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the samurai is a versatile martial class that channels the mystical arts of their ancestors.
please give feedback.
currently I'm thinking of restricting the uses of stances to one minute and a number of activations equal to 1/4 level rounded up, let me know what you think? and if you have any ideas for subclasses let me know?
and I'm sorry for not holding up to my commitment to writing the articles I promised. I will work on them but I got caught up in planning for the game I'm running and helping a friend with a project and reviving my classes of sokoku (a series of classes I made for a rokugan game some time ago)
I really like it. The formatting is pleasant to the eye, and the class seems balanced enough, and offers new things while also keeping most of the OG samurai features.
My only gripe is with the subclasses (well, the subclass). "You're a samurai, but left-handed" feels a bit weak as a theme for an entire subclass, and some features seem totally random ("you are left handed, so now you can summon an invisible weasel to fight for you"). The capstone is also really weak, only one additional d6 in combat which you can only trigger if your initiative is higher than your opponent's. The main subclass feature (+2 attack, -2 AC) could very well be just a fighting style.
I'd prefer to see subclasses based on the combat stances. I think they are creative and evocative and could work really well as subclasses instead of being the "additional fighting style" they are at the moment.
Thank you, I spent a lot of time on this one. You think the stances are balanced as an at will ability? It's what I had in mind for it to begin with to bring the bulk of the versatility since the discipline is long rest and sparing.
The original version of left handed warrior was more flavorful than this incarnation. The original played with the honor mechanic a lot and was kind of skill monkey. The weasel is a kamaitachi by the way, a trickster who delights in the pain of others.
The other subclasses I had for it I didn't give lazy rewrites like I gave left handed warrior so they were mostly incompatible with this new version. I just wanted to push this one out because I've been silent for a while and needed more than one other opinion on the stances.
I think i could play with the idea of subclasses that lean into one stance over the others. I could recycle the left handed warrior and make it kami stance with the kamaitachi ally and abilities centered around it.
Anyway thank you very much.
With how they work, you'll never activate them on turn 1: giving up your action means you can't attack, making them useless; Giving up your movement means you can't get to the enemy, which in turn means that you can't attack, making them, again, useless. Despite being at-will, you're only activating them from turn 2 onwards, and with the average combat only lasting about 3 rounds, you're probably not getting the mileage you'd get from, say, battle maneuvers (or your samurai techniques).
The effects themselves are fine. In my opinion, you could have them work alongside fighting styles and the balance wouldn't be too far off. The strongest is undoubtedly the fire stance, reliable flat damage that scales with levels. The others are mostly situational, with lightning and water being good but hampered by the Wisdom requirement (usually a dump stat for normal fighters, and only tertiary in samurai builds after STR/DEX and CON). The other stances offer minor benefits which are nice to have but not game breaking by any means, and are even weaker than the incoming masteries in 1DnD, which are also at-will, work from turn 1, and trigger on every attack.
Alright yeah, thanks for the breakdown. Currently I'm worried about current game balance even though everyone homebrews martials to have maneuvers for free anyway as of current... But this is useful feedback for me, as I think I'm in an outlier crowd who prefers combats lasting around 10 rounds but leaning towards more than less.
Fire stance I think can be tuned down to just wisdom or just prof yeah. And probably treat immunity as resistance. But I added the ignore resistance because I think by a landslide fire is the most resisted type, I might be wrong.
There are definitely options for what stats to focus on with this class, wisdom and dex as primary I think is the strongest but you can forgo wisdom entirely and go for intelligence or charisma, as long as you don't pick the options that scale off of wisdom. And because of the heavy armor proficiency and the option to use strength for your ancestral weapon (even if it's a longbow) you can build strength and pass up dexterity too.