Dragna's Blog: The Classes - Reloaded

While I was working to transfer Reloaded from GMBinder to an Obsidian website recently, I had a bit of creative downtime - after all, I was spending all of the time I would have spent writing tinkering with HTML and CSS instead.

Some people spend downtime relaxing. Instead, I decided - as one does - to revise the entirety of the 5th Edition ruleset from scratch, starting with player classes.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this has been a long time coming.

• In 2021, I spent three months working on the Sorcerer: Reloaded, a fresh re-envisioning of the 5e Sorcerer that turned it from a metamagic-weaving spellmaster to a power-bursting brawler.
  
• In 2022, I spent another three months mathematically breaking down and building up 5e’s combat system - a process that gave birth to Challenge Ratings 2.0. In the process, I developed thorough benchmarks for player character and monster strength, as well as a simple system for comparing them.
  
• Also in 2022, I spent a week or so creating new tactical roles for the PHB classes, creating new class features to rebalance their relative strengths and creating space for new specializations and teamwork.
  
• In 2023, while developing the revised Strahd statblock, I started tinkering with multi-phase boss statblocks, dynamic bosses, and bosses with multiple reactions - each of which had been vaguely explored in 5e previously, but which I finally had a chance to codify.
  
• Also in 2023, in response to numerous requests for twilight cleric rebalancing and my own homebrew campaign’s experience with an overpowered moon druid, I started brewing reworked, rebalanced versions of both to make for a more calibrated experience.
  
• Also also in 2023, when I started a homebrew campaign, my players told me how much they wanted more tactical combat, and I began pondering ways to add new reactions to each class to allow for more strategic and deep gameplay.
  

As such, when not one, but two members of the Patreon unwisely told me that their parties’ barbarians had cheesed the Vallaki coffin-shop vampire encounter, my first thought was not, “Wow, I’m sorry to hear that,” or “Huh; maybe I need to revise that encounter, but: “Wow, it sounds like 5e combat needs to be scrapped and remade from scratch.”

Y’know. As you do.

Everyone Has a Role

But where to start if you’re reworking the entirety of the 5e classes? Step one, as always, is to begin from first principles: What do we want each class to feel like?

Put another way - each class should have a distinct feeling when played in combat. The tankiest ranger should still feel meaningfully different from the most dextrous barbarian. That meant I had to re-evaluate each class’s role in combat - why bring a barbarian and not a paladin or a fighter? There had to be as little overlap as possible.

In MMOs and other team-based class-based tactical combat games (and, indeed, in 4e), each class has one or more roles. Because these are team-based games, each role describes how the class contributes to the party’s broader strategy.

• A tank prevents allies from taking damage.
  
• A support increases ally damage and/or defenses
  
• A crowd control interferes with enemy damage, movement, and attacks
  
• A healer heals damage
  
• A DPS dishes out damage
  

Notably, D&D 5e really only has two of these roles: support and crowd control. What about the other roles?

Tanks: There’s a concept in superhero fiction called a “secondary superpower” - the superpower that allows the superhero’s primary superpowers to function as-expected and without killing him. (For example, at the speeds the Flash moves, repeated collisions with air molecules and debris should kill him - so he therefore has a “secondary superpower” of super-resilience.)

For a Tank, armor and hit points are “secondary superpowers” - mere auxiliary abilities that allow them to survive the aftermath of their real abilities: forcing enemies to attack them instead of their squishier allies. No 5e class has a Tank’s abilities RAW; the closest you can get is picking up a feat like Sentinel or one of a few subclass features. (Opportunity attacks are ostensibly a “tanking” ability, but are so weak that their impact is marginal.)

Healers: Healing spells exist in D&D, yes - but are, as a general rule, sufficiently weak that any caster would be better off dishing out damage to kill the monsters before they can hurt their friends. Why bother healing your ally when the monster will deal twice as much damage (or more) before the start of your next turn?

As a result, “healing” in 5e is mostly limited to “yo-yo’ing”: restoring a tiny amount of hitpoints (usually via healing word as a bonus action, so as to save your action) in order to get your unconscious allies back on their feet.

