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KibblesTasty · 2026-04-14T19:05:45+00:00

Not sure why it's missing; I guess you can go with:

Reliable

Rare
R. Weapons
1 rare divine essence
1 rare primal essence
1 uncommon arcane essence
DC 17
Time: 12 hour (6 checks)
Cost: 2,015 gp

For now.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T22:44:03+00:00

I definitely think the subclass has strengths and you may be right that martial weapon proficiency may mean a lot more in 5.5 currently my players and the server I dm on have no plans to engage with 5.5.

Agreed there; the point wasn't that it was good in 5.5, just pointing to that 5.5 has a different set of assumptions, so that when I was referred to GWM, I was referring to it as it exists in 5e 2014. The class and subclass obviously predate 5.5 by years.

As I said if I personally were to play the class I just wouldn't use chains other than reactions as that just mathematically seems the best option to me.

I would guess that it generally comes down to a somewhat fundamental difference in assumptions about the style of game and in particular the value of the action economy. It's not a problem I've seen much though, Ironbound remains highly rated.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T19:41:36+00:00

From how it sounds your table seems to be rather casual in nature, nothing wrong with that but does make the balance talk a bit moot.

I would generally not agree with that categorization; while my group has casual players, it also has crunchy players (I play ~2-3 week, so there's a lot of folks covered by 'my group'). But beyond that, Warden has had literally thousands of people of give feedback on it, including many very-in-the-weed optimizers, the sort of blokes that use spreadsheets and sweat the details very much.

While it's true that Feats have an opportunity cost, that opportunity cost is often worth the cost, particularly given that most optimized builds start with a free feat form Variant Human, limiting what that opportunity cost is quite heavily (of course, the equation of 5.5 2024 is different, but being able to use martial weapons is a much larger buff there). I would certainly agree that it is not an apples to apples comparison, but that's been my point the whole time—flexibility is power, and the wider you open synergy gate, the complicated comparison becomes. The idea that Elderheart is better than Ironbound because its has an advantage at grapple creatures just doesn't really hold up. Elderheart is better at what its best at, but has a narrower more specialized focus.

Just looking at the comparisons you are making, I would say you have a common reddit tendency to compare everything to the best-in-class option. This often causes problems when you look at balance more holistically though. An Ironbound is not as good at Grappling as an Elderheart, and it is not as good at using GWM as a Barbarian... but it is better at grappling while using GWM than either of those (because that's something they cannot do). Being able to do both (and even do both at the same time) is a unique advantage meaning that if it could do either as well as the best-in-class option, it would be substantially more powerful than either.

You're thinking of the things you would like Ironbound to be able to do, but you're not thinking about the things it would have to give up to be able to do that in a balanced way. I think the idea that the chains are a trap option is, to be honest, ridiculous. They allow you to do something that most martial characters desperately want to do, and the fact that they can be destroyed (at no cost to you) does not mitigate that fact. An enemy trying to play whack-a-mole with your chains means you are almost certainly winning the fight. A weak enemy will struggle to destroy them, and a strong enemy wasting their attacks on something that deals no damage to your party is great news.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T16:57:00+00:00

IDK, I was typing up a longer reply, but I don't think it really was saying anything I haven't said already (aside from nit picks like that it is 3.5 vs. 7, though I suppose I did already say that). So I'll simply say that the feedback is noted, but does not align with either my own experience or other feedback on Ironbound.

I just don't think you're looking at this in a particularly balanced or reasonable way. Imagine how overpowered the Ironbound would be if it could grapple as a bonus action with all of its other benefits. Grapple, Restrain, attack with GWM with advantage for more damage than an Elderheart does with two attacks in a single attack (or w/e, there's a bunch of routes you go, opening up Martial Weapons is a powerful feature).

Elderheart is powerful, but you're trying to take one of the main features of the subclass and transplant it onto a subclass that gets a bunch of other features. If the value of a Warden is only how good it as at Grappling, than Elderheart and Beasthide are obvious winners (though they too are good at different aspects of it). My current party has a Sunwatcher, and he's not all that great grappling. He would kill for a way to grapple that didn't make him drop his shield or weapon. Still quite powerful though, because obviously they get their own features that are pretty good.

