Order Domain Cleric subclass and Giant Soul Sorcerer pt3

good afternoon twitch and welcome to the Mike morels happy fun hour I am your host Mike morels I am the creative director on Dungeons & Dragons and I’ll be guiding you through the design of a new subclass for a different character class of Dungeons & Dragons each week so as you can see up on our screen right now we have two things first we have our notes from last week on our giant soul sorcerer and on the left of the screen least as far as I’m looking at it we have our handy-dandy browser open to D&D beyond.com which we’ll be using as our reference throughout the show as we work on our sub class and that reminds me of one of my tips I’ll probably repeat this multiple times each week so if you’ve heard it before you’re gonna hear it again when you’re working on anything with D&D or any other role-playing game or any other system you’re working on never assume you remember details correctly always look things up to always tread cautiously and carefully before moving ahead with your design and always verify that way what you think is true is actually true so let’s take it away so last week we work on the giant soul we talked about the sorcerer and I’m introducing a little bit of a change we’re gonna try something a little bit different this week because I felt like I mean I really enjoy doing the show but I also wondered how much of the show were you watching me look through spell lists to pick the right spells that we were gonna give to the giant soul sorcerer so we’re gonna do something a little bit different with the next subclass which we’re gonna talk about this week but we’ll get to that when we get to it and so yeah the oh I see this soul spice V or v miss did you don’t worry about calling me mr. morals I’m just morals or you can call me Mike the I’m actually I shouldn’t say I’m not that old I am that old so I guess if you want to call me mr. morals that’s okay but being now that I’m in my 40s I guess that’s who I am whether I like it or not so yeah let’s take a look at the giant soul now I haven’t really worked this much since last we met and what I wanted to do here was just do a quick review to show you where we are cuz I think what’s gonna happen next you know I thought a little bit about what I wanted to do this week and I think we put enough work into this one that what I’m going to do is probably for next week take these notes and then kind of show you how it turns into the next step of text because I feel like in looking through this with the giant soul were in a solid place it really does need to be played tested now if you weren’t with us last week one of the big points we talked about and I’m gonna highlight it is this first level class feature we know from play test feedback that people feel that the sorcerer is just being sold short a bit on spell selection but we also know that at one point in this play test of the storm sorcerer we gave the storm sorcerer a bunch of extra spells to augment that list the feedback though was it really made the players handbook sorcerer subclasses feel very weak so we didn’t want to just repeat that we want to address the issue but we want to address it in a very specific targeted way that makes the new subclass in this case the giant soul where we’re doing this feel balanced feel reasonable we don’t want people who are playing the existing sorcerer subclasses to feel left out so what we ended up doing was taking a look at the low levels of a sorcerer and it really looked like now we can’t say for sure we can only verify this through play test but we felt that it was at the low levels that the sorcerer was really feeling that spell selection pinch having only two spells at first level really just felt like you didn’t have that flexibility that you might want in a spell caster especially if you’re playing a campaign where you’re expecting to see a wide variety of challenges so what we settled on was in addition to giving giving you the dragon sorcerer type hit point boost basically plus one hit point per level to reflect the sort of innate toughness you’d expect from a giant we also gave each of our different giant types a couple of additional spells at low levels to help bridge that gap and what we wanted to do was make these spells feel thematic for the type of giant and then to build that sort of mechanical ladder that theme that runs through the subclass that really tells you this is why this sorcerer is distinct from other sorcerers so that’s where with that looks right that’s really the big lesson to take away from here is in thinking of designing things for an existing game to really have an understanding of how is the game currently functioning how do the players think of that function are they happy with it do they see it has a shortcoming and then to consider if you want to try to make an improvement because that’s that’s a dangerous word in dealing with subclasses improvements because when we improve things we make them better and if you’ve played any game you know that often if we make things – good – much better if that’s proper phrase iation it leads to things being broken now in Dungeons and Dragons for fifth edition we consider things to be broken if four players at least if a player selecting the option makes the other players at the table feel ineffective or overshadowed it’s okay if that’s within a character’s area of specialization if the fighter has the best armor class at the table we’re okay with that but if the fighters armor class is so high that that character never takes a hit unless it’s a crit then maybe we feel like you’re starting to overshadow people so it’s that line between feeling like my character is really good at this and then feeling like my characters too good at this and often we find that really comes down to perception that we can mathematically prove at least as much as you can mathematically prove anything in a role-playing game that something’s output is similar to something that came before but if it feels too good then that can cause friction because DNA is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game that feel that idea of teamwork that idea of people feeling they’re coming together to play the game rather than coming together to oppose each other it’s important that fairness in some ways overshadows balance for D&D so that’s where we left off and talking about the giant soul for a quick recap we had at first level we increased your hit points we gave you a couple of spells then we came into six level this idea of the sort of spell rage concept it starts out at six level with this idea that whenever you cast a spell you get some benefit based on its slot so if I cast a second level spell I would get a benefit saying okay it’s for second levels better than if the benefit I get for casting a first level spell and this was the idea that truly really make each giant feel distinct and also give you a benefit that really pop up quite often and then at fourteenth level this idea of a spell range then going from a constant benefit from your spells to this idea of I can actually become a size large and then I get a raft of benefits with that then an 18th level allowing you become size huge for you to literally become a giant at 18th level so that’s where we settled on that and this is actually a subclass and I mentioned this you know I think last week I’m really curious to get this one out into play testing because I really want to know how do people feel about this that we’re giving you a couple of extra spells it’s not quite to the same extent that the storm sorcerer went but it also is it we I am treating this essentially as a class feature you know I the other sorcerers especially