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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next Spellraging - Looking for critique



FoggyLens
2016-04-27, 01:52 PM
Hi all. First time poster here. DM. Huge fan.

One of my players expressed his desire to be able to enter some sort of wizard rage. I love the flavor of this, especially given his character, a young apprentice slowly losing his sanity to the arcane secrets he's stumbling upon. We tossed around the idea of multiclassing as a Barbarian, but obviously that's a terrible choice, mechanically speaking. But I definitely want to foster his character goals, so I gave a homebrewed class feature a shot:


Spellrage

Your ongoing discovery of arcanic secrets have pushed your mind to the edge. You can fly into a reckless spellrage equal your wizard level divided by 3, rounded down.

While in a spellrage, the following takes effect:

You can only cast spells with the at-will property, such as cantrips, as you are unable to focus on higher level magic.
You lose the ability to concentrate on spells.
Any hit you score with a spell attack is a critical hit.
Your cantrips do an additional 1d6 of Force damage for each time you have spellraged today.
The only actions you can take are Attack, Cast a Spell, Grapple, and Shove, and you must take one of these actions on every turn until your rage ends.
Any effects of exhaustion are suppressed as long as you are raging.

Your spellrage lasts for one minute. You may end it early by making a DC 15 Wisdom save as a bonus action. Once over, you suffer one level of exhaustion, adding to any levels suffered throughout the day from previous spellrages. Any levels of exhaustion caused by spellraging are removed with a long rest.
Additionally, whenever an ally loses consciousness, you must make a DC 10 Wisdom save or involuntarily enter a spellrage.

In terms of power balance (he's currently at level 5), on his first spellrage he would do damage equal to a Warlock of the same level [(4d10+1d6) VS (2d10 EB + 2d6 Hex + 2*4 Agonizing)], with increasing returns for every degree of exhaustion the wizard is willing to suffer after the rage. (e.g. an 18th level Wizard on their 6th spellrage would do a 8d10+6d6 Fire Bolt, but then immediately die of exhaustion after the spellrage ends) So I think it's on point for damage balance, but I wonder if the other factors (the inability to concentrate and cast from spell slots) is too much of a penalty, or perhaps not enough...
I also wouldn't know what class feature of his to replace (he's a Divination Wizard), or if I should make this into a feat...

I'd love to hear any feedback you all have!

Final Hyena
2016-04-27, 02:05 PM
My initial feeling is that you're giving him a feature outside of his normal class. Creating a raging wizard school and letting him swap, might be more appropriate.

The scaling damage based on how many times raged feels very weird. You seem to have balanced this against the warlocks blast. The problem is the warlock class is largely based around that due to their fewer spells known/slots. If you give that to a wizard for little cost then you kinda make the warlock obsolete.

FoggyLens
2016-04-29, 04:33 PM
My initial feeling is that you're giving him a feature outside of his normal class. Creating a raging wizard school and letting him swap, might be more appropriate.

Yeah, that makes way more sense. I'd have to give it a lot more thought then, and see if he'd be interested in doing a full swap.

Also a good point about making the Warlock obsolete... Not sure if there's a solution there, as any "rage mage" flavor would necessarily make it a blaster, something the Warlock and Sorcerer already have. I think necessarily there's a lot of mechanical overlap between classes, given the simplicity of 5e. Really, the heart of the system lies in thematic differences. For examples, I tend to think of the Ranger and the (ranged) Warlock as being quite similar. (Hunter's Mark vs. Hex; EB vs. Swift Quiver, etc).

Thanks for you observations!