Disaster Barbarian subclass – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

hello everyone and welcome back to the mic myrtles happy fun hour I am your host Mike Murrells and I am the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons and each week we spend an hour together custom building a unique element for the fifth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game this week we’re gonna take a look at a new barbarian subclass the it started as the Marauder barbarian it kind of transformed into like a 2 weapon fighting barbarian and now we’ve got a volcano barbarian and you know I thought you know this is actually kind of yeah and don’t forget handy dandy dandy beyond which is like it took our sidekick on our journey it’s the the Chewbacca to our Han Solo the handy dandy Mike Merle’s yeah I hope I’m dandy dandy and helping you out but I’m gonna give you a little taste now of something which people who work with me maybe have to put up with and now you get to put up with it I tend to like when I design I find that I like to just do the work and let the work inspire me rather than like just do a lot of just kind of hanging out and thinking about it so we’re gonna take a bit of a detour we’ve got the volcano barbarian he’s not going anywhere don’t worry about it but if you played fourth edition D&D you might have remembered there was a character class called the warden and the warden was a I thought it was a really fun class I really liked it the idea behind the warden was you were like this warrior who could transform into like different not creatures like you weren’t turning into like a bear but you’d like take on some sort of like aspect of nature and use that to channel power to defend your your your to defend your allies you were a tanky kind of character so I was thinking about that because I always I really liked the warden was one of my favorite classes of all like all the new classes we added to the game with fourth edition the warden was probably one of my favorites because I just loved the the flavor of it and I loved the the idea that you could like transform to something really like literally like Hulk oh the so it’s it’s not bad fourth right I’m not here to try to convince you that if you didn’t like fourth edition I’m not here to change your mind but I’m saying this is a cool character class I really like playing it so just focus on the story layer if you didn’t like the fourth issue mechanics let’s just focus on the story layer which is basically you played the Incredible Hulk all right like you turned into stuff right like a big you know big burly thing and I was thinking about what the bulk of the volcano barbarian because last week I for some reason said as we’re working on it and like I don’t want this guy to be supernatural and I thought wait why you’re a volcano barbarian like why say yeah super saiyan northland kyla right like exactly right the what why limit ourselves that way we can take a more sort of mundane approach to a barbarian if you want but as i thought about like the volcano barbarian and i started thinking like wait why am i saying no like overtly supernatural abilities and then like I was thinking the twin fighting thing and thought does that really fit with volcano maybe that fit with like a whirlwind barbarian and I thought that’s actually kind of cool we got like these kind of like yeah like this idea of a barbarian who literally becomes like a whirlwind like a storm and then like that’s when I started thinking okay we’ve gotten the players handbook we already have one subclass of the Barbarian the totem warrior and I thought totems are cool like who doesn’t like bears Eagles and wolves right like like I’m not gonna bag on bears Eagles and wolves right there’s some like the very very fine products of nature like why be a bear when you can be a volcano or like a hurricane right the like well I’d be kind of a cool path right at least you know I hope so I mean if you guys hate that go ahead and like no spam chat but you know I think it might be kind of fun to build something around this idea of like disasters right now right and that’s the thing a storm Harold and the kitten hugs you’re one step ahead of me because the first thing I thought was wait a sec let’s make sure we had we’re not reinventing the wheel so let’s slide over to Zanna thar’s guide to everything which had the path of the storm hurled now a path that storm held is similar to the path of the totem in that you have a number of subsets of things you’ve desert sea and tundra um now I’ve said this a billion times and I’ll say it for 1 billion plus 1 times now that this class is going to disaster yeah cue me yeah hopefully not but as Astrid a good way we’ll see maybe I won’t do this we’ll see like this is live right you’re seeing pure game design happening right in front of your eyes so let’s take a peek at the the storm herald features we don’t balance against books be on The Player’s Handbook like we don’t try to worry too much about likability comps but we do want to make sure we’re not reinventing concepts we already have and I think that is good when you think of the whirlwind like we don’t want to just go ahead and say look it’s the that’s just the storm or right and looking to the storm or here the basic idea behind the storm Harold was to really create this more supernatural feeling barbarian and you can see some of this essentially with the storm Harold when you rage you create an aura extends 10 feet around you in every direction but not through total cover so not through walls and it’s each one desert sea and tundra creates a different effect in that aura desert does fire damage not aura it’s all other creatures so can hurt your friends see is let’s see when you activate it you choose an off someone in your aura they have to make a saving Thoreau taking some damage this is a good example as a quick aside you look at desert and see desert is small amount of auto damage to everything sea is a bit more damage but it’s directed and this is one of those things which is like an interesting thing to balance it’s a good example some it kind of requires play test desert hoses your friends so it’s just a natural thing of like how comfortable the people feel with that C is less damage to add up the amount of damage does overall but it’s directed it because if you notice