the dragon sorcerer they get an armor class boost at this level we’re replacing that armor class boost with a couple more spells so it’s be very interesting to see how people react they feel is as fair as it balance does it interesting is it worth it or is this just really patching a hole and people really feel like they’re not coming out ahead of the game at least ahead of the game to the extent they’d expect to after picking up their first subclass features so I take a quick peek in its schatzie let’s see what do I got any questions coming in through here if it wants to throw something up there because I’m about to roll out I’m gonna move away from the giant soul sorcerer and then move to our new our new so class we’re gonna show and like I said it’s a little bit of something different the I decided that well I want to try this right this is the spirit of game design we’re gonna experiment a little bit rather than necessarily watch me do a lot of typing this week there’s gonna be a lot more commentary the oh so a question for Todd Todd Kenny okay Todd why not large at six level so my main worry here is when we think of multi classing letting you become size large it’s probably gonna make you really good in close combat now just flavorful flavor wise that’s what we’d expect six level though makes it a little maybe too easy for a barbarian or a fighter to dip into this to get those benefits and then stack them up with there already you know impressive combat abilities really want this to feel like there’s the sorcerer is shifting modes and maybe acting the way the sorcerer normally doesn’t what that means is those benefits happy really big to get you from being more of the backline caster to muscled ignored your way up to the front and smacking down monsters those benefits if I give them to a sorcerer might make the source store an effective close combat character giving them to a barbarian or a paladin might make that character very powerful so by planting those at 14th level you can still go ahead and multi class I believe at fourteenth level and this is hey we’re gonna check what did I say earlier I can’t exactly remember where it is the fighter and barbarian oops I want to go oh you know what I’m gonna go to fullscreen mode because actually I’m so used to using this in full-screen mode that when I when I goes let’s take a look at the fighter so at fourteenth level as a sorcerer let’s take a peek when does the fighter get their additional attacks and they get them at fifth level so in theory at fifth level they’re I can reach you know 19th level I can combine the 14th level feature with those extra attacks I’m willing to let you do that at that level all the characters are kind of supposed to be broken we’ll talk about that later it’s not really necessary topic for right now but I’m ok with it at 6 level though that means I could reach 14th levels of fighter so I’m looking at I got my second extra has come online now and I’m stacking that so I’m getting three attacks and I’m stacking it on top of a size increase that just might be too good at that 17th level area just you know it’s one of those things where it just might be too appealing to two characters especially for the Paladin so let’s another quick look let’s see all right so I think we’re good here the Oh kira de or I hope I found that right acrobats a little bit I’ve been struggling with a little bit so I’m gonna be honest I’ve been distracted by other shinier things and so why not uh I’m not gonna beat around the bush let’s show you the shiny new thing I want to show you this week so like I mentioned earlier I was a little worried that with the giant sole we were spending too much time just looking through lists of spells so I took a little bit of a change of approach here I actually went ahead and designed a full subclass leading up to the show so I’m gonna show you the first draft of the text and then walk you through a bit of commentary on how I entered it and if you’re looking if you’re sharp-eyed observer might be able to see if you take a look at my window here you might be able to see that window that’s full screen lurking right behind the fighter right up here I don’t know if anyone has ever noticed that but boom cleric of order so this idea came from a discussion I had last week with James Wyatt James is on the magic team and we’re talking about cleric domains and we talked about how cleric domains have evolved over time I used to be when cleric domains as a concept called domains first showed up was in third edition prior to that there were spheres of magic that what the priests class category could access and then a cleric had a sort of a little bit of a different take on it than the druid but that really drove your spell selection one of the things we talked about how was how in the third edition you would pick two domains so domains gave you a benefit and then a list of spells and the way it would work is often you might say while my cleric is a cleric of tier the Forgotten Realms god of justice so I might say I have the war domain and the log and they would give you a sense of okay I’m war cleric I’m pretty good at mixing it up and leading the fight and my the DD I follow upholds the law the idea was you’d use a combination of things to express your character now in fifth we went with just you pick one domain first for ease of play so someone just said I want to be a cleric of the God of War they would just pick the war domain and also to give us more design space by making the domain selection one choice it gives us more essentially spots in that character progression chart to drop in abilities to build on top of each other and to make that one choice bigger but one of the things we didn’t do in fifth edition that we had done in Prior additions was this concept of alignment based domains now as I mentioned in third edition since you’re picking two domains you could imagine a cleric picking war and good would feel different from a cleric who picked war and evil or war in chaos so that was kind of that blending idea now we can we moved away from that because we were looking more just bigger higher concepts like war you know the Sun healing things like that but we talked a little bit about those alignment domains and is almost a little of a challenge like how would you implement those good evil law chaos domains and fifth edition and so thinking of that the I thought well what would the law domain look like and so I what I settled on was this idea of the order domain now before I go too deeply into this as you can see the new done it’s all it’s all written up nice and pretty I want to slide over to Dini Beyond and walk you through a little bit of the cleric character class to give you some insight into the thinking behind domains and that the classes design as a whole because we really wanted I’m gonna just flat-out say I think from my point of view admittedly bit of a biased point of view but I think the cleric was is one of my favorite character classes not necessarily that I play lots of clerics but I am probably happiest with the design of the cleric overall I feel that it has a very good Union between the core class and what it provides and the domains and the flavor that they provide I’ve talked before about the difference between if you were here for the rogue episodes a sub class coming in at third level and what that means for the power level and how much of an effect it can have in a character’s identity I think that the other type of design where the sub class comes in at first or second level really works well here for the cleric and I think the cleric is a great example of why that first level design can really work it adds a bit more complexity but it