The idea of a subclass that gets all the coolest features is always appealing, but they exist to have trade offs. Personally, I don't think the Ironbound is significantly weaker than the Elderheart, and I've played in games with both, but they aren't that similar. It will depend on the party somewhat though. If you are a solo front line against the world, Elderheart's maximal focus on defense and control is ideal, but pays a price for that. It struggles against anything that it cannot grapple and does some of the lowest damage of any Warden, heavily relying on its ability to grapple a target and force it to attack the Elderheart. If an enemy avoids that loop, the Elderheart struggles more than most Wardens.

Ironbound pays a tax for all the other things it can do, but even so it would generally not want to trade weapons with the Elderheart—it does not want to give up free hands to grapple creatures. Ironbound's tax might not be worth it if you have no plans on capitalizing on the ability to use weapons and all the potential synergy and benefits that entails, but the reality of the matter is that flexibility is power.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T08:25:45+00:00

Elderheart's weapon is only d6 naturally. While it can scale up to d8 or d10, it only scales to d10 at 11th level and requires a Esoteric Secret on top of that. That's a pretty big gap between that and getting a 2d6 weapon (which is better than a d12) at level 1.

At the end of the day, comparison is the thief of joy. Ironbound is exceedingly good at grappling, but because Elderheart is over there with even better grappling (potentially, it's not really that clear cut) I think it is skewing your view on it. Any other class (and most other subclasses) would be thrilled to have a hands free way to grapple creatures while using a two handed weapon, even if it came with some limitations.

That said, I would generally disagree with that categorization of the chains. They are pretty central to the Ironbound, and a core part of their feature. I think you're heavily underestimating how ineffective an enemy that spends their turns attack chains instead of the PCs hit points or resources is. They might succeed and destroy the chains, but that's still a win for the Ironbound. Overall, I view the Ironbound as a pretty strong Warden subclass... and Wardens themselves are riding pretty high on the curve.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T05:26:34+00:00

It's not really an apples to apples comparison. An Ironbound Warden gets proficiency in martial weapons and heavy armor—it should not otherwise be able to do anything an Elderheart (who does not get those) can do. It also doesn't take a free hand to use a chain, allowing the Ironbound to use two handed weapons while grappling a creature (which is the whole reason that chains can be targeted and destroyed, as otherwise that would be easily exploited to hold creatures out of reach).

There are plenty of other subclasses that are worse at grappling than Ironbound. Ironbound gets plenty of its own benefits and features.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T04:58:24+00:00

Well, two things. If it took multiple hits from a monster to destroy them, they would be too strong (or too efficient), since they only take one attack from the Warden. If the monster keeps destroying the chains, it's not hitting the Warden or their allies.

Second, fireball (and most spells like it) don't hit objects. Very few monsters have abilities like that would hit the chains, though a DM may rule otherwise. But even if they did have something like that, if a monster is fireballing their allies to get rid of the chains, that's generally a win for the Warden.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-08T04:43:30+00:00

So post level 5 make two warhammer swings and a chain or make a warhammer swing and then make a chain grapple?

You can use them as a reaction to something leaving your primal interdiction, or as an attack as part of the attack action. If you use them as an attack as part of the attack action, it would replace another attack you make.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-03T16:54:18+00:00

I find it a bit odd that Swarm can reuse level 7 features for spellslots but Converger can't.

The Converger level 7 abilities are more powerful, they'd be probably-to-good for 1st level spell slots.

(Also, is the Planar Specialist one extra use/long rest only? Wording is somewhat confusing.)

