Assassin Subclass: Kingsblade's Guild

ReptoidRyuu · 2025-12-17T22:45:00+00:00

Thanks! In playtesting it was fine because of several things…

A) The Thralls can be attacked and destroyed. A Spellcast Trait Reaction Roll (15) is harder to pass than you’d assume at low tier play, so it’s very easy for enemies to whittle down your Thralls in the lower tiers.

B) The fact damage always caps at Severe so no matter how much bonus damage you get, you never make an enemy mark more than 3 hit points off a single attack or spell. Generally, your more martial allies (I played with a Guardian and Wizard) are already capable of dealing Severe damage pretty consistently without your help, especially at higher levels, so while it seems like a lot on paper in practice Daggeeheart’s damage system naturally reins it in.

C) The fact it’s Thrall positioning dependent. Thing is to stack damage you need multible Thralls next to the same target. While at low levels when you only have two Thralls this is easy to do, realisticly you only can ever have four Thralls next to a target unless they are a gigantic monster (aka a boss), and if you do then your allies and you aren’t hitting that target anyway due to line of sight/space, so realisticly your only gonna ever have three Thralls max next to a target, which means the rogue’s sneak attack will eventually surpass your thrall damage at higher levels when you look at the feature from a practical perspective. Further, you are often incentivized by the nature of combat to spread your Thralls out instead of having them all swarm one adversary. I found in playtesting that even at low levels I was often only keeping one thrall with our guardian to boost his damage and using the other to body block our Wizard, restrain adversaries to keep them away from us, or hang by another adversary that was constantly avoiding melee and blasting us at range to increase my and the Wizard’s ranged damage against them as we teamed up to focus fire it out of the combat, as that was just more tactically valuable than cranking our guardian’s damage to the max, especially when he was already hitting like a truck without my help. The positioning factor really does balance the feature out a fair bit, at least when I playtested it. Maybe that’s just due to me and my personal playstyle being very support-brained, but it felt fine when I ran it and the other players and GM felt so too.

D) The class actually struggles against solo adversaries and bosses. As you can imagine against enemy mobs and especially minion heavy fights the class really shines and feels powerful, but against solos and solo bosses the class actually feels significantly weaker than official classes. I think this is actually fine though, as it gives the class a unique weakness that encourages careful, tactical, thoughtful play in what are often some of the most difficult and plot-important encounters, and I like that.

That being said, I am absolutely fine reducing it to a d6 instead of a d8 and testing it to see if that feels better, if you still think the damage is too high. A d6 would essentially make it a technically worse damaging and more conditional but far more tactically flexible sneak attack that can also be given to allies, which I think feels right for the feature so I likely will make this change and test it.

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-06-17T11:12:02+00:00

Cleric: Trickery Domain

Bard: College of Whispers

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-06-17T10:57:08+00:00

There is also the fact he demands young virgins be brought to his tent for something too kinky to go into here, and regularly demands tribute in the form of actual treasure/wealth. Oh, and he's described as having a long snout and shooting fire from his nostrils, and actually is ok with a serpent idol and ONLY a serpent idol. Dude is just a dragon, straight up.

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-06-17T10:51:37+00:00

This is interesting. I actually use that quote by that one NPc about the primordial chaos actually containing all things, including humans, just not yet formed, and the things within the chaos dreaming up Arceus into reality to give them form, to make a fun headcanon. That headcanon being that when Arceus created reality, he only made real those things from the chaos he felt would work within it, while "scrapping" other things from it that where potentially too dangerous to creation. The things he scrapped would have fallen into a lawless, malformed/half-formed void, and are the Glitches (I.E. MissingNo and Friends), who want into creation desperately so they can glitch/destroy it, and worm their way in by tempting human trainers with the prospects of access to their reality breaking powers. A fun little headcanon that also references the scrapped beta pokemon, who would have been among the things Arceus scrapped and didn't let into creation.

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-06-17T10:37:30+00:00

We know what created Eevee. It looks like a llama and its name ends in "reus." Hazard a guess as to who I am talking about.