also really helps identify not only who your character is but what your character class is about the oh so quick question low wisdom check was there ever an idea for personalized domains for particular Dedes of fair room this is actually something we’ve talked about a bit and I’ll touch on it a little bit no no I’ll just tackle it now the you guys will play D&D before I’m assuming right you don’t necessarily need me to go into too much do you tell what the cleric is but um we we are sort of split on that on one hand creating domain specific to deities has a lot of Appeal because it allows for something that’s very flavorful and it’s very locked in for the story the drawback is is just the volume of design we would essentially have to tell players there are certain deities that we think are important enough that we want to give them full support as distinct domains and other ones that are more generic and so like that’s a little bit of a concern because it those concepts aren’t necessarily portable – but it’s I think in a setting where there was a limited number of gods that would make more sense in a setting like fair rune where you have a pretty wide Pantheon you have deities that could be regional in nature you have multiple deities but with different twists on them for instance for dealing with magic you have a Zeus and then you have mistre they both deal with wizardry but they deal with it in different ways there’s a lot of subtlety there but it’s sort of that’s that’s interesting and usefulness for storytelling so I think for fair rune we move away from it you know we we’ve we thought about it but we just fell it would also be really difficult to balance and that’s another important consideration now I didn’t say impossible the right I said difficult it means we have to spend a lot of time on it to get it right but the challenge is when you look at something like that balancing task you have to ask yourself what are the benefits of getting it right and what are the benefits of getting it wrong if we get it right we have really great domains for people to choose from that are nice and flavorful but you could also argue you could just spend that time making more broadly useful domains and make more players happy the other side of the coin too is what if we get it wrong what if our balance is off do we then have a world where say suddenly everyone’s playing a cleric of mistre because herb domain is the best and that’s not necessarily a concern for all players but it’s something where it can throw off the narrative enough that we’re worried about making things so story specific that we end up with a sort of a world where things are almost like to specifically broken if that makes sense having the war domain be kind of considered the best is a little bit easier because you can say well I want to play a war cleric because let’s say I’m worried about characters output I want to be really powerful that’s you know I like playing characters who are really effective in D&D and you pick the war domain but then you might say well my cleric is a cleric of tier or my cleric is a crusading cleric you know normally this deity you know doesn’t have a war domain it doesn’t offer it my clerics are real crusading cleric of that of this temple so you can write your own story we don’t want to put players in a position where they feel like in order to build that more optimized character that the story has to be very specific now it’s not perfect you know there’s big things that we have a miss or doesn’t quite come out the way we want but we generally when we think of those failure States we want to try to create an of design approach such that if we make a mistake it isn’t pushing the game in two directions that are really far from where we want to go I like to think of this is a it’s a subtle but important tool and in game designers tool box is to think about what happens if everything goes wrong how much damage have I done here how far off from the mark does the game end up it’s not something that’s fun to think about it’s like let’s think about total failure what will happen but it’s something that can be useful because what you’ll learn from it is the idea of scope what is the scope at which we want to operate are we making domains for specific deities or are we making them just more for concepts that then can be applied across a number of different story elements and clearly that’s what we settled on was we don’t want to be in a position where we’re narrowing the story too much for players especially because we know there are players who enjoy making optimised characters and it wouldn’t be fair to them to say well if you want to play a cleric who’s optimized here’s the one story choice we don’t want you to feel that those two things story creation and character optimization have to be at odds ideally you can do both now in an ideal world we’d have plenty of options when you think of optimizing a character you have multiple paths to get there it’s not just one clear right answer but we also have to accept to the in the world of optimization there is probably going to be one thing that’s just going to be the best simply because you’re just you’re running the numbers right the dps on one character might be 10.8 and for different character it’s ten point eight five when you’re dealing with matters of math there is just going to be something that’s going to give you the highest value but if we can keep those values close enough we’re not making you feel like the right now the right answer is just this one answer where someone’s damage per round is ten and this other options is thirty you know and this the the second highest option is you know twelve that’s when we get and that goes back to the discussion of what’s really broken in D&D you know those characters that make everyone else the table feel like why am I here I just feel ineffective so yeah so that’s where we some so simple question but I hope that answer kind of shed light on a number of different design processes so let’s take a quick look at the cleric as I mentioned I was very happy with how this class turned out it was one of the first character classes we worked on in 2011 or 12 a very long time ago at least that’s what it feels like in the games history you know the idea that the cleric it’s probably just conceptually one of those classes that lends itself the style of character class and subclass design we embraced for D&D so taking a quick look here the this is a character class that like the Warlock like the sorcerer you make your subclass choice at first level now another thing to point out is that in building these character classes as far as the core class progression goes spell casting is actually kind of nice because it does a lot to define the core of your character class and often we just build the subclasses in the gaps that the spell slot progression creates so for instance you’ll notice a third level the cleric does not get a class feature because we consider gaining access to second level spells that’s its own class feature that that is that’s equivalent in weight to putting a media ability here and so you’ll see that throughout the the character classes that have full casting progression they tend to have a lot of what look like playing spots that are really being taken up by access to higher level spells now it doesn’t happen all the time for instance at fifth level your turn undead ability gets an incremental upgrade we don’t typically see those sort of incremental upgrades to existing abilities as being worth a full character class feature so that can sit alongside gaining access to third level spells so let’s take a look at the core of the class the interesting thing about the