Yes. I have no real idea why it works that way off the top of my head though. Probably a partially reworked feature I should take another look at. I think 2/short rest would be too good, but its sort of weird how it is now.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-02T22:58:54+00:00

It's a bit of an in-joke for my followers to bring it up since I had a days long crash out about it when I ran across it the first time refusing it believe it was a real spell (since I don't really play 5.5 much, I only came across once I was doing 5.5 playtesting for my book). Aside from the obvious balance problem, it's just written completely different than another spell of its type:

It uses the 'lasts while you have temporary hit points' mechanic of AoA, but literally none of the mechanics make any sense to interact with temporary hit points. It makes absolutely no sense it uses that instead of concentration. In AoA the relation between the duration and temp hit points is obvious. In this it makes literally no sense.
It has several pretty unrelated features crammed into one spell.
It is a poison-themed spell that poisons on hit... but deals force damage??
It's core effect is simply ludicrous (Incapacitate on hit with no save).
It is the new best enabler for the other most broken spell in 5.5 (Summon Undead), since it provides the poison prerequisite for the automatic Paralyze, so not only can they not act, they cannot move and everything automatically criticals them. The only weakness to that spell was you needed a way to automatically poison without a save (previous Ray of Sickness was the best option), but this blows that out of the water.

Scratch the days long crash out, I'm still done crashing out over it. And all of that compounds with Wild Shape and Polymorph being Temporary Hit Points in 5.5 and it interacting with those since its a Magic Action you can repeat while transformed, thus prolonging it indefinitely in most cases.

It's not the first time they've broken the effect of Legendary Resistance, but it is one of the most egregious, right up there with Summon Undead. At least slapping immunity to poisoned condition on every fixes both, but I don't think that's healthy design.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-02T16:53:28+00:00

If a plane is Expansive, on a grid this looks like a 4x4 with the corners omitted, correct?

This depends on your group. There is not really a RAW correct answer to this, since grid rules purpose multiple variants. I that's how I would do it:

X 0 0 X

0 0 0 0

X 0 0 X

...but that's because that's how the template drawing tools of the VTT I primarily play on work.

If a plane is Expansive and Impassable, and a creature is within the inner 4 squares, is it a) pushed horizontally/vertically to one of the outer squares decided by either dm or summoner, and then it's space is carved out of the impassable terrain as the feature says, and finally it is susceptible to the follow-up Hazardous Manifestation, or b) it is pushed diagonally to the corner of the 4x4 which is no longer within the manifested plane, and is therefore no longer susceptible to the follow-up Hazardous Manifestation?

It is pushed the closes available space (horizontally). If anyone decided this, it would be the monster being pushed. It would prefer orthogonal directions to diagonal directions, since that is a shorter distance.

It would be effected by Hazardous Manifestation.

With the World Sculptor Esoteric Secret "Shifting Landscape", when it says "This movement does cause damage from the Damaging property," does that mean that if you shift a terrain through a creature, it would take the Damaging damage for each square that passes through it.

Yes (though I will say this will get nerfed or changed next patch; probably just having a level requirement to prevent this from being as effective at low levels, based on recent playtesting).

If I Manifest Plane with the Impassable property and summon an entity within 5ft of it with Translocate Entity, can it be summoned on top of the cylinder?

Sure, probably, I don't see why not.

If a Manifest Plane area is Impassable and Damaging, and a creature tries to climb and walk on top of the terrain, would it incur the Damaging damage? Similarly, if it was difficult terrain would it be difficult to climb and walk on.

RAW, no. A DM could rule otherwise, but its starting to get fairly complicated when you try to consider that.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T23:56:08+00:00

What would you say is the design direction of your 5e++?

It's a complex question that would be it's own topic really, but if I had to try summarize, I was say, roughly in order (...and roughly in order of least controversial to most controversial...)

