Inspiration and Building on Past Design
What makes good homebrew? What inspires it? The answers to these questions vary. It is my personal philosophy that, regardless of what the ghouls in marketing say, good homebrew is justified by your wanting its existence. That being said, when designing homebrew, it can be helpful to have a starting point in mind. Is it inspired mechanically by a certain playstyle that you’d like to see represented in the game? Perhaps it instead comes from a character cliche (and I use this word lovingly) that you’d like to model a character after, or maybe you even had a specific character in mind? Whatever your source for inspiration, keeping it at the forefront of your design will help you attain that vision without distraction or deviance.
I was in the shower when I thought of the Athlete (yes, the Sewerman does, in fact, have hygiene standards). More specifically, I was thinking on the Champion’s Remarkable Athlete and the Thief’s Second-Story Work features. The intention behind these features is fairly clear: mechanically, create a character that can move more freely around the environment than others, and flavorfully, reference the character’s exceptional athletic skill and fitness. That’s all well and good; great, actually. Clear, concise inspiration. The problem is that these features don’t really achieve what they set out to do.
Adding up to a maximum of 5 feet in jump distance is, uh, underwhelming to say the least. Jump is a first level spell that triples your jump distance. In all cases, not just with running starts. So yeah, martial characters yet again getting the short end of the stick. But Trent! I hear you, yes you, the reader whispering into my ear. These features do more than just adding jump distance! Sure. I guess. If you’re a fighter, you get half-proficiency with skills that you should already have proficiency with. Rogue? Have some legally-distinct climbing speed. It must be my goddamn birthday.
But again, I really like the intention behind these features. So what went wrong? Honestly, they’re simply too underwhelming, and the archetypes don’t build on them to create a playstyle for the subclass as a whole to use. There’s a lot of potential here. So much so I think you can make an entire subclass around it. So I did. Let’s first cover the definitive and indisputably best method for creating subclasses, and then I’ll tell you why Athlete and indeed all of my ideas are perfect.
The Definitive and Indisputably Best Method for Creating Subclasses
This isn’t an exact science. Many archetypes may deviate from this system to accomplish a specific task. That’s ok. This is a guideline to help get a design off the ground and an exercise to get you thinking: why am I putting this feature here? Additionally, there is some overlapping territory between these feature types. It depends on the class spine as to what fits in where; some subclasses get their last feature at 14th, and some at 20th. Some subclasses get features at five different levels, and some at only three. It just depends on what relative position the ability falls in as compared to the rest of the features of a subclass. A capstone always comes last, for instance. That all being said, a subclass should generally follow these guidelines:
Beginning inspiration: What flavor or play style inspired your subclass? Why does it exist? Jot some ideas down pertaining to your inspiration. Perhaps gather some characters from other games and stories for reference, and use them to help build your vision. Whatever the inspiration is, your design has to begin here.
The Foundation (1st-3rd level): Your first features in designing a subclass should make the character that you envisioned come to life as soon as a player chooses your subclass. These features will be built upon as the subclass progresses, so make sure it's something with a lot of potential to be iterated on! Granted, you’re still in tier 1 of play, still fighting goblins and bandits. So you don’t necessarily need your most powerful feature here - just your most important one. Ask yourself this, of each of the ideas floating around your design, which are necessary for the character to function as intended? Take those, balance them appropriately, and create the foundation that we will build upon in coming levels.
The Deadzone (4th-5th level): Don’t put features here. This is for Ability Scores and Extra Attack or 3rd-Level Magic in the class spine. That is plenty for tier 1 of play, and we won’t be getting back to subclass goodness until 6th level. Even Artificers, though they technically get archetype features at 5th, only get Extra Attack or a magic buff, just in the subclass instead of the spine. Because artificers, I guess.
The Homerun (6th-10th level): Now comes the good stuff. Not that the other stuff wasn’t good, but you know what I mean. Generally, if you can’t fit your most interesting or powerful feature into the beginning of an archetype, you should usually give it by 10th level or so (the end of tier 2 play). Most campaigns won't progress past this point, so it’s important to make a character feel powerful by the end of their likely journey to about 10th-through-12th level. These features should be what most players aspire to. A flavor and mechanical homerun to spice up the end of a campaign.
The Ribbon (10th-15th level): Welcome to the island of misfit features. The features here aren’t bad, inappropriate, or uninteresting. They just don’t quite fit in anywhere else. The reality is that most campaigns will either never reach these levels or begin past them, so don’t put your most important stuff here. This is the time to give a nice interesting flavorful social feature, or maybe a simple but useful little buff to something already given.
The Capstone (14th-20th level): Now, we’re building to the final tier of play. Most people won’t use this. These features are oftentimes used to capture the player’s imagination of what their character could become. That means your feature has to pop from just a readthrough, no play required. These features, also called capstones, don’t have to be complicated, though they certainly can be. What they have to be is big, bold, and in-your-face. They shouldn’t be game-breaking, but they can justifiably come pretty close. Everything at tier 4 is nutty, so it’s tough to really break the boundaries here. Push the rules to their limits and make this do something that no other feature could.
The Athlete
The Beginning Features
So, with that being said, how does the Athlete begin? It may be a bit of a cliche at this point, but I’m a huge fan of starting off subclasses with at least two features at 3rd. Now, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes a beginning feature is plenty complex enough, and all you really need is the one. That is most certainly not the case with the Athlete, however, as it gets a sort of smorgasbord of tasty abilities to begin with.
