i.e. the range where the projectile still has enough energy to harm your foe). Spell Sniper, on the other hand, is just weird :P
Please do not contact or message me.
For a home game, I'd agree. For folks who can't find a regular home game to get involved in, there has to be some standard between character. My first character when I was in middle school in the 80s, was a ranger. The DM was dropping all sorts of magical items for me, his little brother and his DMPC. In addition to my red dragonhide armor and my two frost brand longswords (to go with my 18 97% str), I ended up with HIS and HIS BROTHERS crap when they died and I carried it all around in a portable hole. I had game breaking levels of stuff in my portable hole that the DM was lining up for himself. I don't even remember all the crap I had, aside from my two swords, I recall there was a luck blade, a cloak of the bat, bracers of protection...it was quite rediculous.
Now, how is that supposed to work when I show up to a community game with a character that is completely unfair? How do you keep munchkins from showing up with characters that are completely optimized, but someone else who put a lot of thought into their quirky, not optimized but FUN (for them) character? How do you let both sorts of people sit at the same table and not have one totally overshadow the other? Heck my current table has the same problem to a certain extent with some of us who prefer more min-maxxed characters (guilty as charged) while others like quirky, weird stuff that may or may not work very well.
AL rules address that to a certain extent. Do they take away player agency? Yes, a bit. They also take away DM agency too. For example, I personally HATE wild magic sorcerers and would straight out ban them if I was a DM. Now, the quirky player I mentioned earlier, he loves him some wild magic sorcerer. Is it fair to him? No, and it's also not fair to me that I'd have to deal with mechanics that I hate. AL rules prevent DMs from outright banning things that they just dislike on GP. I don't like WMS? Tough luck to me, AL rules say I have to permit it. It's just a baseline, and a very necessary one for organized play purposes.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
does it not seem weird that athletics and intimidation are not on the list of skills that a barbarian can get expertise in? that seems weird to me.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subraces/137390-weretouched-beasthide
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subraces/137424-weretouched-longtooth
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subraces/137431-weretouched-razorclaw
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subraces/137461-weretouched-swiftstride
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subraces/137646-weretouched-wildhunt
It does seem weird. They'll probably do a feedback survey. Hopefully enough people point that out.
Athletics is thematic, only reason I can imagine they didn’t was to avoid enabling a +19 with advantage grapple check at 20. Grappling WAS niche, but with the new feat and fighting style maybe some builds will open up...
i still say it should be on the list, bizarre that it isn’t.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
I believe the intent was that Survival Instinct was more of a shamanistic thing, helping to differentiate the screaming-ragemonkey barbarian from the Spirit Walker/native-warrior type that you see less of. It gives the barbarian a chance to be actually pretty awesome at a couple of their secondary skills. I can definitely see the argument for putting the barbarian's primary skills on the list though, even if the feature honestly seems a bit more flavorful when you're forced to pick things you don't use thirty times a combat.
Please do not contact or message me.
I think the Survival Instinct design was more based around the idea that Barbarians out of combat had little they could do. Once the blood stopped flowing they went back to being a spectator for the other pillars.
So for those Barbarian players that are willing to sacrifice some combat capacity for some viability in the Exploration pillar of the game, here's survival instincts. Since the point is to sacrifice some combat viability, it wouldn't make sense to put Athletics on the list.
But the thought of a Barbarian successfully using Intimidation to light a campfire is pretty fantastic.
@guytza My bad >.< I'll see about finding the relevant homebrew forum. And thanks for the observations, I hadn't considered either of those points.
As for the Unarmed Fighting Style for Order of the Lycan, that's a pretty interesting take (although I confess, I'm not sure I see why you wouldn't be able to use your Crimson Rite damage with your fists, seeing as the Predatory Strikes feature simply states that your unarmed strikes count as a single weapon)
Why do people seem to think sorcerers have all their spells hard coded into their genetics? Thematically they have a ton of raw untapped power within them but the way the natural talent manifests is in their metamagic not their spell list. The way magic works in D&D is you manipulate the weave to manifest spells, each class has a different way of doing it but the sorcerers are the most naturally talented at just winging it and bringing whatever effect they intended out (wild magic notwithstanding). If you look at spell casting like that then it makes perfect sense that a sorcerer can decide he wants to practice a new way of manipulating the weave.
Mechanically sorcerers always had the ability to swap spells on level up and that is far more arbitrary but you dont question it because its published in the rules, unless you dont allow sorcerers to swap spells even then, which is exactly why spell versatility needs to get in whatever splat book is coming.
For clarification sorcerers can only swap spells for levels equal to the one they are swapping so its functionally a lateral swap as you would only have a single spell of your highest level due to spells known trickling in (5th level you have one 3rd level spell possibly two if you sack an earlier one on level up). Their entire spell list has like 180 spells which compares pretty well to the free swapping druid list of 150 spells and is nothing compared to the potential list of 300+ spells for wizards. Prepared casters all got the cantrip versatility as a minor buff while known casters did not. You shouldn't go around saying something is OP before seeing it in action and you shouldn't say something is not thematic when its your job to make it thematic.
Thats a lovely sentiment, truly. But it's incorrect. It's not thematic or balanced for sorcerers to be the adaptable caster. Literally their class description ends with the following:
"making up for a comparative lack of breadth in their magical knowledge with enormous flexibility in using the spells they know."
Their flexibility comes from metamagic, not from being able move around spells every long rest. How many times has a wizard fired off a save or suck spell wishing the target rolled at disadvantage? Or buffed only one of his martial companions with haste wishing he could buff both of them? Or wished he could use a spell to stealthily change a bad social situation but knows he will get caught trying? The Sorcerer makes these things happen with impunity. And there lies their power.
Sorceror doesn't need spell versatility. They need metamagic versatility and a short rest sorcery point recovery mechanic. THESE would be thematic enhancements to the Sorcerer.
The way you have to look at it, though, is that the entire bar for versatility is shifting, not just for sorcerers. So in comparison to everyone else, or at least every other intuitive caster, they are just as inflexible. Even wizards got more flexible with cantrip versatility. So everyone's gotten more flexible, but the gap has gotten a tiny bit smaller. I think this falls under the rules as fun philosophy and I welcome it, though I suppose since Unearthed Arcana are all tuned to be over powered, we will probably see this tuned down a bit.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
And honestly since this seems like a partial revision to the base classes, I think we shouldn't cling so tightly to the "core" concepts of what we think the classes are or should be, since those things can change according to the years of feedback the devs have gotten from players.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I need you to crack open a dictionary and look up the word breadth. You will notice it mean in the terms of the maximum potential, an area that the sorcerer is far behind the wizard in nearly every metric.
The total spell selection isn't even close between them, the wizard has the entire sorcerer spell list +100 more. Level to level the amount of spells on your active spell list will have the sorcerer far behind. Ritual spells don't even need to be prepared, also sorcerers don't do rituals. Wizards can swap out cantrips sorcerers can't. Yeah I would say even with the ability to swap spells they are still overall lacking in magical knowledge.
Also you seem to be ignoring that they gave the sorcerer more uses for sorcery points outside of metamagic. bending magic so you are just good at everything you do seems plenty thematic to the class really making them seem gifted in general. You basically want the coffeelock build to be built in the base class while pretending the plenty powerful wizard is being hurt from this UA. Nevermind the competitive damage having the ever flexible sorcery points rechargeable on short rest would do to the warlock and four elements monk, both of which have a short rest spell casting mechanic in exchange for a tiny spell list.