cleric is and this was actually something there was a lot of discussion about in the design the cleric out of the box only gets access to light and medium armor this is a case where you know this is another interesting sort of design element of Dungeons & Dragons and something that I think is unique to D&D and a lot of games you can choose your armor and then your armor might affect the skills you take or some of the spells or abilities you can use so you can kind of think of your armors helping define your build its thinking especially like in video games which say like a game like Skyrim that might have a more and approach to character development where you pick the skill areas that you want to specialize in either by using those skills and play or by spending points that you earn in D&D we have a level system so you just earn experience points and then you you gain a level and that just gives you your new abilities the challenge we had was we knew some people wanted to play clerics who were wearing robes and more spellcaster ii and other players want to play the more traditional D&D cleric who was upfront mixing it up in a fight with heavy armor a shield and a mace what we decided was to make heavy armor a benefit that domain that would rest in the domain rather than the core class what this meant was it gave us a little bit of a lever to play with in domains domains that don’t give you better armor can give you some additional benefit as opposed to the ones that give you heavy armor and when we get to the domains I’ll show the light domain and how that uses that otherwise you get spell-casting clerics prepare spells from the full list of cleric spells your domain also gives you access to some additional spells that you have essentially prepared all the time so it extends number of spells you can cast now having said that I want to double check to make sure domain spells you always have it prepared so yes I was right that’s an example of I made the assumption but once I’m designing I’m gonna double check to make sure I have that right that it’s not just being added to your spell list it’s a spell that you constant you always have prepared and ready to go next up its second level so you’ve gotten your basic spell casting and you get your access to your first sub class elements channeled divinity came in primarily because we knew that turning Undead which is a funny phrase right if you play D&D you know turn undead like make undead creatures run away if you don’t play Dean do you think turn Undead oh my cleric turns into an undead creature but it’s just one of those phrases that has been in the game since the beginning so we just keep using it it’s just one of those it’s not a bug it’s a feature it’s distinctive not irritating this is something we just felt was so iconic to D&D clerics that all clerics could get it it’s essentially a an additional ability that floats on of your spell-casting it’s similar to a spell in the effect it generates and if I remember right do you can use this with every short or long rest right when user channel channel divinity you must then finish a short row long rest to use it again so the interesting thing here is that since turn undead is can be fairly narrow very useful if you’re in say burrow via dealing with accounts trod in his minions not so useful if you’re battling say a horde of works or an evil dragon the domains typically give you an additional ways to use this so if you’re have no use for turn Undead there’s something that’s iconic to your domain that you get to use it I always like this style of design because I think it’s fun to give you something that in the core class that then the subclass provides a twist to if you remember back to the Acrobat with the through the rogue we really tried to make sure the acrobats abilities blended very well with the Rogues cunning action that you felt like okay I’m using my bonus action and then later on I’m using my reaction to avoid damage we’d really want to make sure that that subclass didn’t step on the core classes toes in some ways channel divinity is the opposite we have an ability here that is essentially you get a charge of magic to use to some end this is an area where by giving you more options because the initial option is so narrow giving you a new option that’s more broadly useful does feel like a powerup because I’m taking something that’s very narrow and making it much broader we come to destroy Undead these are this is an augment to your turn undead feature and this is just dealing with a the the tradition in D&D that higher level clerics can instantly destroy weak Undead it’s also giving you some benefits you know as you gain higher levels we assume things like skeletons and zombies you’re encountering them in larger numbers letting you simply destroy them makes you feel more powerful but it’s not really messing with things gain balance wise 1/10 double divine intervention this is a kind of a weird ability but it was something we just felt was so iconic to as far as house rules went or thinking of how people thought about the cleric this idea that you have a link to a deal and you can call upon that God for aid now the interesting thing about this is this is essentially power neutral because the cleric is already a full casting class we don’t take divine intervention and think hey this is actually a load bearing all into this class that’s delivering reliable power it’s really more of a ribbon and a design ribbon is anything that we give you that is really just there for flavor or for storytelling it’s not something that we see is whoa you know the cleric about intervention you’ve got to use that correctly to play your character right we don’t see it that way but that’s it that’s it for the cleric as you can see it’s pretty light but what I like about it is it’s light but it’s delivering things that are very iconic there’s a wide variety of possible clerics you can play and so the the core class doesn’t carry a lot what it does carry is things that really can map to any deity and one of them channel divinity maps very well to being something we want to play with in our subclass design and I wanted to take a quick look before we go over to the order domain and talk about that for the second half of the hour I wanted to show you something here in the light domain so this is a good example in the light domain of the cleric who’s more of a caster to start with you can see we’re giving you spells are a bit more offensive in nature you get fireball as a third level spell the cleric throwing fireball that’s something that’s not really common in D&D especially before third edition burning hands at first level another AoE flaming sphere and scorching ray wall of fire flame strike we’re giving you spells now the important thing to start with is first we try to balance all spells at any level any third level spells in theory if it’s used at the time where it’s correct for the spell or appropriate is balanced with any other third level spell so daylight while it’s not the offensive punch that fireball has it can shut down creatures that are really dependent on darkness or creatures of generating magical areas darkness when used at the right time it can really tilt and encounter in your favor or in fireballs case you can just blow up a bunch of guys and that’s always useful as long as you’re not it’s not a diplomacy encounter but I guess maybe that’s a good way to end the diplomacy encounter and turn it to a combat encounter the other element here that comes into play is warding flare so this is the benefit that the light domain cleric gets now remember this is the cleric who’s not getting heavy armors they either need a good dexterity so there’s a little