Talk:Beastmaster (5e Class)

Restoring the Original Flavor

I created this class a long time ago and have slowly seen it get out of hand with various edits. I love seeing people use their creativity but I've changed the class back in order to restore its original flavor. I also left my reasoning for why various aspects of the class are the way they are.

The most important thing to note is that, despite the name coming from a ranger archetype, this is not a ranger. This is a summoner/healing class. I can't see myself editing this class again so hopefully people will keep this in mind as they make their own edits in the future.

• Hit points D6: As a summoner, you’re not supposed to be made out of hit points. You are the squishy that your animal companion is protecting.
• Armor: Light and Hide Armor: You’re not supposed to be in the fray. Light and Hide was given because it makes sense thematically to wear leathers, furs, and hides.
• Weapons: Daggers, dart, slings, quarterstaffs, light crossbow, spears: Again, you’re not meant for combat. That’s what your companion is for.
• Spell-casting: It’s similar to the warlock where you have very few spell slots, cast them at a set level, and get them back at a short rest. The reason being that full spellcasting seemed too much but half casting didn't allow you to get 3rd level spells until level 10. That's a long time to go without being able to cast "Conjure Animals", a major staple for the class. The warlock spell casting system seemed a perfect workaround for this.
• No Cantrips: That’s right. That was intentional. The familiar and companion are there to help you do the things most people would use cantrips for. Many cantrips do damage as well and the beastmaster doesn’t have any damaging spells.
• No damaging spells: Again, this was intentional. With the exception of summon spells, no spells on the beastmaster spell list deal damage. You have a companion for that.
• Ritual Casting: Considering about 1/4 of the beastmasters spell list has the ritual tag, it seemed silly not to allow this.
• Spell Preparation: Due to how small your spell list is and how few spells slots you actually get, you are able to swap your spells out on a long rest.
• Evolutions: The beastmaster may only steal a number of evolution points equal to their proficiency bonus. The reason I say “steal” is because the beastmaster doesn’t get their own evolution points, they take them out of the pool that the companion uses. The more the beastmaster uses, the less their companion can use. Do keep in mind that even if the beastmaster takes a bunch of attack evolutions (such as claws, bite, stinger, etc), they still only get one attack action. The familar can also steal evolution points to use on themselves but this also gives the companion less evolution points to use.

My DM is loving this character so far and I'm glad to see others are enjoying the class as well. Now get out there and master those beasts!

-Isnt 'speak with master' for the famliar obsolet because of 'bonded souls'?

-Why start with a longbow, if you aren't proficient with it? Just put the light crossbow there.

Additions & Questions

-I think, that this class should be more "hybrid". I really liked, what you did here, you made a great class with nice abilities. But the problem is, that this class should be a little more like a ranger. Of course it shouldn´t be as strong in it´s attacks like a normal ranger, you have your companion for this. But you should at least be able to defend yourself and have some Features from the Ranger class. Therefore I made some changes, if you don´t like, feel free to take the changes back (it´s your class after all):

• Hit Points: I made this d8, thinking that this is a hybrid, it should be between spellcaster and hunter.
• Fighting Styles: You weren´t really clear at this point. Do we gain every of these benefits? Would be a little bit unfair, so I edited it to "choose 2 of them".
• Abilities: Considering this class being a hybrid (maybe my new favorite word), the beastmaster should have the original ranger feats "Favored Enemy" & "Natural Explorer". You can make great story combinations with these abilities and your companion & familiar.

For Example, I made a Pseudodragon my Familiar & a Red Dragon Wyrmling my Companion, cause in my past I´ve encountered these Enemy Types in the Mountains I´ve been traveling. I´m not quite sure, if you should have these feats as an Beastmaster, but you could think about it.

• Ability Score Improvement for Familiar & Companion: Did you want to make this Differences between the Master, Familiar & Companion? The Companion gains more Improvements than the actual class while the Familiar seems to gain nearly nothing. Of course, the Familiar isn´t fighting, but he looks to me a little bit useless, because he can´t communicate with others. So why do you have him? To bring you books in your house? He should at least have the ability to talk to your friends or send messages to them.
• Speak with Master: As been said above, this skill is totally useless, because of *Bonded Souls: I´ve changed this to "Speak with Animals of It´s Kind" & made the Level 7 Feat "Speak with others", so the Familiar is able to send messages. I also gave the familiar the Feat to lern an additional language (Level 7 Feature).

1 last question: Can your companion also be an Elemental? The Requirement is "Beast", which is not really clear to me. Could this also be an Humanoid, which is listed in the beast-table?

