Hi, first time poster. I’m not entirely sure how to be doing this, but I checked out the rules for posting homebrew here and I don’t think I’m gonna be breaking any of them, so I’m just gonna wing it.
I recently wrote up a fighter subclass called Sky Breaking Swordsmanship, and this thread is just gonna be me listing off some of my own thoughts on the homebrew, and some variations that might be better received based on y’all’s comments and suggestions. Basically I’m just looking for feedback.
Oh also, let me be clear that this is an adaption of another work’s idea. I don’t use any potentially copyrighted names, but the concepts and certain phrases are taken from the novel, Omniscient Reader. This original basis is what I used to come up with features of the subclass. I don’t think that disobeys any of the stated rules, and at the end of this thread I’ll be telling you where you can read the novel yourself (without links to another website of course) in the hopes that the mods will see this as praise and an homage, not plagiarism.
So from the top, I think the 3rd level feature is good and synergizes well with most of the other features of the class. I also think it’s relatively balanced, if perhaps a bit overpowered in terms of potential nova damage on a strong target. I think the best variant to this to act as a solution would be to say that you can’t do it more than once a turn, or even have it necessitate a bonus action. If you all could give some advice here, I’d appreciate it.
Each of the features under Additional Techniques (I don’t name things well) are relatively simple, so we’ll go through them each.
I think the Shunpo is decently good and balanced as it is, since you can’t teleport out of a grapple, but you get that advantage on an attack, but I could also see this being a bit much, it’s just that Recovery is so good, all of these features might be a bit much in comparison.
The Godly Fist is simple, better punching and you can slam them to the floor or away from you when you do. There’s not really much more to say. I don’t have any variations, I’d just need some feedback on if it’s too strong in y’all’s opinion and maybe I’ll lower the die one level, or remove the shove, but I’d prefer not to do either.
Strong Self-Defense is very simple, it’s like uncanny dodge, and so I think a good potential feature for 7th level or 10th depending on when you choose.
Recovery I based off of the open hand monk’s wholeness of body feature, but with the caveat of extra uses for your exhaustion. That’s based off the original novel, and I definitely see why it could be too much, but I think it fits the class as a nova type ability in terms of, you won’t use it on just any encounter since you’d have to sleep off the exhaustion, possibly for multiple days, but as far as a big boss fight, being able to tank multiple hits from a dragon and pulling yourself back from near death each time makes a good amount of sense. A friend suggested that since there are multiple potential uses, I might make it worse than the monk’s at 2 times your level. I don’t think this is a good variant, but I’m posting it here as an option.
Having talked about all of these, the problem among most is that they’re all powerful, so what might be a good solution overall is to limit your access to them, only getting two of them rather than three, or maybe pushing the 3rd choice to 18th level or something, since not much is happening then.
Speaking of, the 15th and 18th level features are the concept of Transcendence, going beyond your limits. In the original novel, there’s a kind of stats system you can spend coins on to improve yourself. The natural human limit is 100, but for dnd that’s an easy change to the limit of 20. Personally, I think this ability isn’t overpowered at all, but a friend does think it is, so I’ll do my best to explain both sides as I go on. Her point is that it should maybe only be two stats of your choice that the limits raise, because she thinks it could be overpowered otherwise. She also makes the point that the barbarian’s 20th level ability is to do something similar, even if this feature doesn’t actually raise the stats for you, you do that with your own ability score increases.
The only itens that I recall to raise your stats without raising their limit is the Ioun stones, which you definitely could use with this ability, but as a fighter who’s main feature keys off the modifier of your attack stat, you’re probably going to be raising them to 24 with your 16th and 19th level ASIs, not your wisdom to 20 to use an ioun stone for it to be 22. Yes there’s the potential for a weird MAD build using the Monk’s Unarmored Defense for ridiculous AC, but it ultimately wouldn’t be that much of a difference in my opinion. As well, the variant of raising two stats of your choice isn’t necessarily going to prevent that build from being made.
With all that said, we agreed that I’d post this class to dndbeyond and see input from others, so here i am.
Finally, I have one more thing to say before I talk up the novel, so sorry about this being very long.
I originally had this in the feature description of Transcendence, but from my friend’s feedback, I realized that it’s a bit railroading in terms of an RP thing, so rather than having it be a part of the class that is inherent to it working, I’m gonna post it here as basically a suggestion of something neat you can do as a DM for your Transcendent player. It’s gonna be long, and if you want to skip it, I’m surrounding it with dashes.
———————
In addition, a special circumstance occurs when two transcendents meet (even if the other doesn’t call it transcendence). Whether a creature is “transcendent” or not is up to the DM, but a few guidelines will be presented here for convenience: any humanoid with one or more ability scores above 20 is a transcendent, any intelligent undead is a transcendent, and more powerful variations of a standard creature are ~generally~ transcendents, such as Storm Giant Quintessents, or a Yuan-Ti Anathema, both of which are members of a species that sought to go further beyond what they normally could, and succeeded.
