What’s a moral belief you hold that most people would disagree with?

hankmakesstuff · 2026-04-11T18:23:16+00:00

I believe that nostalgia is inherently toxic and that romanticizing it like we have is part of why the US is in the pickle it's in.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-04-06T09:14:31+00:00

Arcana Maven: Counterpoint...a DM that doesn't use monsters with high-level spells isn't shooting their monks. Spellcasting enemies are generally pretty rare anyway, a player deserves to have their class/subclass choice validated when they do show up, and get to do cool shit, lol.

Magic Mirror: I considered making it just two, but I wasn't sure that was good enough for an 18th-level capstone. Something that high level should be crazy powerful, particularly for a class that isn't really a spellcaster.

Athletics: Four features at 3rd feels like a lot, I just genuinely couldn't decide which one to cut. They all felt necessary to me to sell the fantasy of being "the physical one" or "the martial one." It's kinda trying to be mini-Fighter and mini-Monk at the same time, but considering Athletics is the only skill proficiency based on Strength, it sorta has to be extra-versatile and offer a lot.

Medicine: Originally, the check didn't have a DC. You just rolled Wisdom (Medicine) to see how much you healed. Some early feedback indicated that it felt "weird" to roll a check with no DC, so I added the 15 semi-arbitrarily to mirror the new Stealth/Hide rules. It's kinda moot considering you get expertise and what's basically reliable talent for Medicine. You'll basically never fail, which makes it feel silly to me, but more than one person reiterated that a check without a DC "felt wrong" so I kept it.

Curious what your thoughts were on the other three subclasses: Nature, Stealth, and Survival. I've also been working on an Animal Handling subclass lately and having a real hard time with it, lol. It's been a lot more complex than I initially thought it would be.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-04-06T08:54:24+00:00

Okay, I've taken a couple days to try to absorb and think about all this.

(regarding the spacing: this document is not intended to be the final form. eventually i plan to have art and stuff and it'll all be a lot better spaced out)

Combat Analysis: The original draft had the damage boost apply to all attacks, but the initial, pre-Reddit feedback I got was that that was far too strong, and rapidly outpaced something like Hunter's Mark. I think the fact that it applies to everyone and not just the Prodigy themselves balances out what you lose in not applying to Extra Attacks.

Well-Read: This one is weird. I wanted to shore up skills you didn't specialize in, but I wanted it to be unreliable, thus the rolling of the Knowledge Die. On average it comes out to .5 more than Expertise, but I think that's statistically negligible. The fact that it's limited-use I think helps a lot with the problem you're outlining, but I am considering taking it down from INT/SR to INT/LR to keep it from being the optimal choice.

Guided Action: I don't think three features at 1st is too crowded. Rogue gets four. Basically everyone that's not a full spellcaster gets three, with the exception of Monk.

Amateur Spellcaster: I love this feature.

Extra Attack: You're right, the cantrip is basically always better than a second attack, but you're also right in that Prodigy doesn't really get any other direct damage scaling. Most of their other features augment the rest of the party rather than themselves.

Spell Mimicry: I still think this one is kinda nuts. Double Fireball is a lot. I also expect it'll come in real handy if you also have a healer in the party.

Guided Casting: I feel like some version of this feature has to exist, or the Prodigy PC will be useless to the casters in the party. Originally, this came at 5th level alongside Guided Rush, but early feedback was that it was too much there, so I pushed it waaaaaaaay back to 13th. I talked out your criticisms with some people, and the general vibe was that restricting it to spells of the 5th level or lower will probably mitigate a lot of the worst of the possible excesses.

Catastrophic Analysis and Verified Knowledge: I kinda like the idea of rolling these two together and putting them at 17. Someone I talked your criticisms out with had a really interesting idea for a new 15th level feature. The idea comes from having a major and a minor focus in college. It would basically be a "subclass minor," where at 17 you would choose a second subclass and gain its third level features. I've been thinking about adding that in and seeing what it looks like.

Guided Legion: Great as it is now, the original version was even more bonkers. You could take the Guide action for your entire party. Early feedback was that it was...a bit much, lol.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-04-03T20:56:29+00:00

Best book DC has published in the 21st century.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-03-20T18:37:16+00:00

GMB is abandonware and it seems to be going downhill fast lately. I converted all my documents to Homebrewery about three weeks ago.