it here at sea it only happens once when this effect is activated choose one creature it makes a dexterity saving throw or takes two intakes damage and then Tundras is defensive so creatures of your choice getting to temporary hit points good example of something that’s a buff we typically once a every creature because the tundra guy if you’re buffing people you want to be near your near your friends but since you’re a barbarian you’re gonna be probably engaging enemies so just really for playability it would just be really irritating to give you friends temporary hitpoints and your enemies potatoes what we’re saying here something that’s its aura based so what this tells me is if I want to do something more magical with the volcano guy and potentially a world wouldn’t a character I don’t want a peon aura it’s good and this is kind of what pushed me toward thinking something much more transformative something that is more I am changing as the barbarian rather than I’m changed in the environment around my around me pop because I just I want to make sure conceptually these two things are very separate it also means I can’t take the cheesy way out and say well you transform into a fire thing and everything near you takes damage because that’s just an aura right so and then we can see here at with storm soul a similar pattern we’ve seen some of the other ones at this level we were getting a buff these are just benefits even when your aura isn’t active so resistance looks like each of them is getting a type of resistance and some other minor effect tenth level the your granting the damage resistance you get from your six sub level ability to creatures allies in your aura again giving buffs to enemies doing damage to friends is we kind of see this being okay cuz especially for very offensive character you don’t mind being a bit on your own but granting benefits to friends to ACTU enemies we try to avoid that because it’s just it gets sticky and you feel like you’re just you’re losing ground typically in play test those abilities just end up not getting used people just feel very very wary of giving a benefit to the to the bad guys and then xiv level your r grows more powerful so let’s see immediately after creature for desert after creature and the or hits you you can use a reaction to do some damage to it with see when you hit a creature in your aura you can use your reaction to potentially knock it prone and in tundra you’re granting you temporary hit points you choose one creature in your aura you can really reduce its speed to zero so that’s a good example you know of this these auras and the idea that it’s changing as you gain levels and you gain some other flavorful effects the interesting thing about this one is if you notice the we talked yes time but having four features and trying to make two of them usable with your rage and two two of them not this one is using three of them is stacking them all up on top of your age um but you know what play doesn’t seem to work out fine I think what helps it is storm soul it’s pretty useful getting a resistance especially against something like fire that’s great you know that you’re gonna face a lot of fire creatures breathing underwater in a swim speed foresee this is a good example of something where we design it assuming you’re gonna be playing a nautical campaign like you can Mike might just take this for flavor but we figure you know what since it’s one option amongst three inside of a subclass we’re more okay with it getting more niche all right so this is what we’re doing we’ve got ourselves a interesting potential place I haven’t seen a riot in chat and and Jeremy my producer every here is not like you know grab me and stop me from speaking so I think I think we’re okay maybe going in this direction excited uh I don’t see like a massive protest against it but I do think what we’ve seen is we’ve kind of established our design space we’ve said okay well I’ve said Chad hasn’t objected that maybe doing this transformational approach might be interesting we see something to make you know so a danger sign we don’t want to go with an AR effect so that kind of reinforces that initial idea I had for something transformational the I think I think that’s where we want to go so what it means is because I want to do this sometimes when your designer you get to do stuff because you just want right and cross sex fire I’m trained in writing oh I would watch it if you start writing I’ll keep an eye on you make sure you don’t you don’t leave things up the okay so what it means is we’re going to recon something just a little bit we’re gonna do something more transformational in our rage and we’re gonna do some subtypes like we’d have here with our path of the storm herald barbarian and our totem barbarian so let’s pop back use our handy dandy D&D Beyond website to go back to the Player’s Handbook because it’s gonna remember conceptually we’ll look at other books but for balance we want to make sure we stick stick with the players handbook don’t venture too far from there we will go down to the Barbarian and let’s start building our class so I liked it I liked a disaster totem or something like that I’m just quit disaster breviary ran again hopefully this doesn’t describe our design efforts it’s more what’s going on here and I’m gonna keep this text here but I think what I want is transformational Hulk oh you change not the environment and something that we built on last week this idea that a lot of your features oh our Tomatoes Derick yeah this does reopen the possibility of the Marauder cuz I think what we’re saying is this guy’s not gonna as much about weapons you know I think that idea that weapon fighting barbarian is just something people think of a barbarian with two axes if you played Diablo like that just seems natural and so I think that means it probably isn’t good at manifested here maybe it will we’re not sure yet but I think that means that that’s probably another a niche to play with so you change not the environment and it’s you know disaster themed so its destructive right we want something that is like it literally feels like The Incredible Hulk right like you want something it feels like a force of nature and that’s what I liked about the warden I like the idea that when you transformed as a warden you really started affecting you know