Draft Class / Design Notes: The Abomination! (Patreon)

[Update: Per request and supporter agreement, this post is now public, to help provide context on later Abomination design.]

For September's much-delayed design notes, I want to talk about the thing I was working on the last couple weeks instead of design notes. I wrote a new class! It's called the Abomination, and it's all about transformations.

But, I want to get something out of the way first. I don't think it's going to move forward in its current form. Feedback via discord was pretty negative; I'm still digesting what it means and what changes are needed. In general, people didn't like that it had spellcasting, they didn't like the main mechanical hook, and they didn't think the theme fit the mechanics. Also, a small note: this draft is entirely about werewolves, but the class as a whole would not be. It would probably never get another werewolfy thing, ever again.

With that preface, take a look: https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-OaIBtALWJfcfEV3_vcb/-Ob-S2E90JastFEChSSh

Now let's get into the why and the how of why it looks the way it does.

The Hook

Sometimes a class starts with a thematic idea ("it would be cool to have a full-class swashbuckler"). But more often, at least for me, it starts with a mechanical one. The abomination started with a discord discussion, where a couple people were talking about an idea that they wished the sorcerer was. The notion was that as you expend your spell slots, your sorcerous origin begins to show through more, eventually turning you into a monster representative of your origin. This idea sounded fun to me and worth exploring — both the general concept that you spend your arcane resources down and then transform, and the specific mechanical hook of "you start the adventuring day as a caster and end it as a martial".

So I spent a week or so chewing on it, thinking about what theme would fit. A mundane theme didn't really make sense; if you're going to end the adventuring day as a fighter/rogue/swashbuckler/whatever, with abilities determined by your martial prowess, there's no reason those powers should be unavailable early in the day. So it needed to be a magical theme, and rolling with that "transformation" idea made perfect sense.

Spellcasting

How to implement the spellcasting? A full caster would probably bust through our power budget; to go back to the sorcerer concept, it would be wildly unfair to other classes if a full-strength sorcerer turned into a full-strength martial once it was out of juice. A half-caster works in terms of resource budget, but not in terms of power; if you spend the first half of the day relying on a half-caster's weaker spellcasting, you just kinda suck for awhile. A pact caster would make sense in terms of power budget, but a) wouldn't actually have enough spellcasting juice to carry it through the first half of the day, and b) pact casting has always felt to me like an idea that's totally specific to warlocks, and it's a little hacky to reuse it for other classes. I spent about three minutes considering an alternate progression like the necromancer's 3/4 casting, but that only mitigates the problems of the other designs, it doesn't solve them.

But, there's one spellcasting chassis that totally fits here - spell points.

Spell Points

Maybe spell points deserve their own design notes someday — but maybe not, I can basically fit the full critique in here. You can describe spell points as a mana system, where all your arcane power goes into one pool of mana, and you pull from it as needed to cast whatever magic you want. WotC includes a spell point variant in the DMG, where each spell level costs a different point value to cast (ranging from 2 to 13), and your pool of spell points scales from 4 at 1st level up to 133 at 20th level.

Spell points aren't automatically invalid. Mana systems make a lot of intuitive sense, especially for generations of gamers who've played dozens of video games that use mana systems. (That was not the case when D&D came out in 1974.) But a mana system interacts with its spells very differently than a slot system does.

Most tables that try out spell points see a really spiky experience, where casters wind up spamming low-level and high-level spells and ignoring mid-level ones. This makes sense - low-level spells are more likely to provide outsize benefit for their cost (e.g. shield, but also stuff like misty step, fog cloud, etc.). and high-level spells provide the most efficient output for your actions, as well as providing big power jumps at 3rd, 6th, and 9th level. You're basically balancing two different efficiency ratings: spell-point efficiency (low-level spells are king) and action efficiency (high-level spells are king). In a spell slot system, the mid-level spells still face the same problem, but it's mitigated some since your high-level spell slots are a very scarce resource.

Any mana system runs into this problem. If you go play a Final Fantasy game, the spells are literally written as upgrade ladders; you'd almost never use Lightning 1 once you get access to Lightning 2, and it'd obsoleted in turn by Lightning 3. When you see a TTRPG attempt a mana system, it usually does so by writing fewer spells that are all more adjustable and adaptable. For example, you might just have a Fire spell, which can apply different effects based on how you put points into it. 1 point might get you burning hands, 3 points gets you fireball, etc.

Now, all of this is a big critique of spell points, but there's one way to make them mostly work — really tight budgets.