Beast is a type of creature. If you look under creature's stats just under the name it will tell you the size and what type it is. For example Wolf is a medium beast. Thorrmak (talk) 07:34, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

I hope, I didn´t mess the Beastmaster up to much and I also want to excuse myself for every mistake in my english writing. I made some additions and changed them back after reading your points above there. I want also to make clear, that I fully understand your setting of Abilities considering this should be a spellcaster class, but, like I said before, I think he should be a Hybrid, because your companion can´t do everything on his own (poor thing). And I hope someone reads this and gives me feedback, because I´m thinking about creating my own class and if I made mistakes to big, I would like to hear them.

Feedback

I Don't know if i'm doing this correctly but im trying to give feedback, Personally I love the changes made to the class and I like the Idea of it being a hybrid class. I thought of a way to incorporate both of these changes though, what if you were to make it an archetype, so that you could play as one or the other but still have most aspects of both of these ideas. I personally love playing striker like characters but it would be nice to be support and striker which is what I ended up making my character like with this class and its been working really well because he isnt too OP and he isnt squishy either hes a nice middle ground and my DM loves that and likes working with my character. and the magic works really well, I do agree that it needs more spell slots and I really like having no damage spells and agree that there should be no cantrips, but more spell slots would be appreciated. To wrap this up I will say I think yes it needs to be touched up on but i like the way it is and you should combine the 2 ideas

Answers to Above Questions

I'm back! And I'm here to look answer some of the above questions as well as discuss some alterations I made.

"-Isnt 'speak with master' for the famliar obsolet because of 'bonded souls'?"

You are so right. I removed 'speak with master' and changed it with something else.

"-Why start with a longbow, if you aren't proficient with it? Just put the light crossbow there."

Again, absolutely right. Nice change.

"Ability Score Improvement for Familiar & Companion: Did you want to make this Differences between the Master, Familiar & Companion?"

Yes, I did. The beastmaster gets the standard number of 5. The companion gets 6 as they are more akin to a fighter and, much like the fighter, specialize in combat. The familiar gets quite a few less as it does not specialize in combat. So what does a familiar do exactly? It has a bunch of great uses. It can offer the "help" action on its turning which gives you or your companion advantage on anything it is helping with. It can deliver touch spells such as Cure Wounds to party members when you're in battles. You can freely use Beast Sense on it in order to see through its eyes which is perfect for infiltration and stealth. You can get the Skilled feat and give it things such as perception, sleight of hand, stealth, or even something silly like medicine or religion. Beastmasters learn the spell Animal Messenger as a ritual which allows you to send a recorded message through your familiar. All depends on your imagination.

"I´ve changed this to "Speak with Animals of It´s Kind" & made the Level 7 Feat "Speak with others", so the Familiar is able to send messages."

I agree that the familiar should have a better hand in sending messages but I wasn't too keen on the familiar being able to speak directly to other people. I felt that understanding the speech of an animal should belong only to the beastmaster. However, I did make some alterations. As familiars level up, they can begin to understand languages, read languages, and even write messages. You actually already able to send verbal messages through your familiar with the Animal Messenger spell (and as a ritual to boot) but now your familiar can understand the recipient's response and relay it back to the beastmaster.

"What about a hybrid sub-class that focuses more on your character being in the fight?"

I decided to give this a shot since there were a lot of requests here. I took the original summoner abilities given at levels 3, 6, 10, 13, and 20 and turned them into a sub-class called "Path of the Friend". The other sub-class is called "Path of the Fierce" and gives you abilities such as rolling d8s instead of d6s for health, a special fighting style called "Attack Dog", and Favored Enemy: Beast. The class was far too strong when given all of these at once but having a summoner-like sub-class and a more ranger-like sub-class would work really well. Do you want to call in animals for fights or attack yourself? It's up to you! Feel free to suggest changes. I think a 3rd sub-class that focuses on Wild Shape would be super neat too.

"I hope, I didn´t mess the Beastmaster up to much and I also want to excuse myself for every mistake in my english writing. I made some additions and changed them back after reading your points above there."

Don't sweat it, man! We're all about positive energy and creating here. Your thoughtful input resulted in some pretty awesome changes. Thank you for sharing your passion for this class!

Feel Free to Delete this

I created this class for a specific character I played in a campaign with friends and figured it would be fun to share this class as it created such an unforgettable character for me.

I can absolutely see how this class could be incompatible in other campaigns. Our DM creates his own adventures so there weren't any issues with class balance when I played it as he actually loves when we use custom content and always figures out ways to keep things interesting. I would say about 90% of our character components (races, classes, backgrounds, etc) are things our table either found outside of the official source material or made up ourselves. To be honest, we've always focused a lot more on story creation and character development than nitty gritty mechanics. However, if it's causing so much grief to other players in other campaigns, feel free to delete this class.

I'm sorry to see it didn't bring you as much joy as it brought our table.