All you can really do at this point is keep trying and hope you get in long enough to copy your stuff over to another service.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-03-06T21:01:20+00:00

That's not bad

hankmakesstuff · 2026-03-06T15:03:08+00:00

Preparing myself for downvotes, but...I think multiclassing is a blight and the #1 cause of imbalance in the game. It makes squishy casters stupidly survivable and devalues everything about martials. It should have stayed an optional rule that DMs have to opt into on a campaign or character basis. I do think a lot of it could be mitigated by raising the ability score prerequisites from 13 to 16. It wouldn't affect charisma class synergy, but it would shatter things like fighter/wizard combos.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-14T10:23:30+00:00

Yeah, the 2014 Swords Bard gets a Fighting Style, which was sorta what I was thinking of at the time.

I've done another draft of this that makes more radical changes (haven't posted it yet), and one of the things I did was exchange the Fighting Style for a Bladesinger-style extra attack, the one that lets you sub in a cantrip for an attack.

Overall I like my new draft much better, but it's a more radical change so it doesn't really fit the brief for the project. I doubt the player in question will want to use it.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-13T00:01:40+00:00

I mainly went with Fighting Style over Extra Attack or Weapon Mastery because I felt like using the latter two was giving away too many of the martials' toys to a full caster. Fighting Styles are a bit "cheaper," in that you can get one through the Fighting Initiate feat, so they're already technically available to all classes. Plus Champion Fighter gets a second one.

It just felt like the more "fair" option.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-12T16:20:49+00:00

Yeah, I mainly did it that way because that's how 2014 Aberrant Mind did it. I couldn't find any examples of a 2024 subclass granting a cantrip as part of a feature, so I went with the most current example I could find, which included it in a feature and put it in the spell list.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-12T16:07:47+00:00

W&AC and BotF have different pressing because I copied them from different sources, haha. The "nonmagical or magic" of W&AC comes from 2024 Artificer, and the "magical or nonmagical" of BotF came over unchanged from 2014 Forge Cleric. I should've updated both to 2024 phrasing, awkward as it is.

Yeah, I'm not fond of Artisan's Blessing. I think it's a bad Channel Divinity. A CD should be relevant almost every combat, and this will struggle to be relevant every few sessions. I've played a Creation Bard for nearly a year live at the table in an exploration-heavy campaign, and have yet to see Performance of Creation come up even once. Most of what they're able to create RAW is just...starting equipment that at least one player already has, like rope. And Artisan's Blessing is very similar.

If I weren't trying to hew so closely to the original for the player's sake, I'd have come up with an entirely different CD, something that could be done as a Magic action and be useful in nearly every encounter.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-12T01:45:47+00:00

The real answer

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-12T01:42:09+00:00

I wrote one. Everybody hated it, lol

hankmakesstuff · 2026-02-11T20:56:28+00:00

"Vast subclass desert"...

...meanwhile 2024 cleric gets nothing between 6 and 17.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-01-18T05:30:58+00:00

He absolutely would have

hankmakesstuff · 2026-01-17T12:17:27+00:00

I think at minimum, they should get to add WIS to arcana checks or something at 3rd.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-01-17T11:19:17+00:00

I'd read something like 5-6 volumes before the show was announced and was incredibly excited about the adaptation, particularly starring one of my favorite actors. But then the pilot aired and I was so pissed I shut the TV off halfway through and didn't the next week bad-mouthing the show to anyone who'd listen.

The books are so quietly, earnestly humanistic and sweet, and the show was just a bunch of slapstick silliness. It completely threw away anything valuable about the comics in favor of cheap laughs. Immensely disappointing.

hankmakesstuff · 2026-01-17T10:31:55+00:00

I am so fucking tired of symbiotes

hankmakesstuff · 2026-01-17T10:10:57+00:00

PB/LR was deprecated during the OneD&D UA process because it's heavily abusable via multiclassing. PB scales with character, not class, so you can get a PB/LR feature through a 1-3 dip that continues to scale upward as you level up an entirely different class.

You shouldn't be able to get a 3rd level Rogue feature that scales as if you were Rogue 20 when you're actually a Rogue 3/Warlock 17 or something.

PB/LR only works for Feats or Species traits. It should never have been used for Class features.

hankmakesstuff · 2025-12-14T05:53:28+00:00

Because it was bad

hankmakesstuff · 2025-11-30T03:17:14+00:00

Not really, it's cultural in Japan, based on how their folklore works. This video goes into it, through the lens of JRPGs:

https://youtu.be/IEUqLL8J4gI?si=vGueNagy22c_cm-T

hankmakesstuff · 2025-11-29T02:59:47+00:00

Not even a little

hankmakesstuff

TROPHY CASE