The DM will also decide before a meeting whether your goals are aligned with the transcendent to a great degree or not. A transcendent walks one path and one alone, if you encounter someone who can help you walk it, they will likely help, and vice versa with you for their path. If your paths do not align, they oppose each other, and there is only one resolution to that. The two paths clash, each side declaring that theirs is right and the other’s is wrong, until one falls, and the other rises, both stronger for the conflict, if they survive.
If your goals are aligned, most social interactions with the other should end favorably for you both, shown with deception checks from the both of you being at disadvantage with each other, and insight checks at advantage. If they aren’t aligned, all persuasion checks between the two should be at a disadvantage, and talking for more than a minute should proc a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. If you both succeed, nothing happens, and the saving throws will repeat after another minute of talking. When one fails, the transcendent must spend their action to attack their opponent, having perceived some action or aspect of the other as an insult to their way. A spell such as Calm Emotions, or similar effect, will suppress the need for a saving throw during the time it is active.
Once this combat has finished, and a winner is determined, the negative effects will be suppressed for this and future encounters. However, the loser will feel the need to listen to and obey the winner. If they disobey the other, the negative effects and saving throw will resume as the loser wishes to declare their path again.
——————
Now, finally finally, on to the novel. Omniscient Reader is a Korean web novel written by Sing-Shong (싱숑). The novel is almost an isekai, but not quite, and also it’s very good in my opinion. The author is very aware of the tropes that are common to this genre and web novels in general, and he plays with them like he’s cooking a well known dish, but seasoning it very very well. I don’t want to get too far into this description before it starts seeming like an advertisement for it (it’s not, I’m not getting paid, I’m just a fan), but you can check out TvTropes, they’ve got a page on it (although some of the stuff there isn’t as spoiler covered as it should be, so be warned), and even just googling the name of the novel will get you to the novel. It’s on Webnovel, and it should be the very first result you get. There, you can read the first 42 chapters for free, and I’d say it’s definitely worth your time.
The character that this subclass is based off of is the main character (kinda). He’s the protagonist of the novel within the novel. I’m not gonna get too deep into it, just rest assured he’s awesome and a gigantic sunfish. These techniques are ones that he learned a while ago (by the beginning of the novel I mean) and they’re very powerful.
Anyway, thanks so much for reading this far. If you liked the subclass, give me some feedback, I’d appreciate it a lot. Although, what I’d appreciate more than that would be this novel getting more popular. So go check that out too. Goodbye for now.
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Hi, first time poster. I’m not entirely sure how to be doing this, but I checked out the rules for posting homebrew here and I don’t think I’m gonna be breaking any of them, so I’m just gonna wing it.
I recently wrote up a fighter subclass called Sky Breaking Swordsmanship, and this thread is just gonna be me listing off some of my own thoughts on the homebrew, and some variations that might be better received based on y’all’s comments and suggestions. Basically I’m just looking for feedback.
Oh also, let me be clear that this is an adaption of another work’s idea. I don’t use any potentially copyrighted names, but the concepts and certain phrases are taken from the novel, Omniscient Reader. This original basis is what I used to come up with features of the subclass. I don’t think that disobeys any of the stated rules, and at the end of this thread I’ll be telling you where you can read the novel yourself (without links to another website of course) in the hopes that the mods will see this as praise and an homage, not plagiarism.
So from the top, I think the 3rd level feature is good and synergizes well with most of the other features of the class. I also think it’s relatively balanced, if perhaps a bit overpowered in terms of potential nova damage on a strong target. I think the best variant to this to act as a solution would be to say that you can’t do it more than once a turn, or even have it necessitate a bonus action. If you all could give some advice here, I’d appreciate it.
Each of the features under Additional Techniques (I don’t name things well) are relatively simple, so we’ll go through them each.
I think the Shunpo is decently good and balanced as it is, since you can’t teleport out of a grapple, but you get that advantage on an attack, but I could also see this being a bit much, it’s just that Recovery is so good, all of these features might be a bit much in comparison.
The Godly Fist is simple, better punching and you can slam them to the floor or away from you when you do. There’s not really much more to say. I don’t have any variations, I’d just need some feedback on if it’s too strong in y’all’s opinion and maybe I’ll lower the die one level, or remove the shove, but I’d prefer not to do either.
Strong Self-Defense is very simple, it’s like uncanny dodge, and so I think a good potential feature for 7th level or 10th depending on when you choose.
Recovery I based off of the open hand monk’s wholeness of body feature, but with the caveat of extra uses for your exhaustion. That’s based off the original novel, and I definitely see why it could be too much, but I think it fits the class as a nova type ability in terms of, you won’t use it on just any encounter since you’d have to sleep off the exhaustion, possibly for multiple days, but as far as a big boss fight, being able to tank multiple hits from a dragon and pulling yourself back from near death each time makes a good amount of sense. A friend suggested that since there are multiple potential uses, I might make it worse than the monk’s at 2 times your level. I don’t think this is a good variant, but I’m posting it here as an option.