bit more pressure on their ability scores or they’re just they don’t have the defense’s other clerics have so what this ability allows you to do you get it first level when you’re attacked by a creature within 30 feet of you that you can see you can use your reaction to impose disadvantage of the attack role causing like to flare before the attacker before it hits or misses so basically you create a flash of light to distract on who’s attacking you you can use this feature number times equal to your wisdom modifier minimum of 1 you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest so essentially what we’ve given you is a little stockpile of miniature shield spells it’s not necessarily as reliable as the shield spell where you just know I’m getting an AC benefits gonna turn it into a Miss but it is nice to give someone disadvantage that you know typically speaking that’s like a swing of kind of like equivalent to minus 5 to hit ish it’s not quite that simple depending on the bath but that’s that’s a good rule of thumb to use but that’s a good example of we’re taking away your heavy armor giving you some more offensive spells and other clerics would get but still keeping you balanced because the other clerics are throwing around equally powerful support spells but and then giving you this to this benefit that you know in some ways it’s you know when you use it is actually probably better than armor because for instance you can cancel out a critical hit so we now has to roll to twenties to score crit on you rather than just one with the one the yeah so that’s one important thing to keep in mind about the cleric if that armor it’s something it’s pretty subtle you might not even notice it but it’s there and it is something that we redo way that access to heavy armor as a pretty nice benefit at first level for clerics so with that in mind let’s take a look at errors in our subclass so as I mentioned earlier I went and just did the design work here and we’re gonna try this out I’m gonna walk you through the design process and then I feel free in the comments on Twitter on the chat here just let us know how it’s going how this feels compared to the other approaches we’ve done you know with anything the first this is still new right I think this is only our fourth episode so we can expect we try to tinker with our format a bit to really find the right mix but like I said I was a little worried last week that we’re spending all the time just looking through lists of spells and I want to make sure that the hour we have we’re getting as much interesting content out there so the order domain so the challenge was could you take the concept of the alignment based domains of 3rd edition and convert them to 5th edition style domains and I started with now to take a quick step back because I thought about it I realized we already sort of did this chaos is essentially reflected in the trickery domain in the players handbook the idea of that low-key style cleric who is not necessarily trustworthy has got a little bit of a flavor of the rogue character class attached to it so it kind of is I thought about it I thought I don’t need to do a chaos one because I think if someone was to say I want to play a chaos themed cleric I’d suggest trying the trick we do main but the important thing there is the idea that rather than thinking of chaos just as chaos the concept of randomness trying to think of it a bit more well what’s the story intent there what type of character embraces chaos now it might not be a perfect match you might think that just a pure entropy cleric would be interesting but I think that’s maybe the direction I take it is well okay if it’s some it’s a cleric who’s just all about things ending or falling apart maybe I’d go more like a word like entropy and build around that but I felt like I said but I was I felt like trickery was already close enough I didn’t want to go in that direction good and evil as I thought about it felt like those are domains that kind of get gobbled up by domains that would feel not quite story correct if I tried to match an evil character to them so for instance or a good character now we don’t really have the good one the ones that wouldn’t feel right for a good character because just by default we assume and from what we what we’ve seen from players is they like playing good at neutral characters evil characters just aren’t so popular that domains like light that just naturally feels like a good domain you could imagine an evil cleric of light but it’s not it’s a bit of a stretch it’s a bit of a unique story there yeah you could totally do it but it’s not necessarily the first thing that springs to mind things like the healing domain again that you could imagine okay you could imagine evil healing cleric you can tell that story but it’s not the default and it takes a little bit of work to kind of think of one I’m not impossible but it’s not it’s not reflexively what you think of so that is what we came around to law and as I thought about it what I really wanted to do for my campaign this is actually also why this is kind of built up a bit my own campaign I wanted to do a cleric who could really encapsulate the deity orifice the goddess orifice who was the patron of civilization and as I looked at our lists now go back to DNA beyond real quick I didn’t quite feel that any of our existing domains were matching quite up with what I would thought thought of when I thought of civilization but I thought when I thought of civilization I thought leadership someone who helps build communities and preserve them and like war tempest tricker acknowledged great none of those quite matched up so whenever I have the opportunity to do get paid to do some game design work of my own campaign I typically take it so that’s where we ended up with this idea of the cleric of order now I did initially think about civilization but as I looked at our roster of deities I didn’t see too many other cards that I felt were really good matches for by taking the concept of civilization and asking myself well what are the underpinnings of civilization is there something that is more a broad concept and that’s where order started to come in like one of the deities who want things neatly shelved the deities who want people to obey the rules and especially deities who want people to obey their edicts that’s when things started to feel like okay this is coming together so my example deity list includes bein a rathus vultus from Grayhawk who’s also a deity of the Sun and that’s something where when we think of that like Oh shouldn’t focus also have the light domain well yeah and we I would think of it as in a temple of focus or the in the Holy Orders of focus there might be deities who commune with the Sun and those are the clerics of light domain and then but Voltas is also very lawful neutral very controlling he may have deities or most more I’m Dedes clerics who are more like inquisitors and that’s where this order domain might come in and that provided some fuel there too we Joss is another one the almost somebody is not the opposite of vultus but sort of a dark reflection a deity of order but also of death Orion from Eber on and mcglue biet and Asmodeus some are sort of evil gods really made sense Asmodeus being the head of the nine hells its ruler and often worshipped as a deity and mcglue be it being this sort of conquering deity who destroys Pantheon’s and claims their worshippers as his own really wanting to enforce the order especially through his Hobgoblin followers so the idea that I settled on was this idea that the gods of order and I’ll read a little bit of here trying to be the entire thing but the gods of order to promote obedience to the