Class Showcase: Cleric & Occultist (2023)

Given that it's nearly Halloween, it seemed like Occultist was an obvious choice for today's post. And since D&D's cleric class famously was based off of the vampire-hunter Van Helsing, that seemed like another solid candidate.

• The Cleric (d4/d10)
• The Occultist (d10)

Like many classes, the Cleric breaks down into essentially a melee subclass (Battle Priest) and a ranged subclass (Invoker). In the 4e paradigm where [role + power source = class], it makes sense to split Invoker off from Cleric; in a paradigm closer to 5e, Invoker just seems like a specialized cleric, with particular spells picked. I chose to give the Cleric class a d10, so that the Invoker could have a few extra reserves to burn for powering their abilities (rather than putting debuffs on themself to power them, as in 4e) -- this is also why the Invoker is one of the first real instances where the newly-defined debilities make an appearance, within a class' features.

Beyond that, I felt like a "healing word"-esque spell and a buff like Bless sort of neatly encapsulates the basic Cleric's toolkit in 5e -- barring specific flavours from domains beyond the obvious divine-ish types.

The Occultist was a class I actually took a long time to settle on a name for. I eventually picked this one after it came up as a class in Darkest Dungeon. In earlier iterations, I had the Animate Dead ability as exclusive to the Necromancer, and the Eldritch Blast ability as exclusive to the Warlock. In the previous iteration, I decided to make both of these abilities available to all Occultists (mainly because they both required a standard action to use) and treated Necromancer and Warlock more as 'roles' rather than distinct subclasses. This lastest version kind of splits the difference; the two aforementioned abilities remain universal, but the curses remain specific to each subclass. The Banishment ability was changed to a controller ability from a Necromancer ability, the Hellish Rebuke ability was changed from a Warlock ability to a striker ability, and Vampiric Touch was added as a support ability.

Generally the ethos in TNP has been to try (as much as possible) to fit the abilities of each class into 3 features, which are sometimes bundles of smaller features -- almost akin to how feats work in 5th Edition D&D. There is some bending of this rule; a class might have one feature and each subclass might have 3 of their own features, in addition to that (such as the Cleric... sort of.) The Occultist essentially has 4 features (one of which has 2 different subsets, depending on subclass) and 3 possible role features, on top of that. In the earliest versions of TNP, the idea was that ALL classes should be able to fit onto one sheet of paper; now, it's usually 3, but some of the simpler classes make in at 2 (with the 1st page essentially being the key, basic statistics for each class loadout.) Hopefully this allows the game to overall strike the right balance between complexity as well as range of character options.

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Check back for the next post on November 10th!

The Conundrum of Class Dice Bonuses

Since the summer break, I've been trying to figure out a solution to the problem with the d12 bonus. What it comes down to is that because d12 is such a large damage bonus, it has to be a relatively small attack bonus, in order for the DPR to be balanced against the other (smaller) dice bonuses -- to wit, in the current iterations, the d12 does not provide an attack bonus at all. This creates a problem, because it does not bestow the multiplicative effect to "extra damage" that dice bonuses with an attack bonus offer. I came up with a fix, but in the process I realized I should also clean up some of the nomenclature a bit.

Class dice bonuses are bonuses to attacks, which use class dice; they can be bonuses to attack rolls and/or to damage rolls. When used as a bonus to an attack roll, the class dice bonus is referred to as an attack bonus, and when used as a bonus to a damage (i.e. base damage) roll, the class dice bonus is referred to as a damage bonus (or bonus damage, depending on grammatical considerations.) Extra damage is something entirely separate from bonus damage; extra damage is only ever represented by d6s and/or d10s, can only be used for damage (not for attack bonus), and is in addition to both base damage and bonus damage.

Now, it's important to remember that while all 5 of the class dice bonuses may be applied to a given attack, only one may be used as an attack bonus -- and you can choose which one to use, after rolling all bonuses. Some of the class dice bonuses have special functions that work "as an attack bonus," meaning that in order to benefit from said bonus, no other attack bonus may be applied. Specifically, the d8 bonus when it ties the attack roll (d20), or using the d10 roll in place of the d20 (i.e. a 10 on the d10 being used to make a hit.) Remember this for later.

The general rule is that a class dice bonus can be used for an attack bonus OR a damage bonus, but not both -- however, there are exceptions (which is partly why to simplify things, one of the reworks I was considering was to just allow all dice to be used for attack bonus AND damage bonus.)

As I had said from the top, the d12 bonus:
a) does not have an attack bonus component, and;
b) does not properly scale with extra damage dice

So how do we fix this? Well, what I've come up with is this:
"As an attack bonus, the d12 bonus allows all extra damage dice to be treated as having rolled their maximum value."

Essentially what this does, is take the base hit chance (50%) and crit chance (5%) without an attack bonus (or, when applying the d12 bonus, which has no attack bonus component) and instead of multiplying those chances by the random roll of the extra damage dice, you're multiplying them by the maximum value of the extra damage dice. The result is that the extra damage scales up, more in line with the other class dice bonuses.

As mentioned in a previous post, since each class dice bonus (with a base damage of 1d8) produces a DPR of about 7.3 we then need the extra damage dice to work out to at least another 16.7 DPR, in order to hit our "1 KPR" number of 24 DPR. By using the d12 bonus this way, we're multiplying the maximum value of 5d6 or 3d10 by 50% (hit) and taking double that amount, multplied by 5% (crit):

(30 * 50% = 15) + (60 * 5% = 3) = 18

So this means that with the d12 bonus in play, the DPR from extra damage can be increased to 18, finally putting it just about on par with the other bonuses.

Now, this may seem a bit unintuitive and weird, since objectively the roll of the d12 is doing nothing to provide the actual attack bonus. But we do need to treat it as an attack bonus, to keep other attack bonuses from being applied in addition to this one. Since the ~7.3 DPR from the d12 bonus comes entirely from damage, this also means that the rule for the d12 bonus must be that it can be used for attack AND damage, in order for this math to work out.

Essentially, I think of attack bonus and damage bonus more and more like two separate buckets, that can each be filled in specific, different ways. Attack bonus is more like a "typed" bonus, in the sense that, for example, a "feat bonus" to attack can be stacked with a "power bonus" to attack, and a "circumstance bonus" to attack... but not with another "feat bonus" to attack; if every class dice bonus to attack is considered a "feat bonus", then only the highest/best would apply. Bonus damage is more like an untyped bonus; all of them can be stacked (unless they specifically don't apply, such as when using one for an attack bonus prohibits using it as a damage bonus.)

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Anyway, hopefully that doesn't muddy the waters too much; it was the simplest fix to the class dice problem, short of reworking the whole scheme from scratch.

Next post should be up on October 30th, so check back then!

Class Showcase: Fighter, Paladin, Ranger (2023)

 So for today's 3 classes, we have the (mostly) martial bunch:

• The Fighter (d6/d12)
• The Paladin (d6/d10)
  
• The Ranger (d8/d10)

If we look at 5th Edition D&D, these classes are sort of grouped together, with "fighting styles" being their common mechanic; the fighter gets access to all, ranger leans towards two-weapon fighting or archery, and paladin can basically get any of the others.

It seems clear that there was a deliberate attempt to make Fighters in 5e that could be built for more than just melee, and I felt that was valuable to keep in TNP. However, I didn't want the fighting styles to be something you were pigeon-holed into, so I added the mechanic of each additional style giving you extra damage. The TNP version of the Fighter is actually an outgrowth of the original "Warrior" class, which was a much more barbarian-ish, d12 class; as the Fighter-y bits got added more and more into the Warrior, the d12 made less and less sense. When I started working on the 3rd slate of classes, I decided to make the Fighter as a separate, d6 class, and later with the two-dice revision, d6/d12 seemed the obvious choice.

The Paladin in TNP, on the other hand, was one of the original 5 character classes... sort of -- having evolved out of the d10 "Fighter" class to include some more holy/healing abilities, which the slate was otherwise completely lacking. There are some subtle influences from Diablo 2, as the Paladin in that game was probably my favourite class. I liked the idea of either taking a Cleric domain or a Fighter role (or possibly fighting style) with the Paladin, so I sort of massaged that into the class specialization options; the Fighter and Paladin sharing the d6 class die made role the easier fighter option to share. In much the same way as in 5e, the Paladin isn't mean to be a "pure" healer or "main" healer, but they're a frontliner who can dish out some healing as they fight. I can honestly say I had fun playing a Blackguard in 4e, and so including a dark Paladin with some of the thievery-type skills had always been on my radar.

The Ranger has always been a d8 class, but honestly, stapling an "extra damage die" such as the d10 onto the class just worked flawlessly. The scout subclass bounced around between Ranger and Rogue for a bit, before finally settling in as part of the Adventurer class; I wanted to keep classes to only 2 subclasses, and that sort of necessitated this. Probably the two-weapon fighting and the archery Rangers are the most iconic, particularly coming out of 4th Edition; TNP's Ranger is more akin to the Essentials' Hunter ranger, stapled onto the beastmaster archetype of the Martial Power book. I feel the latter playstyle became popularized for a lot of people (myself included) with the World of Warcraft hunter class, and I think using the beast for 4e's iconic "twin strike" manages to work out ok.

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So, the remaining "completed" class is the Rogue, with 5 others still needing to be polished up and finalized; I might squeeze in a post on another topic, rather than continue with the class showcases, for the next one.

Check back on October 20th!