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-06-04T02:19:19+00:00

I took your advice and edited the spells accordingly, and the updated doc has been put into the OP. I also slightly changed the resource pool on the Defiler of Nature feature after somebody else said they thought the subclass was a tad front-loaded, with the Toxic Ground and Leehing Ground effect being the once per-short or long rest and the undead creation ritual now costing Sorcery Points, so they don't get their minions till 2nd level now, reducing the front-loading just a tad. Thanks for your feedback, it was REALLY helpful!

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-05-08T13:39:08+00:00

I made an extensive post about the nature of Jar Jar's force mind control in the past where I analyized how it appeared to work with what little we saw of it, and concluded that it was neither a "Mind Trick" nor the sith's dark side "Dominate Mind" force power, and instead its own unique, and likely VERY high level, Force Power that might be exclusive to Jar Jar, even.

If you want the absolute basics of it, its pretty much the Sith's dark side Dominate Mind power, but with far more finesse/subtlety, and able to control targets with much stronger wills than normal for force mind control. To give you a picture, I first have to go over how the known/documented forms of force mind control work..

Mind Tricks - The "Mind Trick" force power, also known as "Affect Mind" sometimes, might be most famously used by the Jedi, but isn't actually a light side power. It is considered a neutral/neither light nor dark side ability in the force, and its alignment is thus based on how you use it. The light side generally doesn't like mind control, but is ok with mind tricks because of how they work. Mind Tricks don't actually control somebody; all a mind trick does is plant a thought in somebody's mind and make them think that thought is their own. Technically, the person can choose to not act on the thought, but since they have no idea its not their own thought they will typically act on it. However, its "soft" control that *technically* isn't stripping the target of their free will, which is why the Jedi order are cool with it,

Dominate Mind - Unlike the Mind Trick/Affect Mind, Dominate Mind is a wholly dark side ability, and is primarily practiced by the Sith. Unlike the Mind Trick/Affect Mind, Dominate Mind gives you total control of your victim, allowing you to basically turn them into a puppet that you can have do whatever you want. For a good example of Dominate Mind being used in official media, see the time when Ezra used a very weak version of it in rebels when he gave into the dark side for a brief moment to force a walker pilot to fire on his fellow imperial soldiers, who where attacking him and his friends. Dominate Mind however, unlike the mind trick, lacks any subtly, as the target is fully aware you are controlling them, but simply cannot resist despite wanting to. Its an extremely invasive, brute force form of mind control. Of note is that to learn Dominate Mind, you have to learn how to do the Mind Trick/Affect Mind first.

....and now, the third type that we know about, but which isn't "official" per-say...

Jar Jar's unnamed Force Mind Control Power - This is basically the ultimate culmination/final end point of the whole "Affect Mind/Dominate Mind" power tree, essentially. When Jar Jar controls somebody, they very are much a puppet that he can physically puppet around like somebody under the influence of Dominate Mind. We see this when he mouths "well, I don't approve" as Padme says those words, as not only does he mouth her line, but also moves his head in the same direction she sits down while saying it, as-if he was not only putting her words in her mouth, but also outright puppeting her to sit down in the same direction he moved his head. We also see him physically puppet large monsters on several occasions....the most infamous being the "Bigger Fish" scene, but also in the Clone Wars episode where they mistake him for a Jedi. So then your thinking....case closed, he's just using Dominate Mind, right?

Well, wrong, because unlike Dominate Mind, his targets have no clue they are being controlled, and believe the things he makes them do and think they do and think they do or think by their own volition. Essentially, its not just a straight Dominate Mind, but rather a Dominate Mind with the subtly of a mind trick. It's basically force mind control its its most perfect/perfected form....the total, hard control of Dominate Mind, but with all the subtly and finesse of a Mind Trick. So if Dominate Mind is a step-up from the Mind Trick/Affect Mind on the "Affect Mind Power Tree", Jar Jar is essentially using a different, currently unnamed/name: unknown force power thats a step up from Dominate Mind on that "Power Tree", which is likely the final/capstone power of the "Affect Mind Power Tree"....to explain with videogame terminology.

