somanyrobots.com
I make stuff for 5E!
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249 posts
371 followers
167 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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Art's expensive, but paying (well) for art is an easy decision to make. At the end of the day, if I've overpaid for art - I've subsidized the creation of art. That's awesome. Even if my business is a total failure, if I've caused Art to get created, I'm happy.
8/8
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Generally when I need to onboard a new artist, I start with a self-contained project, something not wildly important, and we'll do it more carefully. I've only been fully ripped off once, though a couple artists have had unsuitable styles or otherwise not worked out.
7/8
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A few other factors: I keep a spreadsheet about art demographics, to try and make sure we have decent representation (a lot of artists will unintentionally gravitate to painting a lot of white dudes). I share artists' work around - e.g. for Atxayotls, I needed everyone to have a common idea.
6/8
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Okay, so actual art process: I need to illustrate subclass A. I dream up a scene for it, run it by one of the artists I work with. Generally I give artists very wide latitude to interpret a brief. They deliver a sketch or two, I approve a sketch, then they're off.
5/8
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For D&D there's a great loophole, which is WotC's Fan Content Policy. While it's a bit pernicious, the ability to legally use MtG art for illustrating stuff is a *huge* boon. Good job, WotC!
4/8
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One thing I feel very passionately about: I am *absolutely* against AI "art". If you're using it noncommercially, at your own table, in private - alright, fine, do whatever you like. (It's in poor taste, but it's not immediately hurting anyone). But in any project for public consumption, veto.
3/8
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Art is honestly one of the biggest hurdles to getting started on really designing content - finding artists is hard, learning how to art-direct is hard, and of course, art is expensive! The biggest expense category for Spellbound Sea, by a good margin, is payments to artists. As it should be!
2/8
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The rules have been playtested *heavily* and refined a lot - I haven't had to mess with the bones too much, but lots and lots of tweaking. I think they're in a great spot! (Obviously). If you like big boats and you cannot lie, this is for you!
spellbound-sea.backe...
7/7
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The idea I'm proudest of is the simplest one: voyage legs. Instead of tracking voyages and rolling encounters day-by-day, you only care about when interesting stuff happens. So you get an actual system for handwaving the boring time.
6/7
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I wanted to stick to basically-similar rules - ships behave like creatures, with actions and movement. I wanted to avoid overcomplexity - too much tracking is bad. And I wanted to give players meaningful stuff to do. Existing seafaring rulesets, IMO, all have 1 or more of those issues.
5/7
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WotC's rules are very hard to use effectively, but they're a good starting point. And that's where the Seafarer's Manual started! Years ago, when Saltmarsh first came out, my rules started as an expansion/refinement of WotC's. Revisiting them in 2024, though, I trimmed and polished *heavily*.
4/7
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WotC released their own rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and they're...pretty bad, tbh. They're the sort of thing that clearly was tossed off quickly and not really playtested. Math that doesn't make sense, an almost-useless Surgeon officer role, anti-integration with the magic system.
3/7
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First: seafaring rules aren't *essential*, but they are important. It's lame when your game has long-distance travel that you just handwave past. If it happens 1 or 2 times, that's fine, but any game in an oceanic setting, or involving PC pirates or sailors, really needs them.
2/7
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So that's the idea: pay attention to how a feature interacts with *everything*. Different classes, different build paths, different levels of optimization. A cool feature that's not usable isn't a cool feature; and if that happens to a species's key identity feature, it's a big loss.
9/9
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Today's thread isn't just for ragging on WotC, though. Hammering Horns *sounds* good. It might have been good in the version of the game WotC originally envisioned, where bonus actions were rarer and not key for optimization. But put in the game everyone plays, the feature just doesn't work.
8/9
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The bonus damage keeps it competitive with your other actions, especially since it scales. 15' knockback and prone is much more effective control. And, because it's strong, it has a fairly tight usage limit. Now you can open 3 fights each day by absolutely givin' 'em the horns.
7/9
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Minotaurs are cool, though, so Spellbound Sea includes a new minotaur species. Hammering Horns (and Goring Rush) gets replaced with a new ability, Goring Charge. 1/SR After a Dash, you can make a special attack, which does scaling bonus damage, 15' shove, and knocks prone.
6/9
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So the most evocative and important species feature is *almost* never going to see use. Every now and then maybe a fighter will Hammering Horns instead of doing a PAM attack, or something, but for the most part, the smart way to play a minotaur is to avoid doing minotaur things.
5/9
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It costs a bonus action. Which means it's virtually unusable for classes with lots of *other* bonus actions (monks and rogues, sometimes rangers). It's strictly tied to melee attacks, so won't see much use by backliners. And once a martial gets a feat or two, they have better uses for that BA.
4/9
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Hammering Horns lets you make a bonus-action shove after you hit an enemy. Not a grapple, just a shove. This is, in theory, pretty nice - a 10' shove is situational but can be useful. And it's always-on, no resource cost, no constraints. But...wait. It costs a bonus action, right?