now the warden had some AR effect so I don’t want to go there but I just like the idea like you take on a form like this really mythic form I mean played Magic the Gathering I think it was at the Forgotten ancient pull up some art here like this is kind of what now this is the more the warden this idea transformed into like this like woodland creature but yeah I just like the idea that you were humanoid but look very different you know and this may be kind of inspark maybe inspired me to think of the Hulk the I’m not sure and I’m like nervous about just starting to Google because I don’t know we’re gonna get any icon not safe for work results but so I’m not just start googling images but that is part of the design step for me I’ll often just type in a few descriptive phrases in Google and see what comes up I’ll go through things like Magic the Gathering cards right and just look at some of the art and let some of that inspire me so the I think the original if you’re curious if you played for the addition the original concept for the warden there is a it was onslaught block and had this idea of the as the block went on is there released more sets that the creatures and it started to transform and the elves became more and more like woodland creatures and I really like that feel to it so the yeah that’s something that I think would be that that was really inspiring for the ward and it’s kind of inspiring me here so the disaster theme destructive means we’re gonna have this AC we’re gonna build out our our futures and I have three options under each that tie into different sort of disastrous elements of nature volcano being one of them so I think the defining ability is you know we had it when you raid you turn into our tornado of attacks you know we had this idea back to the Marauder so essentially what we want is a transformational element when raging you get stuff and I think what we want is volcano I’m gonna say hurricane instead of whirlwind because it’s more of a natural disaster and oh look share DVI both earthquake like it let’s do it earthquake boom I like how you think my friend so there we go so we’ve got three we got kind of a fire themed air theme the elements coming back right I don’t know what the if that’s air or we need water we’ll get the one out we’ll do that later soon a V yeah I’ll guess I don’t to be like so on the nose with the elements but we’ll see if I’m inspired maybe what we’ll go for like title waivers or tsunami the okay Erin’s asking for it so I’ll just put it in there we go you asked I you ask I deliver if I am fickle enough to feel like I want to do it so I think we wanted to volcano is this idea of heat destruction through fire probably the most like of the four volcanoes probably the most just boom I just I just hurt you right hurricane you know Harkonnen tsunami gonna be interesting to differentiate because I think of both of them as like forces of nature that come at you you know heating with a lot of force moving stuff around let’s skip that one real quick so I think earthquake is me pretty simple to meet the UH knocking people prone right you’re gonna be every step you take it makes the ground move yeah eruption that might be a good way to think of it is idiots the eruption it’s a smoldering anger the hurricane yield the idea of winds that Buffett I kinda like the idea of the student the tsunami being something like you know the maybe a middle ground conceptually between the volcano and the hurricane there is that eruption aspect to it you think of a hurricane it hits over a long period of time so that might be something to do with the to its of enduring with the other three happen than the end tsunami hits I mean it’s a disaster they’re all disasters but there’s one event so I think that might be something to differentiate the hurricane and I’m sure if they’re in water that buffets because that’ll just give us a conceptual concept I’m gonna put higher peak than hurricane just so we kind of remember that we see the hurricane is maybe something that’s gonna kind of stick around a little bit more alright I’m not gonna worry about these notes I’m gonna actually save them for later I’ll just dump them to the end of my file and whatever I’m working inward the end of my file always ass ends up being like a graveyard of like sentence fragments that maybe I’ll use maybe I won’t this is kind of more for what they had the cons of the Marauders let’s jump this back here into our word graveyard and here we go okay so this is a mere transformational element normally this stage I just start working on the third level one if you see me work but what I want to do really quickly because we’re doing four of them in parallel I find it helps to go through and build the structure across all the levels first because kind of forces me to think ahead a little bit what I don’t want to do is end up like of these four I’m really happy with it but then I find like oh the sixth level slot I’m having trouble with two or even three of them so what we have here something it’s more utility we have – as a bonus action what I really want here is some utility outside of rage and if we see here we’ll go down here and take a look at the totem at six level you know this is one thing we do I do find these kind of week now see I’m allowed to like speak ill of the game cuz I worked on it right but one of the things it’s like okay you can see mama these are really super flavourful I don’t know if they’re necessary the best template but we don’t want to go too far from where we are what I’ll probably do is a tenth bubble here we’ve got like commune with nature that you can cast as a ritual that’s rectally really useful so I’m probably the kind of blending these two to try to get like two things that feel a little more exciting the there’s a lot of these these three here very high berries they’re pretty situational I know I like in my own games I very rarely even care about carrying capacity the so what whoa so what I want to do throw you here is throw another yeah you know I’ll keep that because I mean I want to use that but now they’re you know useful utility and I think at 14th we want to make upgrade our rage because I think if you’re if you’re transforming into something you want to get a real sense of it’s getting better you get a level up we can deal with some of that in the core ability