I did update the salute to include disadvantage to the enemy and extend the duration to the start of your next turn, because that is a solid improvement that’s probably necessary, but the DC is staying wisdom based. The Pugilist as it is only cares about Strength and Constitution, which is insanely focused compared to just about every other class which usually has at least three stats to be concerned about, counting constitution, or more in some cases (looking at you Monks and Warlocks). Wisdom being the primary DC for the abilities might be less powerful compared to other pugilist archetypes, but it does help bring the class itself more in line with other classes in terms of ability balance.
It might be a bit presumptuous to double-post for this, but hey guys, I launched a patreon so that maybe I could one day get enough support to do this kind of work more regularly, rather than just in my off time! Go check it out, link is in the OP and also right here!
There’s been a number of improvements made in the past few days with inspiration from my two new patrons and the RetroFeed discord. A few racial abilities have been modified, there’s now a force-feeding action for those who want to try and feed people without using weird abilities, and the PHB races have some optional fatty abilities, among other things. Probably the thing I’m most excited about is the insanity that is the Arc Carver, our first artifact weapon of the document.
May I ask if there is a change log or something? ^^
Also! Is there a good place to do some potential critics/giving ideas? I really like the ruleset so far and would be happy to potentially help with it ^^
There is unfortunately not a specific edit by edit changelog, especially because a lot of small edits come in just from me poring over the contents of the book and going ‘that’s wrong, let me correct that’ or ‘that should probably be changed.’ and just doing it without necessarily writing it down. The closest thing to a changelog is me telling people what I’ve changed.
As for places for giving ideas; I’m relatively active in the RetroFeed discord, and of course my personal discord channel for patrons gets priority when it comes to potential ideas, even if it is currently only two people.
Those are conveniently also the most likely places I will post the small changes I make at any given moment as well.
Important update for today:
DRAGONS!
Three new types of expansive dragons, all the way from Ancient down to Wyrmling, have been added to the document. Also a quick update to the way that Enchanted Treats works for the Hedonism domain cleric to make it more in line with a special weird cleric version of arcane recovery.
Also new this morning now that I’ve woken up and put some additional work in I thought of last night: Myomancy Tradition for wizards, for those of you who want to suddenly at 2nd level go from noodle-armed magic nerd to the mighty muscle wizard.
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Magnificent! As always, your efforts astonish and amaze! I am particularly pleased by the inclusion of appropriate diseases; such mechanisms are always sadly underused.
We used your rules in our open world server which also had a main campaign. There are a few comments I would like to make regarding balance and content based on my experience.
-Overall it is a lot of fun and most of the mechanics are not game breaking
There are some major issues with Blood Hunter mostly dealing with Order of the Sin Eater, which my DM mercifully allowed me to switch from.
- The Remove Curse is just not worth it…Other classes get better versions of the same spell with no consequences and the minute cast time for a complex ritual mid-combat makes it 10 turns of nap time assuming the ritual isn’t interrupted. The 1/2 damage from blood curse amplification and rite activation is not all that great and resistance to curses is so situational that it might never even come into play depending on the DM. Blood Hunters are never support roles mostly for lore reasons so I think it’s interesting to try and give them some support archetype. I just think Sin Eater needs some major reworking. I switch to Order of the Profane Soul and never looked back.
-Blood Hunters no longer use wisdom for anything spell casting related. It should be changed to intelligence.
-Some of the Vigilante payloads are incredibly broken. lol
Well for one, Sin Eating is not meant to be an in-combat thing. It’s got a minute casting time for a reason. It’s meant to be a roleplaying tool, the ability to remove curses from items and individuals, including your party members, which can open new doors because no-one actually keeps remove curse prepared most days, and which also empowers you for any future combats you might have after doing so. Sin Eating in most settings is a very complicated process that takes time no matter which variety of it you’ve got, which is why the one time you actually -do- get to eat sin quickly, when you get the sin magnet ability, it comes with some complications.
