3.5e overhaul: generic classes homebrew project

[TeeEl]

Since there is some confusion over how various aspects of the system work, here's an attempt at building some of the core classes using the system.

Note that the following builds take up all path and bonus feats but leave the racial feats untouched.

The "Ranger-ish" (Warrior II/Expert I/Spellcaster I)

Hit die: d8
BAB: +1 per level
Good save: Fort (but see below)
Base caster level: 1/2 level
Skill points per level: 6 + Int

{table=head]Level|Base Attack<br>Bonus|Fort Save|Ref Save|Will Save|Special|0lvl|1st|2nd|3rd|4th

1st|

+1

|

+2

|

+2*

|

+0

|Track, Wild Empathy, Favored Enemy, Granted Domains (Animal, Plant), Divine Preparation, Lightning Reflexes^E|3|-|-|-|-

2nd|

+2

|

+3

|

+2*

|

+0

|Two-Weapon Fighting|4|-|-|-|-

3rd|

+3

|

+3

|

+3*

|

+1

|Endurance|4|-|-|-|-

4th|

+4

|

+4

|

+3*

|

+1

|Nature's Gift|5|-|-|-|-

5th|

+5

|

+4

|

+4*

|

+1

|Advanced Divine Preparation|5|2|-|-|-

6th|

+6/+1

|

+5

|

+5*

|

+2

|Animal Companion|5|2|-|-|-

7th|

+7/+2

|

+5

|

+5*

|

+2

|Greater Favored Enemy|6|3|-|-|-

8th|

+8/+3

|

+6

|

+5*

|

+2

|Advanced Divine Preparation|6|3|1|-|-

9th|

+9/+4

|

+6

|

+6*

|

+3

|Woodland Stride|6|3|1|-|-

10th|

+10/+5

|

+7

|

+7*

|

+3

|Evasion|6|3|2|-|-

11th|

+11/+6/+1

|

+7

|

+7*

|

+3

|Advanced Divine Preparation, Greater Favored Enemy^E|7|3|2|0|-

12th|

+12/+7/+2

|

+8

|

+8*

|

+4

|Nature's Camouflage|7|3|2|1|-

13th|

+13/+8/+3

|

+8

|

+8*

|

+4

|Hide in Plain Sight|7|3|2|1|-

14th|

+14/+9/+4

|

+9

|

+8*

|

+4

|Advanced Divine Preparation|7|3|3|2|0

15th|

+15/+10/+5

|

+9

|

+10*

|

+5

|Greater Favored Enemy|7|3|3|2|0

16th|

+16/+11/+6/+1

|

+10

|

+10*

|

+5

|(free feat)|8|3|3|2|1

17th|

+17/+12/+7/+2

|

+10

|

+10*

|

+5

|(free feat)|8|3|3|2|1

18th|

+18/+13/+8/+3

|

+11

|

+11*

|

+6

|(free feat)|8|3|3|3|2

19th|

+19/+14/+9/+4

|

+11

|

+11*

|

+6

|(free feat)|8|3|3|3|2

20th|

+20/+15/+10/+5

|

+12

|

+12*

|

+6

|Greater Favored Enemy|8|3|3|3|3[/table]
*Not technically base Reflex save; this is the modified value after Lightning Reflexes is figured in.

So let's look at what's different:

• Note that as a Spellcaster I the Ranger-ish is a half-caster. All spells per day numbers are pulled directly from the "spells per day by base caster level" chart, except of course his base caster level is half of his class level.
• There is not, as yet, a feat that says "you cast ranger spells", so Ranger-ish spellcasting is a little funky. I admit that I did quite a bit of meddling with how prepared divine spellcasters work, on top of an already complicated spellcasting system... basically, the Ranger-ish can cast any level 0 cleric or druid spells (starting from level 3) plus any spells from the Animal and Plant domains. The Ranger-ish can also prepare a single 1st-level druid spell, a single 2nd-level druid spell, etc. up through 4th-level... in essence, he gets a "reverse domain" slot for a "domain" consisting of all druid spells.
  
  Ouch. Up until writing that out I hadn't realized quite how ugly the system sounds. I really, really need to tidy up the spellcasting feats...
• The core Ranger is a very front-heavy class, so you'll notice that trying to build a Ranger-ish class using this generic system results in a big bottleneck of feats around level 4. You simply do not have enough feats early on to pack in everything that the ranger gets in 4 levels, so some class features end up being delayed.
• But the core Ranger also has a lot of dead levels later on, which translates to free feats to do whatever you want with. Go nuts with fighter feats, get obscene numbers of favored enemies, pick up some additional domains and 5th level spellcasting, give your ranger wildshape. These are just the conventional uses for those free feats; you can give him turn undead, learn how to cast wizard spells, pick up sneak attack, go nuts. Sure, you could do that stuff before with multiclassing, but this is the stuff you can add in without sacrificing any ranger abilities (although if you do want all ranger abilities in a timely fashion, you're not getting additional class features until very late in your career, when rangers don't offer very much anyhow--so it's still fairly balanced.)
• And, of course, you can swap feats around freely. A few of them have prerequisites that will limit how early you can take them, but there's a lot of wiggle room to re-order feat choices depending on your priorities. And any feat you don't really want? It's gone. Take something else.