3/9
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WotC released a minotaur species as part of their Ravnica book, and made extremely minor tweaks to it for Monsters of the Multiverse. It's never been good - underpowered and not particularly evocative of a fearsomely powerful cow-brute. Let's focus on its Hammering Horns feature.
2/9
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Similar to options-menus in a subclass, modular and choice-based species features help you cover more themes and cater to more player ideas without dramatically increasing the amount of *stuff* you have to write.
spellbound-sea.backe...
7/7
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Some people don't like the choice because it slows down play, but this is misguided. There's a difference between turn-by-turn choice, day-by-day choice, and one-time choice. Species options are a one-time choice, something you consider during char creation and never again.
6/7
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There are downsides to modularity. It's a *lot* of options - I haven't playtested every Serpent's Children combo, let alone all 72 Bloodrager ones. And if the features aren't each chunky enough, then it can lack meaning; it should feel like baking a cake, not just pouring sprinkles on top.
5/7
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That customization isn't necessarily needed. In particular, I think every Serpent's Child I've seen to date has chosen the snake legs - clearly seems to be the coolest form. But the choice helps the species represent a lot of ideas, especially since "mutation" is core to the theme.
4/7
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Serpent's Children can choose one Form (snake-legs, snake-head, basically-human), and two Heritage options (9 options, from "more poison" to "talk to snakes" to "shed your skin at will"). It provides a lot of customization while coloring within the snaky lines.
3/7
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Serpent's Children are inspired by WotC's yuan-ti, but a) not horrifically unbalanced, and b) going *hard* on the "snake-mutant" idea. (If you're going to put snake-people in your game, they need snake legs.)
2/7
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Note that this *can* fall down for games that tinker heavily with rest pacing though. If there aren't enough encounters, full casters generally go full-throttle all the time and look way too strong, and that gets amplified for the Stormborne.
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8/8
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So that's a quick design idea: make the player do what they should be doing anyway. Nudge them to play the game in the way that'll be the most fun.
(Another sub, the Circle of Swarms, similarly triggers its key feature anytime you cast a leveled spell.)
7/8
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In fact, having a feature that incentivizes burning slots I think makes for a more fun sorcerer. Compare to the classic potion-hoarding phenomenon, where you never drink potions because they might be handy later — some players stick to cantrips even when they really *should* cast real spells.
6/8
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This is one of the subs I've playtested directly, as a PC (playing it tonight in fact!). And rather than feeling stressed about my burn rate, I think it hits the spot as a cute little minigame to manage on top of your normal combat loop.
5/8
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But at the risk of being obvious: you're a sorcerer. Spending spell slots is what you *want* to be doing, so you're almost never sad when you're doing it. You spend some turns casting 1st-level spells when you might otherwise cantrip, or sacking a sorc point, but past level 3 or so it's smooth.
4/8
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This is expensive - to get the most out of your subclass, you want to burn a spell slot or a sorcery point almost every round. A couple of early readers and testers were concerned it'd run too hot and tear through all its spell slots really fast.
3/8
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Let's look at the more prosaic "how fast a character burns through their resources". Spellbound Sea includes the Stormborne Sorcerer, a replacement for WotC's Storm Sorcery. Its big feature is Gathering Storm - it gets cool benefits for continuously spending spell slots and/or sorcery points.
2/8
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Those can be functional, for sure (I mentioned my Fencer up above, which can force AoO's to miss). It can be tricky to write those "force the enemy to attack me" features without them feeling too videogamey, though - I think softer taunts generally work better in TTRPGs.
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For a really narrative game, I could see a taunt mechanic going either way - it might take too much from the storytelling, or it could help keep combat breezy and light on rules
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That is neat! Most hard taunts I find stretch believability too much (though tons of GMs do a version of your aggro math in their heads)
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I worry with something like that that there's too much potential for feels-bad moments. Like when a wizard immediately loses concentration, but more so, since it's the linchpin of the subclass
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Yeah, you can draw a distinction between soft taunts like those and hard taunts (you must hit the tank). The swashbuckler gets a soft taunt, and the barbarian's reckless attack is sort of the softest taunt.
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Other answers to the tank fallacy are things like protecting allies, slowing enemies (see KibblesTasty's Warden class), or otherwise gumming up the fight. That's our design idea for today: keep the tank fallacy in mind and design to avoid it!
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10/10
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All bloodragers function as off-tanks, though they're intentionally not as durable as true barbarians. Since they get regen that kicks in at low health, they function well by getting hit at the front of the fight and backing off once they get bloodied.
9/10
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The Ruffian Swashbuckler, in the meantime, is great at proning enemies - so it can do a lot to trap enemies near it, just by knocking them down over and over. (And then builds up Panache when those enemies retaliate.)
8/10
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Another off-tank would be the Fencer I talked about the other day - it's not great at taking hits, but it can force enemies to miss their opp attacks. The Duelist Swashbuckler gets a similar feature, drawing attacks and forcing them to miss.
7/10
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Rather than making a 25 AC supertank, they can buff up allies to a limit - giving someone free proficiency-less plate, and giving the whole party an AC boost.
6/10