vallonde-laid-bare: vallonde-laid-bare:I’ve caught the plague, but that’s not going to s
vallonde-laid-bare: vallonde-laid-bare:I’ve caught the plague, but that’s not going to stop me from homebrewing cool new content for you guys. I was inspired and just had to throw this together. No choice, thems the rules.This is the first divine domain I’ve added to my game, and honestly I had a lot of fun with it. Clerics are my favorite class and, while they don’t really NEED anymore options, new domains server the double purpose of expanding the world and the class at the same time. I’ve always been a big fan of fear effects but have found that, generally, they’re less powerful that more direct attacking options unless you are playing a very roleplay heavy game where fights are few and far between. My main purpose with this domain is to make frighten effects a viable option for combat. Now, the main hurtle I came across with that certain creatures, namely undead and constructs, are immune to fear. Luckily, clerics naturally come with the ability to frighten undead, but the construct issue remains. I don’t think it’s crippling, but those using this domain will just have to come to terms with being less effective against creatures immune to their abilities. Upsides and downsides make for more interesting games anyway.As always, questions and comments are welcome. Do you think this scales well alongside other domains, or does it come up short? Do these features make casting fear spells more enticing? I’d love to hear your thoughts.(Content PDF) (Patreon) (Commissions) Let’s take a look at one of my oldest pieces of content and go over some of the things I like about it, some of the things I don’t like about it, and why and how I changed those things.Firstly, I like the theme for this one. For the most part, fear effects aren’t utilized all that often and there are no strong gameplay elements which encourage their use. Undead, constructs, plants, fiends, oozes, swarms, and just a lot of things in general are completely immune to fear in a lot of cases and make choosing to prepare those spells a risky proposition because no one wants to prepare spells that end up being useless. I mean, why cast a fear spell that may not actually affect anyone when you can just cast a fireball, right? The hope is that by strengthening to theme, spells that cause fear may actually become viable where they weren’t all the great before.As far as changes go, I ended up tweaking some things and overhauling others. - Disciple of Fear: I think the idea of a cleric of the despair domain being competent at demoralizing makes a lot of sense, so this wasn’t changed all that much. In fact, I made it stronger by adding that in cases where charisma would normally be used, you can substitute wisdom to represent that fact that you’re using your divine powers to cause the intimidation rather than just *ahem* artful language. This also helps the build be less MAD since caster clerics rely on their wisdom being high to bump their spell attacks and save DCs.- Spread Woe and Abjure Hope: No changes. I think the first does a fine job of encouraging the use of a signature spell in cause fear by making it essentially always cast a level up, and the second is at the very least thematically appropriate. As I never got a chance to playtest this, I feel like the channel divinity may be a little underpowered since it’s essentially just a bane spell that doesn’t require concentration, but the idea of hopelessness causing poor rolls makes a lot of sense so, at least for now, it stays.- Irresistible Fear: Originally, this increased the save DC of spells that cause fear effects by an amount equal to proficiency bonus, but taking a second look at that it just doesn’t add up to a compelling feature. Sure, bumping your save DCs to make them harder to resist is nice, but bounded accuracy in 5e means that a potential +6 to save DC could be a LOT, especially since a +5 wisdom mod in conjunction with that effect would mean a DC 25 save at higher levels which is potentially broken in a lot cases. On the other hand, you have the VAST number of monsters that are just completely immune to fear and wouldn’t care if the DC was 50 because they simply can’t be effected so it creatures this weird dichotomy of “If the right enemies are there they can’t resist me, and if the wrong ones are there I’m useless” and that isn’t ideal. I thought it would be more interesting and viable to remove enemy immunities to fear to represent the fact that this isn’t your average everyday terror: This is Advanced Terror™️. As a balance to that effect, I thought it was appropriate to give such targets advantage since it creates an environment where you CAN affect everything, but some targets may be more attractive than others still.- Divine Fear: This feature got a direct nerf due to being way too strong. The original feature dealt damage to all creatures that failed saves against fear effects, and that, in hindsight, could potentially mean a ton of damage for free when most 8th level cleric features only add a d8 or two to a single attack or cantrip. Fearing a cone of four enemies who all fail that save would mean 12d6 extra damage which is a LOT. Since this modifies leveled spells instead of cantrips and attacks which can be done without worrying about running out of uses I still wanted to give the potential of more damage so I kept it the same in regards to causing damage based on spell level, but I limited it to one target a turn because that seems like a more fair trade-off.- Unending Despair: Of all the features of this subclass, I think this one got the biggest overhaul. In its original state, it restored spell slots whenever a spell was cast that causes a fear effect with the stipulation that the restored spell slot was of a lower level than the one cast. The idea was that by casting fear spells you can enable yourself to continue casting fear spells, but in practice it enables shenanigans far outside of that intended use. To bring it back around to what it was originally designed to do, I created a point system where casting thematically appropriate spells gives you points to spend specifically on effects that are also thematically appropriate and empower the subclass’ core gameplay loop. Not only does that ensure that the feature is doing what its intended to do and stop it from being used for evil by powergamers looking for loopholes, but it creates an interesting system that keeps the player engaged by giving them an extra resource to use, but not one that’s so complicated that it will slow down play.Anyway, that’s an in-depth analysis of the despair domain subclass for clerics. I hope that the small bits of insight into the design process were useful, and if they were then I will probably continue doing these updates. Let me know what you think! -- source link