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[5E] A Touch More Class: 9 More Classes for 5th Edition $9.99
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[5E] A Touch More Class: 9 More Classes for 5th Edition
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[5E] A Touch More Class: 9 More Classes for 5th Edition
Publisher: EN Publishing
by Thony D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/16/2021 06:05:29

I helped kickstart both this and the original 'Touch of Class' document when they were revealed. The classes within her certainly interesting and fun, but are lacking in some key places that makes this hard to recomend. I wouldn't call any of them outright bad, but there's some small hiccups one might need to wrap their head around.

My personaly favorite class of the bunch, the Bloodweaver, has some fascinating choices. The classes uses 'Resevoir Points', points a replacement for spell slots. Instead of using spells, it uses its own thing called disciplines, which are the Bloodweaver's form of spells. They're very, very powerful. I wouldn't say the power level is all over the place, but I would say the level of a discipline is probably about +2 levels stronger than a spell of the same 'level' (the available blood disciplines go from 1-5). These powers are, at higher levels, total nukes that can obliterate battlefields and towns. The way they balance this is by making the class have few resevoir points. If a wizard used spell points instead instead of spell slots (if you're aware of that optional rule), they'd have around 120 points at level 20; a bloodweaver would have 27 resevoir. It's a valiant attempt, but I find this exasperates a problem DMs already have to face with wizards, being that this encourages the Bloodweaver to save all their points until the boss fight or else risk having little to do against the boss, meaning they aren't doing the fun things they picked the class to do until the end of the dungeon. In a game with the normal amount of fights a day, a low level Bloodweaver will run out of power fast, and some of the higher level abilities are all or nothing endeavors. If the target succeeds their saving throw, a lot of disciplines just don't do anything and your resevoir is drained anyway, vs most damage dealing spells at least doing half damage on a failed save. Lower level disciplines don't suffer this problem so much, but at around 10th level you naturally want to use the cool abilities, of which you'll be able to use twice, at best.

Aside from that, the class can gain regain a resevoir point by spending a hit dice. They get 1 resevoir for this, but can only do this a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus before needing to do a long rest to do it agains (of which you'll only get half your class's level in hit dice back). This is an incredibly low amount that would narely be enough to cast 3rd level disciplines in the best case scenario of having a proficiency bonus of +6. Resevoir is regained to your maximum as well, of course, when you finish a long rest, but I find the hit-dice based system so small it's hardly worth bothering.

On that note, a weird quirk of the class is that you can only spend a certain amount of resevoir to activate a discipline. You can only spend resevoir up to half your class level, rounded up. At level 10, then, you can spend 5 points. Despite all being 3rd level disciplines, though, 4 of them are completely unusable to you because you can only spend 5 points when certain 3rd level discimplines require 6. I find this restriction incredibly odd given most of these powers don't seem that much strong than the others, again due to that 'all or nothing' nature of most of them. Don't get me wrong; they are powerful, in theory. But if they fail, they fail hard. This is made stranger by a lot of discimplines having the cost of being able to target a second creature with many discimplines locked behind the activation of spending most than half the intial cost. But you can't spend those points because you're not high enough level, and by the time you are you could spend those points to turn into a cloud of acid that takes half damage and melts a whole battlefield, or some other amazing thing. Why would you bother? Each level of discimpline blows the last out of the water spectacularly, with the cheapness of 1st level discimplines being their big saving grace. Everything else is a bit wishy washy in terms of cost and what happens if you fail to cast some potent blood magic. I also feel some costs are strange, as the healing spell costs 1 resevoir to heal 1d10+your constitution modifier and then 1 point for an additional 1d10. Meanwhile, another ability of the same level ends a condition (blinded, deafened, paralyzed, or poisoned) for 2 points, but can end another condition as well for 10 points. A later ability can end all those conditions at once for 5 points. Maybe I'm just not usiong the monster manual correctly, but I've never had a player have more than 2 of those conditions on them at once, and the randomness of dice usually ends the conditions quickly.

Finally, perhaps most frustrating, is the class has a limited about of disciplines they can know, almost no qay to change them. It seems a strange oversight, but you have to change a whole cantrip level ability in order to be able to swap around disciplines as these cantrips are prerequisites to what disciplines you can pick. Fairly, perhaps, you're locked out of certain paths if you don't pick the right one. But the utter lack of a way to change otherwise, not even on a level up, seems strange given just how few the class learns. By the time you've picked you've likely settled on your paths if you go RAW. I persoanlly allow players to just change out which ones they know (except for the cantrip ones) on a long rest. I prefer versatility, and one flavor of nuke doesn't change too much of another when they need to have it prepared in advance anyway and can only do it so many times.

Expect to deal with weirdness like that for every class. Do I think this is worth 10 bucks? I think so. But you might have to change a lot of things, or prepare to scratch your head a few times.



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[3 of 5 Stars!]
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