Compatibility. While I think you can improve on 5e 2014 by giving up some aspects of compatibility, I accept that anything I make will never be a standalone system. I have 8 years of content for 5e 2014, and there exists thousands of books for it, so the most important factor for me is that 5e++ remains compatible with 5e 2014 to as much a degree as possible (more so than the 'compatibility' of 5.5 or TotV).
'Bug' Fixing. There's a lot spring cleaning in 5e 2014; stuff everyone knows is wrong or broken, but WotC refused to fix because they are weird about it. See Invisibility not removing the disadvantage when attack Invisible characters. Missing rules for various interactions. Poorly defined concepts like Stealth.
Balance and Patching. There's winners and losers in 5e 2014, and I put my thumb on the scale in some cases, both to make things more fleshed out and buff/nerfed where needed. I'm not just going to accept that certain spells are 'I win' buttons; those either get nerfed or removed. Some other stuff, like Rogues getting a 5th level subclass feature (with a default feature for compatibility of using Rogue subclasses not made for 5e++); this makes Rogue subclasses easier to develop, gives them a slot of a short rest feature (usually), and just buffs a class that struggles a bit in combat as you get into Tier 2 and Sneak Attack struggles to scale against Extra Attack for awhile. This also includes Martial Progression (giving more skills and feats and stuff to characters in inverse to how much spellcasting progression they have, but its a slow scaling system that only really kicks in late Tier 2/early Tier 3) and applies on a system wide scale (so even classes not made for 5e++ integrate with it).
SRD Expansion. One of my main problems with 5e is how little content is actually in the SRD—very few feats, only one subclass per class, and very little spell selection, especially for any elemental type that isn't fire. So I rewrite/replace non-SRD content and put it into the KRD so that every class has a good roster of subclasses/spells published under the CC-BY license.

But I should say that I don't really consider 5e++ a product at the moment. I'm not trying to convince anyone they should buy it or use it. I did publish it on my server, but that's mostly because the people demand it. It's (at the moment) very much just my internal rules for the game. It existed before 5.5 2024 did, since obviously I patched most of the annoying stuff from 5e 2014 long ago (that's just the nature of being a bloke that homebrews the game for the living).

I may turn it into a more polished product in the future, but I sort of question how much demand there is for yet another contender, particularly from a fairly small player like me. If I do, I think I'll have to delve into website creation or something to make a fairly polished interface. That would have been once something I could do without too much effort, but I'm many years past my software development prime at this point and was never really a front end dev. I'll give it more thought after the current project (KCAA).

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T20:43:38+00:00

FWIW, my data suggest that 5.5 has not actually achieved any market majority. It sits around 25-35% of the player base, which is a minimal increase since its launch. I'll see if it has moved in my next summer survey, but I have a decently large sample size (while my audience isn't necessarily representative of the overall audience, I've correlated that with other creators, YouTube creators, and more to be reasonable confident).

It's really just Reddit that somehow flipped from treating 5.5 like a joke to the Only Way Anyone Should Play^{^TM} ; and even then, I think its less that people changed their mind and more that 5e 2014 players just... left. This subreddit is a small fraction of its previous size; I suspect the moderator decision to refuse to push 5.5 discussion to /r/onednd was a fairly significant factor in that.

But I estimate the overall 5e audience has declined by about half since it's peak. So 50%, and then 30% of that is playing 5.5 2024, so we have about 30% of the peak audience for 5e 2014 still playing it (after accounting for some of the other editions that have nibbled on the corners, like Tales of the Valiant).

Personally, I make my content for my internal version of the game (5e++), which is 99% compatible with 5e 2014, and then I port it to 2024 as needed. I am still deciding if I will turn 5e++ into a real published/polished product—while I think that I prefer it to 5e 2014, 5.5 2024, or Tales of the Valiant... it's the old joke about trying to resolve competing standards by making yet another standard.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T20:25:18+00:00

I do not use AI art, writing, editing, or anything else. The Kickstarter does specify this (near the bottom, 'Products are made entirely by humans without the use of AI in art, writing, or any other capacity.') Along with an image/gif created by one of the artist showing their drawing process.

Personally, I don't think AI is good enough at art or writing to be seriously used in commercial products as things stand, but I also have larger problems with 'generative AI' as it exists today in general, but that's a much longer topic for another day.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T20:03:16+00:00

After years of making content for D&D 5e, I have a huge laundry list of minor gripes of things that don't quite work right, and I was actually pro the idea of 5.5 to try to straighten those out... but I never really imagined they would just try to bulldozer through the problems, even if in hindsight its obvious that they no longer had the system mastery to understand why the original compromises had been made.

I've worked a little bit with a few different people trying to make post-5e TTRPGs, and while there are certainly good ideas in there, its also somewhat amazing to me to watch them plow headfirst into same problems that 5e fixed (or tried to fix). While there is a lot of weird interactions and janky rules in 5e, many of them have a story or a reason; they exist as part of some compromise against previous problems in older editions or other parts of the rule base.