law above all else and I’ll just focus on that thing there that’s what they’re looking for is people should obey there are people who issue orders and there are people who obey those orders and the important thing here is because this is law it’s not good or evil really we’re looking for the deity to give us that flavor that we don’t necessarily care about the moral weight of the outcome we just care that we’re following the rules now a lawful good deity with a who offers the order domain might say well the laws should be just but we’re gonna rely on the laws to tell us what’s just we have our own sense we don’t want big people making judgment calls we want to make everything very clear in plain a lawful evil deity might say well these laws should serve me or should serve the powerful to keep those who obey the order should be kept in their place and those who the orders should benefit from their work you know things like that now there’s a lot of different ways you can slice it but that’s just this idea that when you’re creating a domain it helps to think what are the different expressions of it across different alignments and across different types of deities a good domain in my opinion is one where you can imagine a wide variety of deities well not so wide that they have no links but a good a good array of alignments can fall under it now for order order we’re not really thinking of any chaotic deities that they probably just don’t fit in and that’s okay because we want our subclasses to be distinct if a subclass could encompass everything you’re really probably more talking about a character class at that point so that’s we’re looking at is someone who feels like they are in charge we just assume that if you’re the cleric you’re probably not someone you’re following orders probably from other people in the religious hierarchy or from your deity or from the deities edicts whether it’s through a holy tome or through a government or perhaps even like a royal bloodline that you’ve been sworn to uphold and obey but this cleric is probably someone who is more in the position of I am issuing orders but I am doing so in the interest of imposing order and keeping the law intact so the first thing when I touch on is this is a character class that I wanted to give the heavy are a heavy armor too and I thought a little bit about this and where I settled on that why I thought that was a feature this character would need was I really felt that within the deities who offer this domain the ones I listed earlier I felt like they would expect their clerics to be out there in the front line leading okay it’s getting back to that idea of leadership that these clerks felt like they would be that sort of crusading or Inquisitor bent to them that they would deal with problems themselves if you disobeyed this cleric they might be the one delivering justice at least justice as far as they as they defined it so that’s why I went with heavy armor I’m gonna get to the domain spells in a second because actually those were affected by some of the class features that I built as I thought about it so where I thought about this runtime about this was to think okay who is this person who is this cleric who are they as a character and the image that came to mind was this idea and mentioned earlier of the leader this is the cleric who who orders others to do things now this being a cooperative game I don’t want a mechanic where the cleric just tells the other players what to do and they must obey but what I thought instead was what if this cleric gives you carrots gives you benefits if you act in this clerics best interest or at least give you tools where the cleric the player of the cleric can think of ways in which hey I can I can convince people that my plan is right or that we should do the thing that I want to do because if you work with me I can give you some nice benefits or it’s very least I can make our team work together a little bit more effectively and I thought a little bit about the warlord from fourth edition and how some of that this idea the character who’s almost like a little commander a bit of a tactician but with this cleric being less of I’m tactically insightful and more like I’m very good at inspiring others who fight alongside me so this is why I kind of I kind of take the lead here and I’m and as I thought about that oh what of it it’s almost like a target designation thing then if this cleric is has been sent to root out heresy this cleric can say there’s the heretic and point and say get them right so I kind of thought of it as I couldn’t work through it this is sort of the get’em cleric but that but the cleric this is the cleric who also leads the charge they’re pointing saying get him and they’re the first ones to Russian and everyone they expect everyone to follow them and obey so what we came up with was this idea of voice of authority so starting at first level you can invoke the power of excuse me the power of law to claim authority over others once during your turn when you target an ally with a first level or higher spell that Ally can use their reaction to make a single melee or ranged weapon attack against a target of your choice if a single spell targets multiple allies only one Ally gains this benefit and that’s where this idea was of get’em right I can throw a blessed spell on someone get them right I can heal you and say get them now the nice thing about this is I thought about it was this actually chords pretty well with characters like rogues now you might think right rogue and cleric wait this is the order cleric well as I thought about the rogue I thought well if this is a character who was sort of this Inquisitor mode he might often work with spies you could imagine like this character bursts into like there’s the evil cult that’s going in the city and he has a spy one of the cultists is actually on his side or maybe it’s the party rogue in disguise this character can you know the rogue King dive in and make a sneak attack on the leader and then this character can throw a heel on the rogue and the road gets to make another attack and use that sneak attack again now caveat not playtested might be way too good but I like the flavor of it thought this is something that makes this this cleric really feel like a leader the other nice thing is it makes your buff spells feel fun because you throw the buff on someone and they get to make immediate use of it if it’s augmenting their attacks so that’s why now I’m gonna turn it around that’s why at first level I threw bless as one of your domain spells that that being a nice spell to throw on there to really boost a character it’s also something where I threw now one other thing I threw blasts on there and then a lot of the other ones sort of deal with this idea of imposing order so command hold person spiritual weapon is one what I felt like flavor flee it felt kind of cool but I don’t know if it’s the exact right answer there this idea that I’m gonna call upon my Dee Dee’s weapon to smack the evildoer over the head or the enemy of order mass healing word just feeling like an easy one it’s a bonus action I can hit it hit the entire party and pick one the most effective character to make an attack slow being a good way to bring someone to justice so that evil cult leader is trying to get away I throw slow on them and let the rest of the party take them down such right there is slow on them then I you know maybe bonus action well I can’t do that the but anyway it’s it’s good in this idea bringing some to justice the dominate spells the same way dominate beast in person this idea that I can impose order I can force you to do things I can bring you to heal Guardian of faith this idea of