This has a big impact: If the Barbarian heals for 5 hit points and the monster deals 25 damage with its next attack, the monster has just wasted 20 points of damage that it could have spent somewhere else (e.g., killing the healer). More significantly, because healing word is a bonus action, the healer isn’t sacrificing any damage to use it and the target gets their next turn back. Since most combats are relatively short (three to four rounds), just one or two 1st-level healing words can have an outsized impact.

Now, there are precious few casters who can act as true healers - life clerics, for one, who can boost their healing enough to become proper battlefield medics. But such occasions are few and far-between. As a result, instead of the “take damage-approach death-get healing-return to the battlefield” loop that most class-based games have, 5e winds up with the far less fun “take damage-go unconscious-get healing-go-unconscious-repeat” gameplay loop instead.

DPS: What about DPS? Paladins can use smite to boost their damage, yes, but not reliably enough to act as a clear damage-dealer. A rogue’s sneak attack barely lets them keep up with a fighter or barbarian’s damage output, and all of them (paladin included) pale in comparison to a single fireball or cone of cold. To the extent that 5e has a DPS (DPR?) class, it’s bound up in its area-of-effect damage-dealing spells, rather than any class in particular.

Altogether, in addition to dealing chip damage, 5e classes tend to do one (or more) of buffing allies (Support) or debuffing enemies (Crowd Control). Of the five traditional class roles, only two are present - and most martial classes have no roles at all.

But which class should receive which role? To answer this question, I decided to start from first principles: What should playing a class feel like? I assembled a list of ten verbs that each represent a way in which a class might interact with the battlefield:

• Harm (inflict damage) / Heal (heal damage)
  
• Attract (draw attacks) / Repel (repel attacks)
  
• Push (push enemies) / Pull (pull enemies)
  
• Hone (buff ally offense) / Dull (debuff enemy offense)
  
• Armor (buff ally defense) / Expose (debuff enemy defense)
  

I then ran a quick, informal survey of some members of the Patreon Discord to match up verbs to classes. Here’s what the consensus looked like:

• Barbarians run in, draw enemy fire, and dish out damage.
  
• Bards weaken enemy offense and defense and strengthen ally defense
  
• Clerics heal wounded allies, strengthen ally defenses, and weaken enemy offense.
  
• Druids break the enemy frontlines, pull vulnerable enemies into danger, and aid allies where necessary.
  
• Fighters draw enemy fire, dish out damage, and prevent enemies from reaching the backlines.
  
• Monks KO low-HP enemies, pulling vulnerable enemies into danger and pushing dangerous enemies away.
  
• Paladins dish out damage, draw enemy fire, and strengthen ally defenses.
  
• Rangers deal heavy damage, break the enemies’ frontlines, and create vulnerable targets for others.
  
• Rogues deal heavy damage, make enemies more vulnerable to others, and repel enemies that attack them.
  
• Sorcerers deal heavy damage and push enemies away while strengthening ally defenses.
  
• Warlocks dish out damage, make enemies vulnerable, and pull enemies closer to the frontlines.
  
• Wizards dish out damage while strengthening ally defenses, making enemies vulnerable, and weakening enemy attacks.
  

The overall distribution therefore winds up looking something like this:

• Barbarian: Tank/DPR
  
• Bard: Support/CC
  
• Cleric: Support/Healer
  
• Druid: CC/Healer
  
• Fighter: Tank
  
• Monk: CC/Tank
  
• Paladin: Tank/DPR
  
• Ranger: DPR/CC
  
• Rogue: DPR/CC
  
• Sorcerer: DPR/Support
  
• Warlock: CC/DPR
  
• Wizard: CC/DPR
  

That’s three primary Tanks (Barb/Fighter/Paladin), two primary Support (Bard/Cleric), four primary CC (Druid/Monk/Warlock/Wizard), three primary DPR (Ranger/Rogue/Sorcerer), one secondary Tank (Monk), one secondary Support (Sorcerer), three secondary CC (Bard/Ranger/Rogue), four secondary DPR (Barbarian/Paladin/Wizard), and two secondary Healers (Cleric/Druid).

From here, you can branch out even further via subclass specialization. For example, the Fighter might have the following subclasses: Champion (+DPR), Knight (+Tank), Weaponmaster (+Utility), and Battlemaster (+CC). (Here, “Utility” means “able to fill a number of different roles by trading power for flexibility.”)

The overall effect, therefore, is to create a system in which no two classes - no two subclasses, even! - play exactly the same, even if their weapon and spell choices are exactly the same.