The "Battle Sorcerer-ish" (Spellcaster III/Warrior I)

Hit die: d6
BAB: +3/4
Good save: Will
Base caster level: character level
Skill points per level: 3 + Int

{table=head]Level|Base Attack<br>Bonus|Fort Save|Ref Save|Will Save|Special|0lvl|1st|2nd|3rd|4th|5th|6th|7th|8th|9th

1st|

+0

|

+0

|

+0

|

+2

|Arcane Knack, Arcane Spontaneity, Advanced Arcane Spontaneity, Extra Slots, Extra Slots|5|3|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

2nd|

+1

|

+0

|

+0

|

+3

|Expanded Spell Capacity|6|4|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

3rd|

+2

|

+1

|

+1

|

+3

|Advanced Arcane Knack|6|4|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

4th|

+3

|

+1

|

+1

|

+4

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|7|4|3|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

5th|

+3

|

+1

|

+1

|

+4

|Expanded Spell Capacity|7|5|4|-|-|-|-|-|-|-

6th|

+4

|

+2

|

+2

|

+5

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|7|5|4|3|-|-|-|-|-|-

7th|

+5

|

+2

|

+2

|

+5

|Advanced Arcane Knack|8|5|5|4|-|-|-|-|-|-

8th|

+6/+1

|

+2

|

+2

|

+6

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|8|5|5|4|3|-|-|-|-|-

9th|

+6/+1

|

+3

|

+3

|

+6

|Expanded Spell Knowledge|8|5|5|5|4|-|-|-|-|-

10th|

+7/+2

|

+3

|

+3

|

+7

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|8|5|5|5|4|3|-|-|-|-

11th|

+8/+3

|

+3

|

+3

|

+7

|Advanced Arcane Knack|9|5|5|5|5|4|-|-|-|-

12th|

+9/+4

|

+4

|

+4

|

+8

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|9|5|5|5|5|4|3|-|-|-

13th|

+9/+4

|

+4

|

+4

|

+8

|Expanded Spell Capacity|9|6|6|6|5|5|4|-|-|-

14th|

+10/+5

|

+4

|

+4

|

+9

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|9|6|6|6|6|5|4|3|-|-

15th|

+11/+6/+1

|

+5

|

+5

|

+9

|Advanced Arcane Knack|9|6|6|6|6|5|5|4|-|-

16th|

+12/+7/+2

|

+5

|

+5

|

+10

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|10|6|6|6|6|6|5|4|3|-

17th|

+12/+7/+2

|

+5

|

+5

|

+10

|(free feat)|10|6|6|6|6|6|5|5|4|-

18th|

+13/+8/+3

|

+6

|

+6

|

+11

|Advanced Arcane Spontaneity|10|6|6|6|6|6|6|5|4|3

19th|

+14/+9/+4

|

+6

|

+6

|

+11

|(free feat)|10|6|6|6|6|6|6|5|5|4

20th|

+15/+10/+5

|

+6

|

+6

|

+12

|(free feat)|10|6|6|6|6|6|6|6|6|5[/table]

• I didn't bother listing spells known per day; it's going to end up looking fairly similar to the sorcerer chart anyhow.
• Spellcasting isn't easy! At first glance things don't look too rough compared to the sorcerer; sure, you lose the familiar (sob) and it takes you a while to get up to 6 spells per day, and your spells per day for your higher-level spells don't grow quite as quickly. But remember that you can't just jump into a PrC and start picking up class features while progressing your spellcasting; your spellcasting is your class feature. You end up spending so many feats keeping your spellcasting progression up that you don't have room to fit anything else in until the very highest levels.
• On the plus side, you can fit in a bit of rudimentary combat ability, so all is not lost. If you don't care about the BAB and hit points, you could always swap out Warrior I for Expert I; that would get you plenty of skill points and a couple of bonus feats, so you could actually pick up a few additional class features (but only expert ones, not spellcasting ones).

[three08]

yanno warrior 3 should maybe get two good saves since they don't get any improvement in BAB over warrior 2?

[TeeEl]

stuff

Tier allocation is set up the way it is because otherwise it is basically impossible to make hybrids work, which kills a major part of the point here. Look at the Ranger-ish build up top. If you limited a character to 3 tier picks, there's no way you could make it work.

Plus I reaaaally don't think there's much of a point to making a character "fully specialize" as a fighter or skillmonkey unless you're giving them like +1.25 BAB/level and d14 HD, or something equally silly.