Obvious bonus proficiency in Athletics aside, you begin with a feature that increases damage potential with Charging Strike. This keeps in the pattern established by Fighter archetypes, providing a small buff to damage at 3rd level. Generally, when creating an archetype, you should look for these patterns and only deviate when necessary, but I digress. Charging Strike allows you to add your Strength modifier twice to a weapon attack (instead of once), provided that you move 10 feet straight towards a creature before attacking. This isn’t a huge damage buff by any means, but it's a consistent 3-5 damage or so for your attacks assuming you are playing to the archetype’s strengths. More on that later.
Next, we have Superior Athlete. This feature essentially encapsulates everything that I wish Remarkable Athlete and Second-Story work could have been. First off, climbing and swimming costs you no extra movement. I decided not to outright give a climb speed to the archetype, as climb speed means you can cling to walls. This guy certainly can’t just stick to ceilings. Aside from that, we have no room for fooling around with adding 3-5 feet to jump distance. As I said, not impactful enough. Let’s just flat double jump distance and call it a day. Finally, for the cherry on top, you can use the Dash action as a bonus action, a sort of mini Cunning Action for fighters. This should help you really put the swimming and climbing, jump distance, and Charging Strike to good use, so I think it's a nice useful feature to tie the archetype’s playstyle together at early levels.
Next at 7th, we have Practiced Technique. Nothing crazy here, we simply raise the floor for Athletes on Athletics rolls. Fighters are weird and get a lot of features, so we can still get some foundational stuff late at 7th and push back our home run feature to 10th. I figure that while an Athlete can always fail a check, it’s never simply going to fall flat on its face, more just underperform. Thus, a raised floor fleshes out the character’s competencies. We originally gave the Athlete expertise in Athletics, but we found that to be much too powerful. Not only does expertise raise the floor of skill checks, it also raises the ceiling. During playtesting, we were consistently rolling above 30 for Athletics checks. It all felt a bit much, so we decided on this iteration instead. (This feature also doubles the range of thrown weapons. Have fun, kids.)
The Homerun Feature - Unstoppable Path
This brings us to the Athlete’s most interesting feature, Unstoppable Path at 10th level. Remember dashing as a bonus action? Well, here’s the true payoff. With the foundation laid by previous features, we have a very mobile fighter. However, our Athlete is hindered by creatures standing in his way. Unfortunately, shoving a creature requires a whole action. Those are pretty hard to come by. Thus, we can make the Athlete’s movement around the battlefield even more efficient still. By dashing, the Athlete can now attempt to knock a creature prone and out of its way by simply attempting to move through that creature’s space and rolling a contested Athletics check. This was originally absurd with expertise, and still very strong with Practiced Technique. This feature solved the issue of creatures standing in our way, and also gave our Athlete an additional offensive buff in the ability to knock creatures prone, granting advantage on melee attacks against that creature.
As with any ability that alters the action economy, this is a powerful ability indeed, meaning it needs some limiters. Mainly, you can only do this once per turn, and once you try it against a creature that creature is immune if it succeeds its check against you. Neither of these limiters were in the original incarnation of the feature. As innocuous as shoving a creature is, it turns out things in 5e are usually an action for a reason, and completely getting rid of that limitation tends to leave the game in a warped state. Always keep the action economy in mind, designers. This feature is also limited by the size of the creature that you are trying to shove. You’re probably medium. That means a large creature is gonna be much larger than you, by about 4 times. It’s certainly a doable task on the part of the Athlete, but it shouldn’t be easy, hence the disadvantage on your Athletics check. Trying to shove a huge or large creature? Sorry. I love stories about suplexing the 2-ton ancient dragon as much as the next guy, but I can only suspend my disbelief so much. Maybe that’s just a me thing.
I really like this feature. It feels like a sort of flagship feature that builds upon the solid foundation of the archetype’s starting features.
The Ribbon and the Capstone
Anyhoo, next comes the 15th-level feature Vigorous Wind. A play off of Second Wind from the fighter’s spine, Vigorous allows you to use second wind twice before completing a rest and doubles your movement speed when you do so. So, nothing fancy, but a little bit of extra survivability and the elimination of competition between your bonus actions. I also quite like the flavor of an Athlete having a bit extra gas in the tank compared to the average fighter, almost like a ‘runner’s high’ at the end of a race. Overall, a nice, simple, and useful ability for the penultimate feature.
Finally, our capstone is similarly simple: our Athlete’s Strength grows by 4 to a maximum of 24. I’ll openly admit, this is not a very flashy capstone, especially by my standards. I like my capstones to be the things of dreams. You should want to pick my subclass for your 20th level one-shot because the capstone captures your interest - it allows you to do something no other feature would. Now, that being said, this capstone is flashy to some and not to others, and I’m ok with that. Number crunchers will love it, other players maybe not so much. It’s just as powerful either way, granting you more damage and emboldening your jump distance, Athletics checks, and Charging Strike feature: the power and synergy is here.
Final Thoughts
All in all, I hope this article was helpful in highlighting the process I take to designing a subclass, as well as in showing why I made certain choices in the creation of the Athlete. Please, let me know how you feel about this system; do you follow a similar skeleton? Why or why not? Anyhoo, that’s all from me. Until next time,
- Trent the Sewerman
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