The Party Composition Problem

“But wait, Dragna!” I hear you saying. “Doesn’t this just force the players to build a balanced party during character creation? I remember being forced to bring a healbot cleric in 3.5 - I don’t want to go back to those dark days.

Fear not, dear grognard - you shan’t have to! And it’s all thanks to a little thing called Challenge Ratings 2.0.

In developing CR2.0, my custom mathematical encounter-building system, I learned that every combat factor ultimately boils down to one of two factors: effective DPR (how much damage you can put out in an encounter, incorporating attack bonuses, status conditions, etc.) and effective hit points (how long you can survive in an encounter, incorporating armor class, saving throws, enemy debuffs, etc).

I also learned how to calculate these two factors. Significantly, I realized that each, in a way, can be converted into the other: the longer you survive in an encounter, the more damage you can put out; the more damage you put out, the less long you need to survive.

Put another way - if a player can deal one damage per round and survives for three rounds, they’ll deal a total of three damage by the end of the encounter. If you want to get them up to six damage by the end of the encounter, you can either double their damage (two damage per round for three rounds), or double their hit points (one damage per round for six rounds).

This means that, if you can get the math right, all combat abilities are fungible. You can convert “+10 damage per round” to an equivalent amount of healing, or enemy de-buffing, or ally to-hit buffing, or ally AC-increasing, or anything of a similar sort.

Ambitious? Yes. Have I done the math yet? No. Is it possible? Yes.

(In fact, I’ve already done something like this in refining the CR2.0 system to recalibrate the CR of monsters - such as the night hag coven in Re-Reloaded - that inflict debilitating conditions instead of dealing damage. As it turns out, casting hypnotic pattern is functionally equivalent, on average, to increasing your own hit points - since some enemies can’t attack you - and increasing your DPR - since you have advantage on one attack before they wake up.)

As a result, assuming the developer (me) has done a good job of balancing, no matter which party combination you create, any party should be conceivably viable. Five clerics? Good. Two wizards and three druids? Good. Five fighters? Good. The important thing isn’t what role you choose, but how well you play that role.

Dynamic Character Sheets

In a previous devblog, I discussed how I dramatically revamped my approach to solo boss monster, providing them with a small assortment of bonus actions and reactions with keep their turns dynamic and interesting. This paradigm has been a hit, with players and DMs alike praising how fresh and fun these monsters are to fight.

Notably, as I tested these monsters, I realized something interesting: Their turns never felt overwhelming, but they were always interesting to play. I always had a meaningful choice to make, no matter how small or insignificant. And because the monster had bonus actions and reactions as well as actions, it didn’t matter if I missed one or all attacks on its turn - it still had more stuff to do.

This is in sharp contrast to a lot of basic 5e monsters, which often have an express tradeoff between “doing the flavorful and fun thing the monster is supposed to do” and “making a bread-and-butter attack with a ~65% chance to hit.” Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse directly addressed this with new actions and bonus actions, and the official 5e Vecna statblock did something similar by replacing the usual three legendary actions with three reactions (therefore tying the monster’s gameplay directly to the players’ choices).

But the bulk of modern 5e monsters still rely overwhelmingly on their actions; if they have bonus actions or custom reactions at all, it’s usually no more than one or two. They do more, but choose less.

The same is arguably true for modern 5e players.

In general, we tend to assume that the bulk of a player’s combat experience will focus on their action, with reactions and bonus actions coming up only rarely. (In fact, bonus actions are generally so low-impact and/or under-utilized that spells like healing word or spiritual weapon receive high accolades merely for “breaking the action economy” by allowing players to make meaningful use of their bonus actions at all!)

As a result, however, player turns become very top-heavy, with all of the meaningful choice concentrated on which action the player will take. If the action fails (e.g., the spell fizzles or the attack misses) or is boring (e.g., Dodge or Disengage), the player feels like they wasted their turn. Even if the action succeeds, players without substantial choice (e.g., most martial classes) will feel forced into making the same decision again and again each turn.

That’s not to say, of course, that complexity is good! In fact, I consider myself somewhat radical in the 5e space by rejecting the concept of complexity for its own sake. One of 5e’s strengths over 3.5 or Pathfinder (or even 4e) was its rejection of complexity and its embrace of elegance.