protecting the faithful feeling like an order domain thing and then commune being like well okay this is a cleric who wants guidance so being able to cast that spell to get insight from from the gods felt felt flavorful and OnPoint but you can see especially at first level having blessed in there it’s kind of a pointer I thought about some other buff spells here but you know I looked at like spell like aid just didn’t quite fit in with what I wanted to want it to do so this might be something where in play tester and like a revision before going out this this might you might change a bit but it felt like a good starting point so that’s our big mechanic first level you are leading the charge and you’re really throwing buffs on your friends as much as you can especially your high damage friends like those barbarians and rogues to really lay the smack down on your enemies but as the cleric you control it so you get the feeling of a bit of the tactical smart person here right I’m gonna think about my buffs not only in terms of the party’s benefit but what could it do to really lay some hurt down in our monsters our enemies so then now the four more benefits for the class we’ll go through but you actually get three and I’ll talk about that when we get to it so it’s like a level this is where our channal divinity comes in and I actually gave this this domain two different channel divinities because I felt like it had two separate needs I wanted to address this is a I think I don’t know the proportion but we often either see channel divinity coming in at second and at sixth or coming in at second basically second level it’s almost always channel divinity to give you that flavor that way to you know that that additional utility out of a fairly and our ability and it’s six level that can come in if the second level one if we feel there’s more a broader use that makes sense the domain otherwise typically you get some sort of like static benefit here but orders demand demand was this idea that I pictured the order domain cleric it goes into a tavern it’s a rowdy crowd and this cleric just speaks a word and everyone goes quiet right he’s here to find a thief or that cult leader we’re trying to track down this cleric speaks a word and crowds listen so what I did here was I stole some mechanics from the sleep spell sleep spell it has you roll some dice that gives you some total hit points worth of creatures you can affect and in this case of sleep you perhaps not surprisingly given the spells name put them to sleep in this case it lets you put a command spell on on these other creatures so this is really meant to be a it can be really useful and in combat if just shut down a mob little I’m not just my little mob a bunch of creatures or it can also be useful in a more social situation now as I think about this this might be something where we need to specify if it’s in combat maybe it doesn’t work creature gets a saving through because I did think of this when I think of the use cases when I think of the story I often think it this is not during a fight but then again it’s kind of fun let’s maybe play test this and see how it goes we don’t I don’t think about it I want to play play test something that I know is broken because that I’m not gonna get good play test feedbacks already know people gonna tell me this doesn’t work but I also do always want to try to it’s good to push things it’s good to see where boundaries set and it’s good to take a risk sometimes on something that’s kind of cool and maybe it’ll work well but so this is where we are with your second level ability the six availability is one that’s really meant to be used in combat this is a bonus action you present your holy symbol and select a creature within 30 feet of you it should say that you can see until the start of your next turn junior allies gain a +5 bonus to all damage rules against that creature +5 might not be the right number but that’s a good starting point if damage applies to multiple creatures including the chosen one wait that might be something wrong yeah I don’t I think I can just oh whoa I see this is for things like fireballs so be thorough fireball it includes the creature the benefit applies only to that creature you don’t apply it to everything in the area of effect that language might need me clean up a little bit but that gets it there so my thing is looking at the six number one I might want to go back that makes me feel more like I want to sculpt the second one to be really more of an out of combat use because my six level one is coming in you don’t want these abilities to feel like they sit on top of each other because and the player feels like I’m not really getting a new toy I’m just getting a new way to use the thing I already have and maybe I’m happy using it the way it is now so I have to consider that there’s a chance that if I think if I kept orders demand as a ability I can use in combat I might make this something different make it not use channel divinity but we’ll see we’ll see where we get that now I said before that while there is four features really there’s only three divine strike is purely here to let the cleric keep up in damage output with other characters this is just a boost to your damage back when we designed we found that giving the cleric a second attack here was a little bit too good it also left clerics behind who are really going to be dependent on well a cleric using can trips doesn’t need a second attack to keep up with damage there can trips scale up so instead we decide we settled on giving use an extra die of damage that was enough in our spreadsheets to make the cleric feel like okay still competitive but also meant we could throw an energy type on this damage in this case force damage to give you a little bit of a you know a boost that you know a fighter barbarian doesn’t have automatic access to but really this is just divine strike is just here purely for the the math and balance of the game we don’t consider this to be a really a feature of this of the subclass per se we just really see it here because it’s what the class needs to keep up but then I had an idea I decided since this is something we just put in here is just a supporting pillar why not try to do something fun with it so it’s 17th level now remember you’re getting 9th level spells really that’s like your capstone ability as a cleric that’s like your really cool thing but you know within the domain we still want to give you something it feels really neat and really over the top and I’m just gonna confirm that right if we go to the cleric we go to our class features oh that’s right your divine intervention gets gets beefier at xx level the wanted ticket well we’ll do that later I can’t remember if that actually makes it something we we think is now actually a key part of your character or for just a flavor thing but in case it’s 17th level we want to give you a really nifty ability so that makes you very distinct because your subclass came in at first level it’s really part of defining your character we really want your awesome capstone thing if it can flow through that subclass that’s where we want to take it and this one is when you apply your divine strike damage to a creature so I smack someone with a weapon your allies gain the benefits of your divine strike against that creature until the start of your next turn so this is pretty good now it might not be quite good enough in my all that initial to DA damage is at 14 this ticks up to to d8 force but it the the drawback here is it does rely on you making a weapon attack so that might not be broad enough but this is something where I’d feel comfortable playtesting it you just try it and feel like am I being forced