as always with dnd, do whatever works for you and your group. The former makes your particular slab of steel very personal and the latter would make it possible to manipulate any steel/metal. either your steel can be detected as magic or you need to 'cast spells' to do anything with it. even Totem Warrior Barbarians are magical.Įither the steel itself has to be magical or the manipulations of the steel have to be magical, ie. Bards and their music are magical, Druids and their nature stuff are magical. Just saying it's magically bound to your soul would make more sense. As a DM I would probably not accept a personal power source like non-magical soul essence for someone's custom class. Well, there's a system for supernatural shit in DnD, and it's magic. The process to imbue it with your soul is magical, but the actual steel is not (unless souls are magical?).

Without putting to fine a point on it, I'm basically saying it is powered by a fragment of your soul. I describe the steel as being bonded to your essence. I dig I've been developing this class in conjunction with the DM and the table so they're all aware of what's being built here. I've had to pump the breaks numerous times on a home brew Witcher at our table and it's been a little taxing, as it can distract from the actual adventure and narrative when I have to refamiliarize myself with his 10 pages of class ability descriptions AND alchemy buffs AND monster trophy mutagen buffs and blahb-blah-bBLAH.Īll in all though, pretty interesting concept. Talk at length with the DM about it, be willing to make changes as you play if it's becoming apparent that it's OP, and try not to incorporate traits so nebulous that only you understand how they work with the rules. I'm running a large table right now with 3 custom classes, and from my experience, they can create a sense of unwelcome toxicity to the table since the other players might feel as if they're being cheated by the player, and the DM for allowing it. I would at least have that use a bonus action. Maybe work those immunities into later level perks if you're married to them.Īlso being able to summon back the steel not unlike a Blink enchantment or 'X of Returning' from 1st level without a cost associated with it is a little much imo. Without getting into the number crunching, I feel as if you should better clarify why the shaper steel doesn't count as magical for 'detect magic' and 'dispel magic' when it is clearly magical in it's creation and use, such as 'Vortex of Steel.' :) As an example if your party enters some sort of DM invented anti-magic alarm/field/area and other arcane spells or items no longer work, yet the shaper steel is unaffected, that seems a little iffy.

I'll try not to be too precious about my ideas.

If any of you would like to give this a read and offer feedback, I'd be very appreciative. The core concept is to have a melee class that's light on damage, but high on utility and crowd control. Now I think I've pretty much made a complete class. Steelshapers! Originally I was trying to design this as a 4e class which was a nightmare and I quickly gave up. almost half-a-year? So we're taking a break in the action to run a short interlude campaign and he was magnanimous enough to let me build out a custom class. Some of you may remember earlier in the year when GBer was recruiting for his D&D campaign and I was one of the lucky few who managed to join.

Update: I made a custom background to go along with the class, and threw it all into Homebrewery which I just discovered and spent way too much time messing around when I should have been sleeping.

5e homebrew classes