What does elegance mean, as I use it here? It’s a concept I’ve cited quite often in my blogs about Reloaded. It’s admittedly a bit of an ineffable term as I tend to use it, but here’s the best definition I can provide: a component of narrative or game design is elegant when it conveys complex possibilities through a small array of simple components.

There’s not really any better example of “elegance” in this respect than the game of Go. From simple mechanics - “place one colored stone per turn; capture any enemy stone(s) you’ve surrounded with your own stones” - comes one of history’s deepest and most intricate games.

This concept of complexity from simplicity, rather than complexity qua complexity, was something I tried to focus on making these class revisions: simple, intuitive mechanics that create larger opportunities for meaningful choice.

For example, let’s take a look at the base mechanics for the Reloaded Fighter:

Press: When you hit with a melee attack, you can use a bonus action to grapple the target or shove it 5 feet away.

Mark: You can use a bonus action to mark a target within 5 feet for 1 round. It has disadvantage to attack other creatures while marked and within 5 feet of you.

Halt: You control a 10-foot-radius area around you. When an enemy leaves that area, you can use your reaction to move up to your speed toward and make a melee attack against it. On a hit, you can immediately mark it until the start of your next turn.

There’s not really a lot of complexity here! None of these features are competing with the Fighter’s action, which is (generally) going to just be “attack with my longsword / attack with my longsword / attack with my longsword” ad infinitum.

Indeed, only two of these features are competing at all - Press and Mark, which both occupy the bonus action slot. Halt is a reaction, and doesn’t really compete with opportunity attacks - it’s more of a replacement for opportunity attacks, really.

But the presence of these additional features lends an elegant depth to the Fighter’s turns that wasn’t there before. Is it better for the Fighter to mark a target, shove it, or grapple it? If the Fighter grapples the target, where does the Fighter take it? Should the Fighter try and leverage environmental hazards to shove targets into? If the Fighter’s marked Target A, should they then use their reaction to move away from Target A to mark Target B instead?

From simplicity - depth.

You’ll note, importantly, that none of these mechanics really focus on the scarcity, resource-expenditure gameplay that most people think of when they think of 5e “tactics.” Contrast something like the Battlemaster, which has a large suite of different effects and a limited number of dice to spend on them. That’s a lot to keep track of for a new player, especially since they won’t use these features on 80%+ of their turns - there’s no chance to build “muscle memory” there. While D&D combat tactics are most infamous for forcing players to triage scarce resources, D&D’s deepest gameplay only emerges when scarcity is no longer a concern.

Additionally, the inclusion of these “free” features (we’ll call them “Class Actions,” as folks in the Patreon Discord have been calling them) really makes the turn-by-turn gameplay of the Fighter meaningfully different from, say, a Paladin or Barbarian. Even when these classes aren’t using their scarce resources, like Action Surge or Smite or Rage, they still feel meaningfully different to play.

These Class Actions turn different classes into something akin to the crew of the Starship Enterprise - while Team Member #1 is focusing on one problem (“How do I stop the boss from reaching my friends?”), Team Member #2 is focusing on another problem (“How do I keep my friends from falling unconscious?”) and Team Member #3 is focusing on another problem still (“How do I make sure my friends’ attacks are hurting the boss?”). It’s their collaboration and unique skillsets that win fights - not how much DPR each individual member is putting out.

I’m still working to refine these classes, and I’ve been making some tweaks to some spells and weapons as well. Ultimately, my potential goal is nothing less than a full rework of the 5e system itself - for clarity, accessibility, enjoyment, and elegance. But I can’t do that alone.

You can view my current work here, which is (admittedly) a bit messy in places, and not yet complete. 

Note that, because I’m still in the Design phase (“get ideas down on paper”) rather than the Development phase (“calibrate, hone, and balance those ideas”), more than a few of my current designs might be over- or undertuned. (I plan to spend heavy amounts of time in the Development phase once I reach it, using a mathematical model similar to CR2.0 to ensure that these classes are properly balanced, both in and out of combat.)

Even so, I welcome your feedback on my ideas - their flavor, their complexity, their implementation, their vision, and their playability. If you’d like to playtest them, please feel free to do so! I’d welcome any efforts to see how these designs feel and play “on the ground,” so to speak.

Just let me know how it goes ;)