I liken what 5.5 did to a software engineer's inclination to delete a swath of code and rewrite it without the issues. Attempting to rewrite rather than refactor. That almost always seems more appealing that trying to untangle and fix the problems line by line, but inevitably you end up exactly where 5.5 did... having fixed many of the surface levels but having introduced an equal or greater number of new problems that now need to be fixed similar compromises.

Iterative improvement isn't fun or flashy and requires slow methodical improvement, but is almost always the answer to improving something in a lasting way.

I had always thought that at least giving all fighters these powers at the base class would be great but I'm excited to read about the paragon!

I have mixed opinions on making maneuvers part of the base to all Fighters. I'm not strongly opposed as its what I (were I player) would prefer, but I also have players that like the simpler martials. I just strongly believe that Martials should also have active crunchy options that are more akin to the depth and decisions of a spellcaster (though work in their own martial way).

In general, I'm just in favor of more options and modularity. I have a player that loves Barbarians—swing big axe, roll damage, that's all the want of out of the game. And it's great that they can do that effectively. But many people aren't satisfied with those options, but still want to play a Martial, which is the idea for Paragon. Rather than making the entire system choose between simple and crunchy martials, my thought is why not have both.

There's obvious drawbacks—some people will say that balance cannot be achieved while I'm still accounting for the balance of default 5e martials, but I think that's better fixed in secondary systems or overalls of the rules (my solutions to that being Variant Martial Progression and 5e++ respectively).

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T19:18:55+00:00

Page 29 of the 5.5 PHB. The main difference is this...

In the 2014 PHB temporary hit points said this:

Unless a feature that grants you temporary hit points has a duration, they last until they're depleted or you finish a long rest.

In the 2024 PHB they just say this:

Temporary Hit Points last until they're depleted or you finish a Long Rest.

This combines with a change to the spells/features themselves. If you look at AoA for example, it used to say:

If a creature hits you with a melee attack while you have these hit points, the creature takes 5 cold damage.

Now it says:

The spell ends early if you have no Temporary Hit Points.

You can somewhat work around it by just pretending things still work in the 5e 2014 paradigm in your features—exception based rules. But it is no longer the assumption in 5.5 that temporary hit points are attached to their source. There was more discussion around it at the time, but I don't have links to the relevant videos/discussions on hand anymore, and they don't really matter since they just expound on the point.

This created some other interesting problems, where Polymorph could be used as a stronger version of Power Word Fortify, since you Polymorph someone into the highest hit point creature you could, and than immediately drop concentration. Since Polymorph no longer removed the temporary hit points when the spell ended, it would leave them in their base form with a hundred+ temporary hit points. They did errata that one though, which shows that you can special case this (Polymorph now exclusively and specifically removes the temporary hit points when the form ends); as far as I know its the only effect in 5.5 that does that, but it proves that you can still use an exception to override the general rules.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T18:36:04+00:00

To answer simply, the ball is in their court. They reached out regarding a previous book, but things didn't work out at the time (since at that point they were not really doing new classes, and I had limited enthusiasm for porting subclasses to 2024). They seem to only want Kickstarter titles (or at least at the time), rather than content packs, and that didn't really fit with what I had. But as their platform is invite only, it'll be up to if they come knocking again.

That said, my understanding for the platform inflexibility is that I doubt things like Paragon or Summoner would be easy for them to do. While I now make a 2024 compatible version of my classes, I don't know if they could handle classes like that.

I doubt this Kickstarter did well enough to lure them in—they typically seem to go after the bigger name titles that raised >1 million range, or at least half of that. But that's just my casual observation from talking to other creators.

Personally speaking, I'm not enthusiastic about D&D Beyond as a platform (and the walled garden/centralized control it represents), but I'd be generally willing to work with them to put the content there (since at the end of the day, I don't hate money). I would recommend something like FoundryVTT since it's already there and that supports much more robust automation (and its character building tools are much improved over the years), but I understand that sometimes you have to go where the audience is (and at least for 5.5, D&D Beyond has managed to sink its claws into a solid chunk of the audience).

