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Vagabond
🕑 Added 2023-04-01 05:05:01 +0000 UTCNEW BASE CLASS!
My cowriter Ben and I have been hammering design meetings for the last month and a half to conjure up a brand new base class for you. Because the Book of Extinction has the artists pretty locked down, I hope you'll understand that we didn't have time to get art for this class done for this first release.
Some background: The Captain class, as well as the Grey Watchman warden and other subclasses that utilize our Battle Dice mechanic are envisioned as "half-casters" and "third-casters" of Battle Dice, respectively. In fact, we've designed their progressions with a full Battle Die class in mind since day one! It's just taken us a long time to complete the "full caster" version of this class.
Ultimately, this class inherits a long legacy of maneuver characters, tracing back to the D&D 3.5 Tome of Battle. We tried our best to create something that's more flexible, more expressive, and more engaging than this class's forbearers. I think you'll enjoy what we came up with.
The Vagabond is an archetypal wanderer -- someone who, by choice or by necessity, has left home, never to return. Their travels have left them desperate and willing to embrace any tactic that helps them survive.
Changelog:
- 4/2/23: Typo fixed
- Battle Edge and Cutthroat reworded for clarity
- Take Hostage modified so you can't insta-kill incapacitated foes
- Maneuvers: Table fixed for critical strike
- Maneuvers: Rally and Reckless Assault removed. These were never intended to be in the core class
Comments
Mage Hand Press
On a hit implies that the player has already rolled an attack and hit, and they're making the decision before or while they're rolling damage for the attack. I'll make sure our wording is consistent with other mechanics that rely on this timing, like the paladin's smite.
Mage Hand Press
Very perceptive of you! The capstone is easily the weakest element of the design at the moment. After kicking around a lot of different angles for it, we settled on this one in order to meet the deadline, but I expect we'll completely replace it in a future update.
[ Complexicon ]
I love it! There is one thing I'm wondering though, on maneuvers where it says that you spend the battle dice on a hit, is the intended use case that the player can declare that they're using the maneuver after they roll to attack but before rolling damage or do they have to declare that they're using the maneuver before rolling the attack? Based on the wording I lean towards the first interpretation, but its not explicitly stated anywhere so I was wondering if that's actually what's intended
Suzuki
Yoooo! Alright, here's my first impressions- It feels great, well put-together. However, the capstone feature seems overpowered. Permanently having advantage on attack rolls, and crits always miss? I think it'd be better to change the capstone to something like, 'Your class features that require you to be under half hit points instead require you only to have taken damage within the last minute'. Not a major change, but something I feel would fit more flavor-wise, in addition to making sure it takes a bit more to activate stuff like that.