That said, for campaigns where your GM isn’t willing to work with your archetype and provide you plenty of curses to make you feel like the curse-breaking investigator of the paranormal that you are, I’ve also added Greater Restoration to the Sin Eating options so you can use it on more traditional debilitating effects like petrification. I’ve also given it a damage increase on its crimson rites for the duration as some additional benefit for using it. I’ve also corrected everything from Wisdom to Intelligence in line with the update to the Blood Hunter core class.
As far as the Vigilante goes, I’ve got zero playtest information on them, so just saying that doesn’t really help anything without any specific experiential information for me to go off of and make changes from.
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I do like some of the changes you made. My only concern picking the subclass would be gaining to being hindered rather quickly, especially if you’re playing a dexterity based BH and not strength. Perhaps to offset some of the gain, have the rite damage dealt while empowered come off of you when dealt to an enemy or some other mechanic? Otherwise a BH using mostly dexterity will find themselves hindered after 2-4 uses of the ability, ignoring everything else they could possibly gain from.
The new Blood Curse is pretty interesting, however I’m not a massive fan of the way the damage output is done (Also it is written as an action, while every other BC is a bonus action or reaction). Something about it having a fixed damage output throws me off. I think its partly do with most Blood Curses having X effect in addition to damage when there is a save involved and not the other way around. With this curse at level 7 and a +3 intelligence mod your risking coming away doing 5 damage and using up one of two blood curses. Plus most blood hunters with high intelligence are probable going into Profane Soul for the benefit to casting.
I understand that the stun is quite powerful but maybe instead of having the target pass the spell save and just not be stunned maybe have the curse cause fear (in line with the wisdom save) for the turn and on a failed save continue along with +2d hemocraft die rolls when cast for damage/gaining. Amplify could cause damage on continued failed saves maybe? Otherwise I think the Sin Eater needs to give some more benefits to putting points in intelligence because at level 3 and level 7 you’re essentially getting a few spells vs something like Profane Soul which gets access to cantrips and level 1 Warlock spells to benefit from that intelligence.
Thanks for reply though, regardless of any of my opinion you want to take into account. I wish the server I played on wasn’t killed by the owner.
Thank you for pointing out more things that have changed about the blood hunter since I wrote the archetype. When the archetype was made half of the blood curses did require an Action.
As far as the effect of the blood curse itself; consider the blood curse of binding. It is an equally all-or-nothing save, and the real effect of penance is the stun, the damage is an added bonus. Penance gets a bit more power due to being order restricted, but both of them are debilitating curses that either work or don’t, and the amplifies are similarly equivalent, with one allowing you to affect one target continuously and the other affecting a group of targets at once. Add on to that the extra power that comes from forcing evil targets to make the save at disadvantage, and it sits pretty solidly as a decent blood curse for an order ability. Also saying that every blood hunter with decent intelligence is going to play a Profane Soul is a bit disingenuous, considering every Hunter I’ve ever played and any of the people I’ve gamed with have played have had a decent Wisdom (Which was the mental stat of the hunter at the time) and not one of us has ever played a Profane Soul (I do intend to eventually, all of the hunter orders are great, Profane soul is just the least interesting of a bunch of interesting options. It’s your standard caster archetype like the Eldritch Knight or Arcane Trickster. You get spells, so the general archetype abilities are just less interesting in that case, as is usual.)
As far as the weight limits; I did add the option to lose an equivalent amount of weight to the rite of flesh, but that won’t be a massive dent in your waistline, and that is the danger of playing a dex blood hunter as opposed to a strength hunter. Dex based classes have a somewhat harder time managing weight in this system in general, which is part of the toolkit of a GM to provide challenges to the players. The other option of course is that you’re playing in a party of other people and hopefully someone will have something to help you manage your weight. I did tone down the weight gain a bit by changing it from 1d100 to 10d6. But while that means you’ll get less occasional massive weight spikes, you will be more consistently gaining a decent chunk of weight every time you use the ability. Which seems appropriate, only gaining a few pounds when sin eating seems like a rarer occurance.