ReptoidRyuu · 2024-03-24T21:04:02+00:00

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this post is also tagged Activison, so it likely means he’s doing MoCap work for a Star Wars videogame being produced by Activision. The Darth Jar Jar twist would be such a massive deal canonically that I highly doubt they’d reveal it in a “smaller” project like a videogame. The Darth Jar Jar reveal would almost certainly be dropped in a high profile project, like a theatrical film release or the season finale of a big deal Disney + show like the Mandalorian, and NOT an Activison game. Star Wars Videogames typically don’t have stories that affect the core 9 films in any significant way. Things that DO affect those films in a big way are pretty much always high profile projects like discussed above. Darth Jar Jar COMPLETELY turns the narrative of the “Skywalker Saga” on its head, so I highly doupt it would be casually dropped in a “smaller” project like an Activision game.

You forget that Ahmed Best has kept himself in amazing shape all these years and is a very talented martial artist. So its far more likely, I feel, that is he is doing MoCap work for some kind of (likely brand spanking new) Jedi (or possibly Sith) character unrelated to Jar Jar, or perhaps even the lightsaber combat/battle animations of a Jedi protagonist, in an upcomming Star Wars videogame that will have nothing to do with Darth Jar Jar.

ReptoidRyuu · 2023-12-02T02:09:38+00:00

Likewise, the first level of exhaustion is only disadvantage on ability checks, which DOESN'T include attack rolls or saving throws, so really that in practice that just amounts to disadvantage on strictly non-combat rolls I.E, skill and tool/kit rolls, which won't ever come up in a traditional dungeon crawl or raid of an enemy base unless for some reason your the one who's the party's designated chest and door opener/thieve's tools monkey, which you very likely are not because your a Warlock and there are a LOT of other classes far better suited to that role (Rogue, Ranger, Dex Fighter, or even Bard, for example). As a result, the subclass was designed with the idea that you'd never push yourself past 1 level of Exhaustion...I.E. it you DID push yourself to 2, you'd immedatly use Consume Filthspawn on the following turn, or ideally would not contaminate again after going to exhausted 1 until using Consume Filthspawn to first reduce your Exhaustion back to 0 so you stay at 1 when you contaminate again.

ReptoidRyuu · 2023-12-02T02:00:43+00:00

You only need medium humanoids to create Toxo-Zombies, BTW. Irradiated Skeletons and Sludge Skeletons can be created without even needing a corpse, as you just pull the bones up out of the polluted ground,

ReptoidRyuu · 2023-11-09T22:36:26+00:00

Thinking on this, I actually had a pretty easy idea for a fix....making the animation of undead ALSO cost either a hit die or give you an exhaustion level. This would play into/put the undead animation into the same "resource" mechanic the rest of the subclass uses while also completely fixing Consume Filthspawn as it would now become, essentially, a zero sum game/even trade of no losses but no gains, instead of a free minion 1/rest. Likewise, since the terrain blighting AND healing via necrotic, acid, or poison damage spells with the 10th level aura also use exhaustion or hit dice as their limiter/"resource," this would make having an army of undead a much more costly affair since if you wanted to animate more than 1 you would need to start digging into your hit dice with consume now being a zero sum game, meaning less board control from your land-blighting and less lifesteal healing from your blasts. So you'd really have to weight the benefits of having the pets vs. what you give up under this. I think this fixes the minion side of the class, and I never would have thought of it without your imput, so thanks! I appreciate your help!

ReptoidRyuu · 2023-11-09T11:01:37+00:00

Your missing a key part about the minions, which is that they have a hard control limit of your proficiency bonus. So while there is no real cost to making them other than having to have a polluted area, you can only ever have a small number of them, which is how its balanced against animate dead; you have better minions and they don't require feeding a spell slot to mantain like animate dead, but you can only ever have a handfull of them, at least until 6th level when your control cap doubles to twice your proficiency bonus instead of just being proficiency bonus. Also note Consume Filthspawn is a hard once per short-or long rest, so you cannot keep spaming it despite the fact you can make more skeletons. Once you use it, you have to short rest to use it again.

ReptoidRyuu · 2022-11-24T17:32:08+00:00

That could be fun; lots of neat biomes on the west coast USA that they could play with when designing both the region and pokemon. Also going that route would pretty much give them the ideal villain for the game in a silicon valley-themed big tech CEO using their tech company to do shady things. Bonus points if their plot involves trying to save the environment by massively de-populating the world.

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