User:Guy/Class Design Guide

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What is a class?

• A way for a player-character to contribute to the party in a unique way.
• A way for a player to feel a sense of growth, by increasing level and gaining new features.
• A way to guide, but not force, a player into making the hero they want.
• A collection of features that work together to provide a unique lens to experience the world.

General Overview

The Backbone: Combat

D&D is a game designed focused on combat. Classes, magic items, and more primarily focus on enabling characters to be better at combat. For a class designed for general-use play—that is, for a class you intend to post on a wiki without appending a disclaimer—combat performance should be a main consideration.

A class's ability to contribute to the party in combat, and how a class gets better at combat, should be its foundation. A rogue's sneak attack. A barbarian's rage. A fighter's absurd number of attacks. A paladin's smite. Almost every class in 5e either has full spell slots (including warlock), or has one reliable means of doing a lot of damage.

Full casters are often unique in the number of options they have, but most have strong options for combat support—and in 5e few focus on single-target damage (inflict wounds does ~16.5 damage, which isn't that much better than a couple greatsword attacks at ~16), instead having strong options for unavoidable area-of-effect (martials wish they could fireball).

In all cases the non-optional features of an official class revolve around the class's ability to participate in combat. D&D is built with this assumption, and your class should similarly be built around a means of participating in combat. To make a truly great class, it's best if your class's backbone—its combat potential—is unique from official classes, but still balanced to stand alongside them.

Underpowered Combatant

If your class is unable to contribute in combat, the player will likely feel useless with it. Worse yet, the DM might need to lower the challenge of encounters just to compensate for the weak class. This becomes particularly notable at high levels. While the ideas of non-combat classes like the nomad are neat, D&D is not built to deal with them—and shoving them into a party is likely to hurt more than help. Even the lowly bard can do incredibly supportive things like cast vicious mockery to help protect allies, or cast faerie fire to help allies hit more often.

While the ranger is a decent official class, at high levels it falls behind the likes of fighter and others in combat. This is a significant reason it's sometimes considered underpowered, to the extent WotC themselves has remade it with buffs on multiple occasions.

We can learn from the ranger an important lesson. Your class's combat ability should scale with level. With spell slots and features like Sneak Attack this is built-in. For less structured classes like fighter, monk, or ranger this is more subtle.

Overpowered Combatant

Frankly, a homebrew class is much more likely to be overpowered than underpowered.

The biggest problem with an overpowered class is merely because D&D is meant to be a team game of cooperation. If one character snuffs out the big-bad-evil-guy in one turn, players are likely to feel things are unfair—or become disinterested.

Aside from that, the thrill of being overpowered wears off relatively quickly. RPGs are about being challenged, and finding creative solutions to those challenges. A player-character that is overpowered will, for most players, be less interesting after a game session or two. (This can of course be overcome by increasing the challenge to compensate, but in a game with multiple players and multiple classes that isn't easy to balance.)

Utility

So your class's combat ability is the backbone. For official classes these are either spell slots, or the features listed in the main class that you can't avoid taking.

Aside from "just combat" the next most important step are non-combat features central to your class's identity. A ranger's Favored Enemy, a bard's Bardic Inspiration, a rogue's Expertise, a sorcerer's Metamagic, and so on.

Ideally these identity-centric features are so vital and so useful that no one would ever want to trade them out for other features of similar power level, or forget they exist.

As an arguably bad example, some rogues seem to forget Thieves' Cant is even a thing they have. A feature this negligible is ideally an option that can be chosen if desired, like a fighting style or a spell, instead of a central feature the player is "burdened" with remembering they have.

Classes at Low Levels

A minority of campaigns reach the highest levels. Many only reach the first 5 to 10 levels, and may others are only one-shots.

Partially for this reason it's best to focus on the lowest levels first. Every official class has its foundational abilities in its first three levels: Spellcasting, Fighting Style, Sneak Attack, a subclass, and so on.

Your class should feel "complete" by 5th level. Every official class gets a Feat at 4th level, and then one big boost at 5th level: Extra Attack, Uncanny Dodge, or powerful 3rd-level spells.

Options that feel like enhancements or power boosts, but not an intrinsic part of the class, are best reserved for levels after 5th. By contrast a class should rarely if ever get a class-changing feature after 5th level.

While it's ideal to make a full class, it's not required. It's perfectly reasonable to make a homebrew class that only has ten levels, or even only five levels. Multiclassing is an option to exceed that level limit, after all. In all likelihood, focusing on only a few levels will help you make those levels the best they can be.

Level-By-Level

Level	Proficiency Bonus	Features
1st	+2	intrinsic features (1 of 2)
2nd	+2	intrinsic features (2 of 2)
3rd	+2	subclass / 2nd-level spells)
4th	+2	Feat
5th	+3	major upgrade / 3rd-level spells
6th	+3	"bluh"
7th	+3	"bluh"
8th	+3	Feat
9th	+4	"bluh"
10th	+4	"bluh"
11th	+4	major upgrade / 6th-level spells
12th	+4	Feat
13th	+5	"bluh"
14th	+5	"bluh"
15th	+5	"bluh"
16th	+5	Feat
17th	+6	capstone (1 of 2) / 9th-level spells
18th	+6	capstone (2 of 2)
19th	+6	Feat
20th	+6	Epic Boon

"Bluh" levels are traditionally slow but steady upgrades to your existing features. Even WotC has acknowledged that campaigns often drop off in the middle levels, when scaling suddenly seems sluggish. (Exp growth at these stages doesn't help either but that's a bit off the path.) If making a full 20-level class, anything you can do to spice up these levels is a good measure. If making a 10-level "half class," you can effectively replace levels 7th-to-10th with the concepts behind 17th-to-20th.

What is a subclass?

• A way for a player-character to further push their class into a specific aesthetic or archetype they wish to portray.
• A way to give a class more flavorful or supportive features that don't need to be part of the main class, or that might clash with other interpretations of the class.
• A collection of features that work together to give a unique but cohesive twist on the main class.

While a class isn't required to have subclasses, the great ones generally do. If your class has such a specific identity that subclasses are out of the question, your lens might be too narrow—the class you're thinking about might be better at a subclass.

If your class doesn't have unique features (e.g. it just borrows Extra Attack and spell slots from official classes), chances are good it could be better as a subclass. You can go pretty wild with a subclass, after all. There's no reason you can't make a sorcerer subclass that uses a completely different spell list, or one that even uses a different casting ability. Doing so would certainly be easier than making an entirely new class, and it likely would be easier for players to understand & use.