That said, I'm not really committed to keeping the three-path system. I'm strongly considering moving to a point-based system such as sageman proposes (but probably not on a level-by-level basis). The one shortcoming I see there is that I don't think that spellcasting ability can be balanced purely by point cost, so what I'm looking at for the future is essentially a hybrid system where the only relevant "path" is your spellcaster level; you'd have a certain number of points to allocate to raise HD/BAB/skills/etc., but in addition to eating up your points raising your spellcaster ability would impose additional restrictions.

As far as feats go, I'm looking mostly at a combination of #1 and #3, but in general I lean towards #1. The problem with #3 (weak feats as prerequisites for stronger ones) is that it starts imposing the kind of arbitrary limits that the whole system is designed to break free of. I'd really, really prefer not to make Poison Immunity a prerequisite to any feat that does not involve some form of stronger anti-poison effect (like a supernatural feat that let you remove poison at a touch, or gave you bonuses for "absorbing" poison). I know there are a couple such links in there already (Divine Grace requiring Divine Aura, for one), but I don't want to do this more than I have to.

Actually, as I'm typing this I just thought of a few alternate ways to handle Divine Grace dips, so that may be getting revised too.

I agree that the whole disease/poison immunity chain is a bit of a WTF, though. I think the idea is that "I am immune to poison" is a much more significant class of ability than "I can run faster than the average person" or "I am better than average with a longsword", but really it needs level-based prerequisites rather than additional feats. Disease/poison immunity really ought to be wrapped together, too; Divine Health is a real wallbanger. But I'd much rather tie together disease and poison immunity to make it worth taking than tie it into an unrelated feat chain.

(And as far as being worth taking: even if Poison/Disease Immunity is not as good as Power Attack, there's only one Power Attack and you get 30+ feat slots. Sure, as the feat lists get fleshed out there will be ones that synergize well with Power Attack, but the point remains that a feat doesn't have to be anyone's top pick so long as it can be their 15th or so pick. Immunities can be pretty handy to have.

[Epinephrine]

Well, Poison Immunity was just an example, my point was that minor abilities aren't tempting to select, even if you have 30+ feats to use. (I also don't think it's a particularly great ability, especially as one can generally avoid being poisoned via armour class, good saving throws and the use of spells. While we make poison saves occaisionally in game, it's not a common enough occurance that I'd go out of my way for poison immunity - it's a nice perk, but hardly something I'd spend a feat on.)

One way to handle getting "flavour" feats as a requirement is to have feats classified into categories, and to have requirements based on categories, rather than on specific feats. Take GURPS magic as an example - some spells have specific requirements, to take Fireball you need Ignite Fire, Create Fire, and Shape Fire (IIRC). Another spell though might require 4 Fire spells. A blend of required feats (when it's part of a logical progression) and required "feat themes" (for a D&D example, look at the metamagic feats, some of which require any other metamagic feat) could provide flexibility while at the same time not making flavour abilities pointless.

I like higher level powers of some "classes" being unreachable without showing a huge dedication to the "class" - sure, you can maybe pick up some wild shaping, but if you want the high level stuff you must learn to master your body totally - that includes poison immunity, stopping aging and so on. But obviously this is opinion, and we're allowed to differ :)

[TeeEl]

That would be a possibility. Still, I'm more in favor of creating incentives so those sort of feat combinations are handy but not necessary. For example, maybe advanced Wild Shaping shares a common ancestor with Poison Immunity. Maybe there are other more powerful feats out there, but they have other, different prerequisites, whereas you've already got the prereq for Poison Immunity so it's easy to pick up and does give you a handy little boost.

[three08]

i'd like to propose a system for determining class skills. it seems like this would fit pretty naturally with the generic system. basically, each class has a list of skills, which is subdivided by tier. a character's list of class skills includes everything at their tier and below.

for example: suppose warriors get skills A, B, and C as class, but C is tier 1, B is tier 2, and A is tier 3. likewise, experts get skills X, Y and Z as class, with Z being tier 1, Y being tier 2, and Z being tier 3. the class skills for a W3/E1 would be A, B, C, and Z, whereas a W2/E2 would get B, C, Y, and Z.

in addition, certain skills would be generic, meaning they are treated as class skills for everyone.

all i had on hand was the pathfinder skill list, but it should be fairly easy to work backward from that if you want to convert it to 3.5. also note that some skills are listed for two of the classes. it seemed appropriate to me.

thus:

Spoiler

Show

generic skills
craft, fly, handle animal, knowledge (geography), knowledge (local), perception, profession

warrior skills
tier I: climb, swim
tier II: heal, ride
tier III: acrobatics, intimidate

expert skills
tier I: acrobatics, appraise, diplomacy, stealth, survival
tier II: bluff, disable device, escape artist, perform, sense motive
tier III: disguise, intimidate, knowledge (dungeoneering, engineering, or nature), linguistics, sleight of hand, use magic device

spellcaster skills
tier I: heal, knowledge (history, nature, or religion)
tier II: knowledge (nobility or engineering), linguistics
tier III: knowledge (arcana or planes), spellcraft, use magic device

i'm not entirely confident about how the spellcaster skills all shake out, but that's the best i could figure.

thoughts?