Having talked about all of these, the problem among most is that they’re all powerful, so what might be a good solution overall is to limit your access to them, only getting two of them rather than three, or maybe pushing the 3rd choice to 18th level or something, since not much is happening then.
Speaking of, the 15th and 18th level features are the concept of Transcendence, going beyond your limits. In the original novel, there’s a kind of stats system you can spend coins on to improve yourself. The natural human limit is 100, but for dnd that’s an easy change to the limit of 20. Personally, I think this ability isn’t overpowered at all, but a friend does think it is, so I’ll do my best to explain both sides as I go on. Her point is that it should maybe only be two stats of your choice that the limits raise, because she thinks it could be overpowered otherwise. She also makes the point that the barbarian’s 20th level ability is to do something similar, even if this feature doesn’t actually raise the stats for you, you do that with your own ability score increases.
The only itens that I recall to raise your stats without raising their limit is the Ioun stones, which you definitely could use with this ability, but as a fighter who’s main feature keys off the modifier of your attack stat, you’re probably going to be raising them to 24 with your 16th and 19th level ASIs, not your wisdom to 20 to use an ioun stone for it to be 22. Yes there’s the potential for a weird MAD build using the Monk’s Unarmored Defense for ridiculous AC, but it ultimately wouldn’t be that much of a difference in my opinion. As well, the variant of raising two stats of your choice isn’t necessarily going to prevent that build from being made.
With all that said, we agreed that I’d post this class to dndbeyond and see input from others, so here i am.
Finally, I have one more thing to say before I talk up the novel, so sorry about this being very long.
I originally had this in the feature description of Transcendence, but from my friend’s feedback, I realized that it’s a bit railroading in terms of an RP thing, so rather than having it be a part of the class that is inherent to it working, I’m gonna post it here as basically a suggestion of something neat you can do as a DM for your Transcendent player. It’s gonna be long, and if you want to skip it, I’m surrounding it with dashes.
———————
In addition, a special circumstance occurs when two transcendents meet (even if the other doesn’t call it transcendence). Whether a creature is “transcendent” or not is up to the DM, but a few guidelines will be presented here for convenience: any humanoid with one or more ability scores above 20 is a transcendent, any intelligent undead is a transcendent, and more powerful variations of a standard creature are ~generally~ transcendents, such as Storm Giant Quintessents, or a Yuan-Ti Anathema, both of which are members of a species that sought to go further beyond what they normally could, and succeeded.
The DM will also decide before a meeting whether your goals are aligned with the transcendent to a great degree or not. A transcendent walks one path and one alone, if you encounter someone who can help you walk it, they will likely help, and vice versa with you for their path. If your paths do not align, they oppose each other, and there is only one resolution to that. The two paths clash, each side declaring that theirs is right and the other’s is wrong, until one falls, and the other rises, both stronger for the conflict, if they survive.
If your goals are aligned, most social interactions with the other should end favorably for you both, shown with deception checks from the both of you being at disadvantage with each other, and insight checks at advantage. If they aren’t aligned, all persuasion checks between the two should be at a disadvantage, and talking for more than a minute should proc a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. If you both succeed, nothing happens, and the saving throws will repeat after another minute of talking. When one fails, the transcendent must spend their action to attack their opponent, having perceived some action or aspect of the other as an insult to their way. A spell such as Calm Emotions, or similar effect, will suppress the need for a saving throw during the time it is active.
Once this combat has finished, and a winner is determined, the negative effects will be suppressed for this and future encounters. However, the loser will feel the need to listen to and obey the winner. If they disobey the other, the negative effects and saving throw will resume as the loser wishes to declare their path again.
——————
Now, finally finally, on to the novel. Omniscient Reader is a Korean web novel written by Sing-Shong (싱숑). The novel is almost an isekai, but not quite, and also it’s very good in my opinion. The author is very aware of the tropes that are common to this genre and web novels in general, and he plays with them like he’s cooking a well known dish, but seasoning it very very well. I don’t want to get too far into this description before it starts seeming like an advertisement for it (it’s not, I’m not getting paid, I’m just a fan), but you can check out TvTropes, they’ve got a page on it (although some of the stuff there isn’t as spoiler covered as it should be, so be warned), and even just googling the name of the novel will get you to the novel. It’s on Webnovel, and it should be the very first result you get. There, you can read the first 42 chapters for free, and I’d say it’s definitely worth your time.
The character that this subclass is based off of is the main character (kinda). He’s the protagonist of the novel within the novel. I’m not gonna get too deep into it, just rest assured he’s awesome and a gigantic sunfish. These techniques are ones that he learned a while ago (by the beginning of the novel I mean) and they’re very powerful.
Anyway, thanks so much for reading this far. If you liked the subclass, give me some feedback, I’d appreciate it a lot. Although, what I’d appreciate more than that would be this novel getting more popular. So go check that out too. Goodbye for now.