[3.5] The Hexblade Homebrew Handbook!

[Mephibosheth]

Thanks for the input! I wasn't sure about the balance of some of the auras, so any comments are very much appreciated.

From a fluff point of view, I'm not sure a spell-less hexblade is necessary. Rangers and paladins got those variants because the magic was tacked (badly) onto a real-world tradition. But hexblades are rather more inherently magical in its literary tradition than both rangers and paladins, so having magic works well for them out of the box.

I don't think you're wrong. The point of this whole exercise is to provide options for people who want to play hexblades, so I'm not being too selective with my ideas. Maybe most people won't want to play a spell-less hexblade, but it seemed like an interesting idea and it gives hexblade players one more option. The idea was to make hexblades more martial and less magical.

Incidentally, is there a specific hexblade literary corpus outside of the myriad of traditions of malevolent magic practitioners who bring bad luck to the community? Is there something specific to which you're referring?

Nice Idea, though it seems strange to give it at lvl 6, as you remove spells starting from lvl 4. Probably not a big issue though. As for individual auras, Aura of Hesitation and Carelessness seem fairly weak compared to the other two. Can't think of any other ideas though

I put the ability at level 6 for a couple of reasons. First, the spell-less paladin and ranger both gain their first new class ability at 6th level. Second, I wanted to fill the dead levels left by the omission of battle casting and didn't want to overload level 4 with good class abilities.

I had a bit of difficulty coming up with interesting auras. Ultimately, most debuffs boil down to simple penalties on rolls or to AC. With this ability, I wanted the debuffs to be interesting and circumstantial. I wanted the hexblade player to have to think a bit or work with teammates to get the most out of the aura rather than just turning on the aura and racking up the minuses. I don't think I did a particularly good job, which is why I'm looking for other ideas. That said, I agree that Aura of Carelessness and Hesitation are underpowered but can't really think of a way to fix it other than just increasing the penalty (which I might do).

Nice once again. Though a bit strangely ballanced. Aura of Paranoia in particular seems underpowered. Especially for lvl 14.

You're right. I think it can be powerful in the right context, but probably not lvl 14 worthy. I do like the idea, though. I just can't figure out where to put it.

In general, I was trying to make these aura abilities more active than most. I thought it would be more fun if the hexblade had to work with his teammates or seek out situations where the aura would be effective. Spellcasting is a significant, flexible and fun ability and I wanted to replace it with something more inspiring than the abilities they gave the spell-less paladin and ranger classes. I had hoped to come up with abilities that players would enjoy using and that the party would appreciate, but I'm not sure whether I've accomplished that. Some of them I really like and some I'm still on the fence about.