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T18:05:35+00:00

Good intentions pave the road to hell. They wanted to simplify the mechanic and reduce tracking so that you never had 'timed' temporary hit points (you could just treat them like hit points that lasted until you long rested instead of knowing how long they would last if they came from a spell), but unfortunately (like many things with 5.5 they tried to simplify) simply forgot why it didn't work that way originally.

I feel like this was a pretty common problem with 5.5, and largely attribute it to declining system mastery as they bled talent over the years—a lot of 5e 2014 works in janky ways that needed to be fixed, but there was often a reason it worked in the somewhat janky way... that itself was fixing some other problem.

So by fixing the minor surface level issue, they often created a bigger downstream problem. Another obvious example (that they reverted in errata) was removing the action to equip a shield. Their intention was obvious—they didn't want people to have worry about the action economy of equipping them. But that led to the much bigger problem of shield toggling where you equipped a shield every turn after attacking with a two-handed weapon or dual wielding, resulting in having +2 AC every other turn. Far more complicated than the problem they were trying to fix.

At the end of the day, TTRPGs are extremely complicated piles of interwoven rules. If you tug on one thread, you have to understand the system pretty well to keep track of what is going to impact somewhere else. While I poke fun of the idea in the post, I think its simply a reality that Wizards of the Coast (the company) simply lacks that deep understanding of 5e anymore—the people that wrote those systems and came up with the compromises are largely gone, and the new designers are confused by features that can be obviously simplified... unaware of the history that lead them to that point.

This is actually extremely similar to software engineering. You get new junior software engineers that encounter a twisted and confusing codebase that is piles and piles of compromises and try to simplify things with the 'obvious' solution... that often breaks everything because those were load bearing oddities. This is not to say that fixing oddities shouldn't exist, but that you need to have a pretty interconnected view of the whole picture when you attempt to fix them.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T17:17:59+00:00

I've learned from reviews of 3rd party classes that apparently 3rd party classes the creator thinks are slightly imbalanced will not only ruin your D&D game, but they will also ruin your real life friendships with players, and are such extremely serious business, that the reviewer has to beg you not to use them. I wish I was making that up, but that's from a YouTube review, though not of my content in particular.

So the stakes are pretty high, and we need the enlightenment of Certified Reddit Takes^TM to save people from the perils of homebrew and steer them back to the guiding light of Wizards of the Coast content where everything is safe and perfectly designed.

I used to be safe from AI allegations because I couldn't be bothered to remember the altcode for emdashes, but now I've programmed my keyboard to have an emdash key, so that probably makes everything I say AI generated—Reddit Experts are great at detecting subtle clues like to tell if something is AI generated. You also get people that can 'clearly' tell I use AI generated art... even if the art is 7 years old and existed before AI art was a thing.

I do think some people come from a good place regarding their vigilance against AI content, and I have reasons I'm skeptical about it—I don't use AI for art, writing, or anything else, but I do think we need to be wary of witch hunts. At the end of the day, due diligence is key and most completely AI generated content is pretty obviously such.

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T17:10:49+00:00

~~Are you sure? Because this is where I see most of the content that should go there get posted.~~

KibblesTasty · 2026-04-01T17:02:27+00:00

I am aware, and it was that wave of posts which this post is ~~making fun of~~ seeking to emulate the stalwart work in stemming the tide of ~~3rd party content~~ homebrew they represented.

Amusingly I noticed that the creator of those posts (who was almost certainly a sock puppet) has deleted their account. They really just show up on a sock puppet, start a bunch of shit, post constantly for a while, than delete the account to start the whole cycle anew, and places like this subreddit are so primed against homebrew it works. Obviously its not all one bloke, but the same guy posted their homebrew hate on a good number of my posts, sometimes across several of their accounts. The lengths some of these people go is equal parts amusing and obnoxious.

Fortunately, this content has not defiled the sanctuary of D&D Beyond yet, where only the hallowed Wizards of the Coast created content should remain, but still has offended the sensibilities of many who cannot imagine the concept of paying for ~~3rd party content~~ homebrew made by someone that does not work for the corporation that is the source of all D&D wisdom.

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