The Psion

I'm a huge fan of KibblesTasty's psion class; I think it's just incredibly fun. And it does use a spell (psi) point system, despite all the issues I just described above. It solves the issues in two ways: one, its psionic powers are written like our hypothetical Fire spell above, where they scale in novel and interesting ways based on how many points you pump into them. Two, you just don't get that many points. You have a number of psi points equal to your level, which refresh fully on a short rest.

In terms of playstyle, it produces something like a wildly-flexible warlock. You're very short-rest hungry, and once you blow all your psi points, you're stuck casting base-level psionic powers, effectively just cantrips. But while you're got psi points in the tank, the number of interesting decisions you get to make on your turn is magnificent. (Don't play it if you get analysis paralysis, for the love of god.)

Now, how can the abomination learn from the psion? I'm obviously not going to graft psionic powers in, but a small pool of spell points can fix most of my problems.

Back to the Abomination's Spellcasting

I wanted something with a smaller arcane budget than the psion, so for starters, ,I just gave the abomination half as many points: 1 per level, but you can only recharge half your points on a short rest, 1 time.

The second issue was spell selection: the psion mitigates the spell-list problem I descirbed above by tightly curating what spells are available. Instead of picking freely from a spell list, you get an assigned spell list from your subclass (and a second one when you pick up a second discipline; almost like a lightweight secondary subclass). I like reusing this idea for the abomination, since it was clear the subclasses were all going to have wildly different themes. But it would be really limiting (and annoying to write) to just have a 25-spell list for every subclass, with no player choice involved. So for the first subclass in the first draft, I gave the abomination 8 free selections from a general spell list, which is almost entirely geared to utility spells and self-buffs. And 16 curated spells coming from the subclass, the Nature of the Beast, which is 2-4 at each spell level and also basically every beast-themed spell in the game.

Lastly, while I actually used "spell points" in the early drafts, I reskinned it to "control points" before I published it. Then I stuck this into a transformation mechanic: once you get below half your maximum control, you transform, getting AC, temp hp, and offensive bonuses.

Unleashed Strike

The big mechanical tool that solved a lot of problems for me is Unleashed Strike. It's basically a smite: after you hit (like Divine Smite), you can choose to spend control points to deal 1d10 damage per point. It serves three mechanical purposes.

When you're at high control (still human), it lets you intentionally burn points quickly, so you can get to your transformation.

When you're at low control (a monster), it lets you pump out more damage, but now control points are a scarce resource you have to think carefully about.

At higher levels (11+), I stole another mechanical idea from the psion: you get a free control point every turn, which doesn't affect your transformation but which you can burn for spellcasting or Unleashed Strikes or other features. This gives you a pretty clean way to scale your damage up at high levels.

Playstyle-wise, my hope is that Unleashed Strike would let it function a bit like a half-psion paladin.

Mutations

The last major mechanical idea I stuffed in there is mutations. These aren't wild; it's just another version of warlock invocations. You get an expansive menu and pick a few as you level up. These get one unique twist, which is that they have passive benefits that apply in both your forms (generally small) and bigger boosts that only apply when you're transformed. So if you choose Hidden Claws, you can make a claw attack anytime, and you get a climbing speed, but you get to make an additional attack when you're transformed.

The big question for Mutations is whether there would be a class-wide pool of mutations or just subclass-specific ones. Compare to the necromancer, which has 36 general rites, sometimes level-gated, and 4-5 more from your subclass. For the abomination, that felt like the wrong way; general mutations were inevitably not going to be a great flavor fit for all the subclasses. So instead you get 8 mutations with no level-gating, and ultimately you get to choose 4.

What's Next

Patreon commenters might try to change my mind, but feedback on discord so far is that people really don't like having spellcasting here. They don't think it's a flavor fit and they don't see why this class is attached to that mechanic. Now, I picked this theme so that I could hang it on that mechanic. So the most obvious option is just to drop it and go work on other stuff. I really can't think of another theme that works as well for "start as a spellcaster and become a martial as you spend your resources", while also being broad enough to build a class around it.

Another option is to start reworking. In the same breath that people said they didn't like the class, they said they liked the theme. An abomination class with a focus on transformation and gradual loss of control over the day sounds cool. It would need to distinguish itself mechanically from barbarians, and that's tricky, but not impossible. If I go the rework angle, I think the next path I'll test is making the untransformed state into sort of a dedicated support. Spellcasting was a really straightforward solution to a gameplay problem here ("how do you make the untransformed character useful if they're not physically powerful"), so exploring other solutions is going to look a lot trickier. A nonmagical support is really tough to implement in D&D, so that might not work either; early design projects can be messy like that.