The Vocator (A 5e Binder)

[NCat]

So, I've been having fun doing what I've been calling Variant Classes, essentially new classes that use and recontextualize the existing subclasses of other classes. The difference from these to their core class varies, some like the Archivist are pretty much the same as the wizard, but with a different spell list, whilst others I've made, like the Aleator, while they use cleric subclasses, are completely different in gameplay (In this case, using a card based magic system)

Context out of the way, I wanted to get some thoughts on my newest one: The Vocator

(Do excuse the lack of images yet, I plan to add those once I fully feel I'm finished with the gameplay part of it all)

The basics of it is that its based off of the Binder of 3rd edition, with the core of the class being that it uses vestiges to gain power. What differs in flavor is that its not only vestiges that they make deals with, and they are more of a maker of many deals, in comparison to warlocks who make singular pacts.

Mechanically, this means the utilize warlock subclasses, which they later gain a class feature to allow them to swap subclasses. They also gain invocations, which are flavored as minor pacts with lesser entities.

The core of the class is built around "Binding Power", a point based resource which you expend when binding a vestige and doing other things. Essentially, unlike 3.5's binder, the limit in vestiges isnt a hard number, but a manner of how much of the resource you have left. Furthermore, binding weaker vestiges has a good purpose, since higher level vestiges take much more binding power to bind.

Vestiges also go up to 9th level now too (:

As for the design decisions for vestiges, I've tried to make a mix of 3.5e vestiges, as well as new vestiges, so as that the class has a mix of things that are familiar, and some content that is new. In terms of gameplay, vestige features now either recharge on a minute, hour, or once per binding rate, rather than say, the once per 5 turns of 3.5, to make it a bit more standard with 5e's language.

When it comes to non-vestige powers, you have limited spellcasting and invocations. Invocations you get up to 4 at level 20, however you dont have them always on, instead needing to bind them just as you do a vestige, and them costing the same as a level 1 vestige. As for spellcasting, you have cantrips from the warlock list, and your warlock subclass gives you all their learnable spells as spells known. To cast a vocator spell above 0th level, you expend binding power equal to its level. At later levels, vocators slow down their rate of binding power progression (going from 1 per level to 1 per 2 levels) to make it so you cant have two 8th or 9th levels at the same time, but you also around this time get a bonus pool of power that can be used on non binding things, or most likely to cast spells and do invocations.


Im pretty happy with how it turned out. My current thoughts on it is that its maybe lacking variety in terms of utility? So i'm trying to think where I can expand that. I also feel that the current vestige options might favor melee-locking a bit too hard, so I might want to add some more spellcastery vestiges.

But yeah, I'm mostly looking for feedback on this first draft, thanks for checking it out (: