One of the major and most exciting ways that 5th Edition has expanded player options has been the creation of new subclasses. For instance, the classes with the fewest subclasses, apart from the Artificer, which was introduced years after the premiere of the edition, the Druid and Sorcerer, have seen their options more than triple, from two in the Player's Handbook to now seven each.
To a large extent, I think that the later subclasses have often been bigger successes than the older ones. This shouldn't be surprising - when the PHB subclasses were first released, the edition had only seen pre-release playtesting. I think in many cases the designers were over-conservative with features, and while a few really knocked it out of the park (like the Battle Master Fighter) others had some serious design problems (like the Assassin Rogue, who has two of its four subclass features give you something that in theory any character could do anyway).
As I've said, I think a lot of the newer subclasses have been bigger successes, though there are some let-downs. Most recently, I think a lot of people felt the Way of the Ascendant Dragon Monk from Fizban's Treasury of Dragons fell flat, though if we're going for Monk subclasses, I think the Way of the Astral Self is peak "this seems awesome but is deeply flawed in practice."
I've certainly not played all the subclasses in the game - I shudder to think of someone who has played every one of them across multiple levels of a campaign, given how many there are. And I'm always eager to try something new. But I think there are certain ideas that can make for a strong subclass.
Power:
Naturally, this is the first one. Even if you're a really RP-focused player, I think very few people play D&D without wanting at least a bit of a power fantasy. You want to feel cool and effective and kill the monsters.
Power is not the easiest thing to assess, though you can sometimes calculate things based on average rolls and math. I think it's a credit to the game design that this sort of practice gets extremely complicated, where one class or subclass can be very effective against big groups of low-armor monsters while another will outperform it against a single big boss.
But it can be clear sometimes that one subclass has more easily-used, broadly-applicable, and individually powerful abilities. As an example, a Genie Warlock will deal a little more damage each turn than a Great Old One Warlock thanks to Genie's Wrath - GOOlocks don't get any equivalent damage boost.
Flavor:
This is actually entirely divorced from power, but I think a good subclass should have a strong flavor to it. This is sometimes easier to achieve in some classes than it is in others. For instance, a Champion Fighter and a Battle Master Fighter are both going to be masters-of-arms. I think the latter does distinguish itself a bit more in tone.
One instance where there's a big divide in flavor quality versus mechanical quality is the Hexblade Warlock. The mechanics are amazing (in fact, a bit too amazing, as they become the only real good choice when going Pact of the Blade) but I find it's also very rare for anyone to actually buy into the official flavor of the Warlock patron - that it's a sentient weapon like Blackrazor or the Sword of Kas. Indeed, I think a lot of people treat "Hexblade" as a descriptor of the Warlock rather than their patron, and cut out that definitional element to the Warlock class, instead flavoring it as more of a dark paladin or eldritch knight.
Mechanical Building:
I find that, often, the strongest subclasses introduce a mechanical concept when you take it whenever your class picks subclasses, and then that mechanic gets improved with the subsequent subclass features. The Battle Master is a great example of this: most of your subclass features merely allow you to choose additional maneuvers to learn and then give you either more superiority dice or make those dice a bigger one (eventually upgrading to d12s). The Armorer Artificer does this as well, if a little less tightly focused on individual abilities. Instead, it makes the Arcane Armor you have more effective.
Now, this isn't a hard and fast rule. The Clockwork Soul Sorcerer, which I think is generally regarded as a strong subclass, has no real interaction between its subclass features, but they collectively make for a pretty compelling option.
Likewise, sometimes sticking to a theme doesn't work out so well. The Way of the Astral Self Monk is all about building up this "astral self" that makes you far more powerful in combat, but because every subclass feature requires you to spend ki (that you might prefer to spend on, say, Flurry of Blows or Stunning Strike) you undercut the power of the subclass because by the time you have your whole thing set up, you've drained a significant portion of your most important resource.
Still, regardless of power, I think that this idea of building on mechanics introduced early on is also just more satisfying.
We don't have much in the way of details about the 2024 Core Rulebooks - they're still two years off (and probably a bit more, given how early in 2022 we are. I'd guess these would probably be planned to release in the fall) and we are likely to see several more books between now and then.
I'm very curious to see how their design philosophy changes regarding this. It will, of course, be ten years since the release of 5th Edition by then. I've written before how I thought they could even wind up making the concept of Maneuvers and Superiority dice a base feature of the Fighter class, though that depends strongly on how conservative they are - they have said they want these books to be backwards compatible with all 5th Edition content, and I wonder what that would mean for all the Fighter subclasses printed in post-PHB sources. (For one thing, it might make some of them insanely powerful).
However, even at their most conservative, I expect that we'll see the PHB subclasses revisited in the same way we've seen with playable races and monsters in Monsters of the Multiverse. I'd be really excited if we saw some of the ideas that have worked out best over the past 8 years used to redesign the subclasses there (or even see some new, more compelling options put in the PHB).
And yes, I'll confess that a big part of this is hoping that the Great Old One Warlock gets an almost total "back to the drawing board" redesign, as I think its mechanics are among the weakest of the Warlock subclasses, and if I ever get to really play my original character in an ongoing campaign, I'd like him to be good.
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