I have a player who enjoys discovering things about her class as the story progresses, rather than knowing what's coming up and being able to min/max and fine-tune her character straightaway. Is there a resource that could help me balance and/or create a class from scratch?
A few questions:
What is this player's starting concept for the character, if there is one?
Does the player, given a starting concept, have a sort of eventual destination concept for where the character will end up?
Does the player have a fair degree of system mastery - is a custom class called for, or could you simply find a suitable build for her to level into and gradually reveal?
pick a random 3pp class, preferably one she doesn't know, then just give her class abilities as she levels.
Classes are the hardest material to design in this game. Anything would work better than going through the trouble of designing a whole new class.
Instead, I recommend having her take a class that normally provides a lot of build agency and you deciding her options. For example, if she's an alchemist, you could decide what extracts and discoveries she gets. The oracle is a great one for that. You could not tell her what mystery she has. Or even better: create your own custom mystery and hand out revelations cherrypicked from existing mysteries.
pick a random 3pp class, preferably one she doesn't know, then just give her class abilities as she levels.
This is a good idea, too. The savant from New Paths Compendium could be cool, though requires a lot from you.
The oracle is a great one for that. You could not tell her what mystery she has. Or even better: create your own custom mystery and hand out revelations cherrypicked from existing mysteries.
The Mystery mystery: it's a mystery.
Something like a mystery or bloodline that gets a lot of unique features as it levels, along with unique bonus spells, is a good way to customise a class.
If full-caster isn't where she wants to be, you can always build archetypes for other classes that keep their principal features but trades out enough to get in on the mystery/bloodline deal. Archetypes are a much easier job of work than classes. Think a sort of Destiny's Champion or Destiny's Herald Paladin or Bard archetype with mysteries but no final revelation style of thing.
Or, as has been mentioned, third-party classes, or archetypes (3pp or not) that swap out a great deal of the base class to produce a very different identity.
They did a "create a class options book" in 2e, anything you made as pretty much broken. There might have been one in 3.x (but I might be recalling a pretty extensive race builder book too).
Generally speaking, just don't do it unless you let everyone do it. And then be prepared for what you let them do and to toss most balancing mechanics out the window.
They did a "create a class options book" in 2e, anything you made as pretty much broken. There might have been one in 3.x (but I might be recalling a pretty extensive race builder book too).
Generally speaking, just don't do it unless you let everyone do it. And then be prepared for what you let them do and to toss most balancing mechanics out the window.
Well, she's a solo-player when she does this, so there's no worry about allowing "other players" to do it. And she usually rolls high stats, anyway, so the idea of balancing against enemies is already fraught with peril.
What is this player's starting concept for the character, if there is one?
Does the player, given a starting concept, have a sort of eventual destination concept for where the character will end up?
Does the player have a fair degree of system mastery - is a custom class called for, or could you simply find a suitable build for her to level into and gradually reveal?
The player (my wife) usually wants me to have some sort of input into her initial character, anyway. She is most comfortable in the human-elf spectrum, and typically plays a good alignment, but she likes being surprised as to what her character can do, etc.
For example, in our first game ever, she started with no strange powers at all (she was a standard wizard). After a certain point, she began to channel magical energy into various magical effects (as if casting a spell) with a random chance of failure. Later, she discovered she was a "magic golem," designed to be an automaton made of pure magic in a corporeal form, which is why she thought she had those powers. Much later still, I revealed that she was, in fact, the hidden child of two gods (magic and fate).
I suppose I could find a suitable build, but I also enjoy getting her to certain points where her powers simply start breaking the system. It doesn't have to be in all-powerful ways: one of her characters gained what we called "trap fu," where she would, if she could close her mind to distractions, instantly react correctly to any and all traps initiated in her vicinity, almost Matrix-style.
I'm kind of wanting to create a character class/archetype based on some kind of stellar abilities: star-based spells, flight, psychic stuff, etc. ... or I could do something else, but those are a few examples of how I've really surprised her OOC.
The Vigilante playtest had quite a few ideas in that direction, so did the Occult Adventure playtest, the Generic Classes from 3.5 Unearthed Arcana can also give some more ideas.
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Occult Adventures sounds up her alley. It should be out.
Another idea is have her play a bladebound magus and create a story with her blackblade. I did this with one of my players where the blade is an agent of an eldritch god-like spirit called the Yatagarasu that lost his memory and choose the magus to do the spirit's bidding. At first, the magus knew very little of the Yatagarasu and resented having her soul be entwined with the spirit. Sometimes, it possesses her and communicates by writing in a journal. And enemies discovered this and used it against her to frame her for murder. Over the course of a 2 year campaign, the magus embraced her destiny as the Yatagarasu's herald, even grafting a wings of flying to her back in the spirit's honor. As the Yatagarasu's plans start to come to fruition and reveal a major conspiracy, the party has allied with the spirit and crossed their fingers she won't betray the party and turn out to be evil.
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I have a player who enjoys discovering things about her class as the story progresses, rather than knowing what's coming up and being able to min/max and fine-tune her character straightaway. Is there a resource that could help me balance and/or create a class from scratch?
She sounds like a player who isn't terribly worried about staying competitive with the rest of the party, rather getting cool new powers at each level. So, why not just have her roll her new class randomly at each level, ignoring any result that has her gaining two levels in the same class consecutively?
Sure, she's going to end up with the "sampler" build, but maybe that will achieve exactly what she's after. I would advise a balanced array of ability scores, naturally, and sticking with one of the more diverse races (human, half-elf, or half-orc).