Also, check out the RetroFeed discord, they have a thread here in this projects forum. That’s the one I’m currently active on, and where most of my development that isn’t specific to my Patreon ends up being talked about. For someone interested in Blood Hunters, there’s also currently a non-ExpanDnD blood hunter archetype that I’ve worked on under my more general public face identity that I posted there recently based on the Hunters of Bloodborne.
Speaking of Development: New stuff for Warlocks and Monks! The way of the Myo-Oni for those of you who want to be a martial arts movie villain and the Great Ooze Patron and the Pact of the Feast for Warlocks with a penchant for stuffing people. I’m gonna need a second page for the table of contents soon.
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Love the new content, lots of the people in my group are looking forward to those new Warlock subclasses!
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Thanks for taking the time to read my feedback and being so responsive! I do like the subclass a lot more now and it seems like a much more viable option. Also I think if you roll Profane Soul you’d be surprised by some of the insane things you can do…Taking polearm mastery and then having access to stuff like Eldritch Blast, Misty Step and Mirror Image, plus the added benefit of using your melee attack as spell hit is brutal lol, especially if you slap sentinel on there as well. The added benefit to multiclassing with Warlock is pretty cool as well however it require you to have the prerequisite charisma level to do so which is then pretty useless afterwards in a class where you’re already spreading your ability points out thinly.
Edit: I especially like the 10d6 change as in my tenure as a Sin Eater I managed to roll a 99 and a 96 the two times I used the ability XD. Even 10d10 would have been fair as statistically it decreases that chance to get a massive swing by a pretty decent amount. The trade off being that you’d have a min gain of 10 pounds unless you wanted to really get technical and make it 11d10-10.
Hey Storymaker! I just made a little discovery in the rule set. In the dragons, specifically in their Breaths DC who are strange. By that I mean in therm of DC to beat for their age category.
Lypomantic : For all ages, their Breath DC is the same, meaning DC 24 Dex save. (Using a red dragon base saves being 13, 17, 22, 25)
Myomantic : The Ancient and Adult are fine, but for the Young and Wyrmling their breaths are the same DC as the Adult one.
Nexious : They are fine there, the thing scale normally :3
That all, sorry if it’s bother you, a simpler remark I realize while planning for my campaign ^^
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Thank you for noticing that, I’ve corrected the DCs on the dragons.
Also, for everyone; there’s a couple of new things in the document, including a feat to allow for everyone to attempt to eat creatures whole and a bunch of new stuff in the workshop for DMs to make use of, including Epic Boons tailored to this system.
This has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here. The main document is approaching the total length of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and is about half the length of the actual Player’s Handbook, and all of that is without any of the massive chapters and pages of lore and description that go into either of those books. The thing is massive.
Which means it’s time to create some other books to keep from having to add to much more to it.
Here are three new books, each with a focus on a particular sub-genre kink of the system. There’s not too terribly much there at the moment, but right now each one does have an optional system for the game included, as well as at least one new Archetype, and a handful of new Fatty Racial abilities for the official DnD races. These links will also be added to the OP.
Atha’s Grimoire of Gains is focused on Weight Loss and Muscle Growth
The Apocrypha of Letidýra is focused on Slob and Corruption content.
And Avenice’s Archive is focused on Inflation content.
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Well I’m excited to check each one of these out
Came to the realization today after doing some fun build math that, realism be damned, the current rules for increasing size category and stomach capacity and exercise make anything large damn hard to stuff, and anything huge nigh impossible.
To that end, I’ve reduced the increase in stomach capacity and exercise points received to just x2 per size category over medium rather than x4. This means you’ve actually got a shot at stuffing large creatures to death, and huge creatures are just really hard rather than functionally impossible, with stomach capacities in the 40-70 range rather than the 100-200+ range.
Is it less realistic comparatively, especially when bulk limit calculations with size are staying the same? Absolutely. Is it more feasible now to actually be a danger with food-based archetypes and attacks against larger creatures? Also yes, and I feel that’s more important.
We’re already working in a completely unrealistic food system that focuses on weight rather than volume anyway, let’s at least make sure it’s mechanically balanced since we can’t make it appropriately realistic.
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