to make melee attacks more often at this level I’d also want to be able to cast us you know maybe I’m casting spells more often so this is the one thing here that playtesting could really show us is how does this character work and play how do I want this character to function what options my going for I can picture kind of a couple of different ways you might mainly be using weapon attacks augmenting with bonus action buff spells to get the most out of your voice of authority but I could also see a desire for this character to be using more like I can still use my buff spells as my full action and maybe there’s something where my bonus action isn’t being used as much so that’s something which this is also a good case we’re just building a 17th double character can sometimes give you some sense of okay based on the spells the spells I’m seeing the choices I have here is kind of where I think this character is gonna end up so that’s another good way to play test something when you have a new subclass is build that character for first level build that first level character did you have fun was it enjoyable do you feel like your characters effective just use that gut gut check then Inc just level that character up to whatever it like in this case level 17 obviously 18th on up I’m probably not going to see any changes maybe I will continue a level up just to be sure but it can be useful just to go through the process of okay I’m leveling up how do I feel this character developing do any obvious gaps appear going back to the rogue example that’s a really good one when when you’re making that character and you’re writing that stuff down you might realize hey I’m using my bonus actions in three different incompatible ways now I can kind of get a sense of why this might not work so the yeah and is a Gaius Octavian point seventeenth oh you have ninth double spells do you really want to be swinging your mace yeah so this might be something where it needs a little bit of work but I guess that’s something where I would probably just go over to DNA beyond make up a 17 little cleric and this is where since this domains not in D&D beyond right now I can still get a sense of what they may be like a war domain cleric might look like I might just say okay I’m gonna make a war domain cleric but I’m gonna really focus on buff spells rather than necessarily but I know war domain is it’s a cleric command that is more oriented toward close-combat so that that’s a good comp that’s a good tool to use if you you know because you can have to compete let the website automate everything rather doing it by hand it’s also very good for a quick first pass on what that character might look like so that’s what we’ve got here so I worried just about five of just a couple of closing elements where I head out but uh so let me know was this more in useful was it more insightful than actually seeing me type things out in a rough note order or was it more interesting to see some final design something that I worked on before I came into the show no to be fair to me things like a Giants law I do think about it before I come in I’m not just making up as I go I am making up as I go in some cases but there’s some specific pieces but generally I take some notes I have an idea of where I want the design to go the and I think that’s also important you know when you’re sitting down you know I used to be a freelance game designer I had a full time job I came home from work and I did some freelance you know I’d write what I found though was the writing went much easier if I didn’t use my writing time as my idea time seeing that blank page and thinking wow what am I going to put here was very intimidating but if instead like let’s say at the time I was a programmer I might doing my lunch hour just pull it a notebook and just sketch out a few really basic concepts for a character class or feet or spell or whatever it was what that meant though was at that night when I sat down like after dinner at eight or nine o’clock with that open word document I wasn’t coming to the table going okay now let’s come up with some ideas I already had some ideas that I could play with I could just start writing out and see where they took me but having that sort of pre-work those notes those ideas ahead of time to me it almost felt like you know if you’re gonna exercise is gonna lift weights you’re gonna run a marathon I felt like my warmup it’s what got me ready so now I was ready I mean it also gave me a plan right it’s sort of if you go to the gym and you have no idea what you’re gonna do just looking around at all the equipment you might just end up getting overwhelmed but if you go in knowing hey today is leg day right or today you know I’m gonna run you know it’s today I’m gonna do my you know two miles on the treadmill you have a plan you just go in and execute know that execution would be really hard but you’re already halfway there if you know what you want to do so that’s something to think of you know when you’re when you’re doing it yourself don’t come to the table you know think of the difference between time to think of ideas it might just be you in a notebook and time to implement those ideas I think a lot of times when we start out we tend to conflate those two things rather than thinking just have somebody fun with ideas and then maybe puts less pressure on you when you’re actually writing and what I also encourage you to is you know if you have an idea sometimes when you’re looking at that blank sheet of paper let that open word doc and maybe you don’t have any confidence in your ideas one piece of advice I got that’s been very helpful is throwout you put your worst idea implement your worst idea right and people just go ahead write it if it’s a class subclass whatever go ahead and start writing it and then ask yourself why is this idea bad and that might start giving you some insight into what a good idea could look like and in any case like a I’m gonna tell you it’s you know to be honest II I I am where I am because I’ve had a bajillion bad ideas we don’t get to the ones that work unless we’ve gone through plenty that don’t so don’t let that intimidate you now I know that’s easy for me to say it might be harder for you to live if you haven’t sort of been to that before but uh that’s just my my sort of encouragement is don’t let today’s failures undermine tomorrow success so anyways it’s been great I will see you all next week now I’m gonna get Gary Khan next week but we’ll still have our episode as normal and we’ll still we shouldn’t have any interruption due to Gary Khan but if you are at Gary Khan next week I’ll be arriving on Wednesday so we’ll have one more person before then but be sure to hit me up say hi I can sign a book or just chat game design and next week depending what I’ll probably good by the end of the week is figure out if I’m gonna show up with another written up one what I think I want to do too is write up the giant and show that off and finish up the Acrobat and maybe if I’m feeling really ambitious we’ll have another new one to show off but yeah so thanks a lot everyone I will see you all next week

Getting ready to go live with the Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour in about 10 minutes. This week – a little more on the giant soul sorcerer, and a new subclass. Trying something a bit different this week – I did the work ahead of time. https://t.co/kJy7uCt97O

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) February 27, 2018

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Order Domain Cleric subclass and Giant Soul Sorcerer pt3 – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

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