Adjustments to the Inner Shadow Barbarian

 So, iteration is always important in design.

Generally speaking, I think that good design in something out of D&D is when you get something cool and new but it's rendered in the simplest, most elegant way.

The Inner Shadow Barbarian is my design for a character I'd want to play. It's pretty important, though, for me, to make it balanced and also coherent. So often, I think, 3rd party and/or homebrew design can veer into wish fulfillment, being either overpowered or trying to force a scenario that could potentially play out in other ways.

I presented this in an earlier post, but I had two goals for this subclass:

First, to make a viable Barbarian subclass focused on Unarmed Strikes. Second, to make a subclass that flavored Rage as more of a transformation.

Since getting into the games from Remedy, specifically the Alan Wake series, I've been really interesting in the Jungian idea of the Shadow. Jung, of course, studied with Freud, who came up with the idea of a threefold psyche composed of the Ego, Superego, and Id. The Id (whose potency as an idea is really aided by its simple two-letter spelling) is the impulse and unchecked drive and desire, which I think relates well to the idea of Rage - a kind of submission to the Id and the abandonment of any of the checks or restraints the Ego and Superego place upon the Id.

Jung's idea of the Shadow is not really the same, but they could be related - it's basically the aspects of our selves that we aren't aware of - an unconscious self-perception or desire that might even contradict the image we have of ourselves.

So, the concept here is that Rage unleashes a suppressed or even just unconscious part of the Barbarian's psyche as a separate persona.

Now, I'll concede here that the connection between that and the mechanical theming of an unarmed Barbarian isn't inherent to the concept. But I do think we need a good unarmed Barbarian subclass, and I think that this fits with multiple Barbarian character concepts I've had. Given how much Gothic Horror is about that Jungian shadow (describing it before he defined it in the 20th century,) I think both the folklore of the Werewolf and also the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story both sort of fit with this idea. I had really wanted to make a werewolf Barbarian, but the Path of the Beast didn't really do it for me (I'll concede that at least on a conceptual level, there's certainly overlap here).

But later, I had a more elaborate character concept of a man who becomes trapped in the Shadowfell for several years (yes, like Alan Wake getting trapped in the Dark Place) and manifests this shadowy persona called "Mr. Teeth" in order to survive there, though he erroneously (or I guess it'd be up to my DM) thinks that Mr. Teeth is a separate being who terrorized him (but also just happened to slaughter anyone who threatened him in the Shadowfell). Having returned to the Material Plane, he's brought Mr. Teeth along with him, and becomes the monster when he needs to protect himself.

But all that preamble aside, what changes have I made since that first post? And what other changes might be called for? For reference, here's a link to the initial post.

First off: damage scaling.

I think one of the things we have to do with any unarmed-focused subclass is not step on anyone's toes. It sucks when one class is better at doing the thing that another class is entirely built around. Thus, I've changed the scaling of the Inner Shadow's Unarmed Strike damage to be at best equal to an equivalent-level Monk, never better than it. Thus, when you get the subclass at level 3, your unarmed strikes deal 1d6 damage. At level 6, a level after Monks get their first upgrade, your unarmed strikes go up to a d8. Finally, at level 14 (three levels after Monks get this) you go up to a d10, and that's where it stops. A d10 is fine - it's the equivalent of a Glaive or Halberd. Thanks to the Wraps of Unarmed Prowess, unarmed strikes will at least be able to get the most basic scaling with items (though I do think we need some items that let you add extra dice to your unarmed strikes, like a Vicious Weapon).

Next, we look at the Flurry of Claws element of Monstrous Claws (which is now Monstrous Swipes). This is a buff primarily to avoid some awkwardness - your bonus action unarmed strike still gets to add your Strength to it. Mainly, this felt necessary if we were going to let your unarmed strikes benefit from Graze - why should you get to add your Strength only if you miss?

We're going to come back to Shadow Manifestation, which I think might need a redesign for clarity.

Vicious Swipes (the new Nightmare Claws because we're saving the "Nightmare" term for later, and also swipes allows for non-slashing damage) is unchanged.

Ok, now, Raging Hurl was cool, but we were trying too hard to do what we can already kind of handle with Shoves. So, we replaced it (as I already mentioned in the subsequent post) with Enraged Manipulation, which gives foes disadvantage on their saving throws against Shoves and Grapples if we're raging. The intent here is to recreate the benefits that Rage gave to these actions in 5.0, essentially, when they took an Athletics check.

Vicious Claws got renamed to Nightmare Swipes, because "nightmare" feels like it should be more powerful than "vicious." I will say that I'm now wondering if we should get a once-a-turn Fear effect on our attacks, like an Undead Warlock. I also bumped it to level 14 to make it fair to Monks, and as mentioned before, it bumps you to a d10 rather than 2d6.

Secrets of the Id was a feature I liked, but it also felt potentially like not enough for your level 10 features (especially when putting Nightmare Swipes at level 14). I didn't want to directly replicate anything from another Barbarian subclass, so you don't get full immunity to Charm and Fear, but you get advantage on saves against them while raging. It's strictly worse, of course, than Mindless Rage for Berserkers, but I think we have enough unique stuff going on here that it's probably ok. You still get those extra skills with Primal Knowledge.

Metamorphic Manifestation is unchanged.

    So, let's come back to Shadow Manifestation.

The real problem I have here is just wording it clearly. The idea is that if you're raging and you get hit with any damage, you deal a bit of extra damage on any attacks until the end of your next turn. But while this idea isn't hard to communicate, it's surprisingly hard to put into strict and clear language. I considered saying "when you take damage, you enter a state of shadowy fury. While in this state, your Rage bonus damage to your attacks is doubled." That's a bit awkward, but the older phrasing "when you take damage your rage bonus is doubled until the end of your next turn" could lead people to think this is exponential - get hit three times at level 10 and you're dealing 24 extra damage per hit. That's obviously not the intent.

So, we could keep hunting for a new way to phrase this, or we could just come up with a different mechanic for Shadow Manifestation.

I still have this design in my "version 3" document, but I do think there's a reasonably similar feature: we could just say that "when a creature within 30 feet of you deals damage to you while you are raging, they take Force damage (could be psychic) equal to your Rage bonus." This could give us more or less damage depending on how many times they hit us. But one thing I like that's kind of elegant here is that it's not rolled, just a flat amount, which means that it can be shouted out easily during combat without pausing much.

If we go with this, maybe when we hit level 10 (which still feels a little thin) we might get to start to add our Strength modifier to this, helping it scale better into higher levels.

It's admittedly maybe an imperfect design - Barbarians usually don't disincentivize monsters from attacking them because it's better for them to get attacked than their allies - but it could still be good.