but I think having somebody to look forward to like that that new level of power it’s maybe like what keeps you playing a character up through high levels I’ll be on obviously the story alright so I think we’ve got a pretty good structure here the rage upgrade should be pretty simple I’ll just remember when I build these that I just want to have leave room for it to add something which that that’s pretty simple and I think six and ten I think not only do I want to make these utility I might have like one of them also do a give you a utility benefit when you’re aging to get that real sense like maybe we can put a movement mode or something in the 10 all right so here’s what I want to do for volcano I love this idea of the eruption like going Nova so let’s say this you are a volcano I’m gonna give you a few bullet that’s just throwing some bullet points here so an immediate thing would be fire damage we do other desert doing that in an RSO maybe fire damage if you are hit you can use your reaction and then you know what I’m kind of thinking is that you get say immune to fire while raging your rage damage can be fire and maybe we do something we play with that rage damage how about this the once per rage you get to go Nova and you can triple your damage bonus once per rage the funny thing about that is remember way back when we were talking about having a to up and fighting barbarian this section might be something which is pretty good for two weapon fighting guy cuz if you’re tripling that damage bonus you want to get as many to tax out there as possible this might be broken it might not be who knows oh so many I’m Remy drew let to hope I’m bouncing that right resistant fire not immune yeah I think actually it’s a good point because I think immunes a little too good third level that’s make e resistant I don’t want to just ignore the dragon’s breath that feels a little little too over-the-top the O cross very much the Nova at the end of rage one thing that’s tricky with that we’ve tried to play tested mechanics like that I think one of the forms we tried one of the ones we tried was a look at the very end of the rage something happens would often what we found was the players would feel like oh we won we won and my rage isn’t over yet you’d feel a little a little bit of a letdown we also had something which to rate us a sage helm our we had ones let you rate and your anger rage early and what we found was players felt like it just was turning rage into another spell what often would happen is like the ideal form is you rage you’re using a rage for a couple rounds then you’re like oh I need to I need something to really take us over the top I’ll use our use my rage power what often would happen is people would rage and then immediately end the rage to use the boost because I just kind of viewed it as oh I get let’s say they’ll let you cast fireball I join a cast fireball I rage in the rage fireball or whatever it was so I’m a little leery of going that direction it’s something which you know that that’s a case where our playtesting has shown that so far there might be a way to solve for that the I don’t want to go there quite yet though I think that what I’d what I’d want to do is go through and build out the class and then see is there a way we could add something like that in or find so it implement it that that’s works but a little house in the past but it’s a good example of you know just because it hasn’t worked in the past it doesn’t mean like we just wouldn’t try it again it just means we always want to learn from it like we know just implementing it the way it was we tried in play test that’s not gonna work right we need to find some of their other flourish to it the who love emote store fire damages you take hits her up on your foe that’s not the path we could go looking at to um and you know I’d like that let that feel right I’ll actually put a question mark there maybe that’s a way you can you can trigger you know I you know that’s an interesting approach because what that means is you want to get attacked but it also has a nice thing of if it doesn’t end your rage but something you can trigger if you’re really outnumbered you feel like oh this is good like what a lot of games are call a comeback mechanic and a lot of games it has to be competitive games if one person starts losing ah they just start losing more because maybe you know you’re playing and someone let’s say in a strategy game you lose a battle which maybe means you lose resources and your ne is gang resources and now there’s a you know each loss means the divide is growing wider what this would kind of fun here is if it’s like if you’re really outnumbered this actually gets better you know this idea that rather than the loss necessarily making the gap wider like it is widening but there might all be abilities that kick in only when a gap is it a certain thing a classic example would be imagine a spell in a competitive game that was like deal one damage to every enemy one damage might not be a lot in your game system but since it’s every enemy if there’s a lot of enemies on the board especially if they’re units that are left over from prior fights the mayor do you have damage on them you can use this pretty simple spell and take out a lot of enemy units at once and close that gap a spell that in a close match might not be useful or in effect in a match where someone’s starting to pull ahead might actually be a good catch up anyway it’s a very long way of saying that the cool thing about this is a character being outnumbered and likes taking on big hoards of guys um the yeah and uh Gaius Octavian mentioned there is a lot of bookkeeping so that’s one thing with a look at well there are some tricks that we can do to simplify that that cognitive load the let’s hop down to the hurricane so I like the idea of the hurricane being enduring I like the idea that compared to the other ones this is maybe something that does have this sense that there’s an effect rather than is happening once it just continues so I think what we want to do here oh yeah maybe that’s sitting compared to the tsunami but do something with movement like you move around and can move foes around when you hit them sorry I may be a limited fly effect that will really tie this into study of the storm and maybe that’s something which would be fun to compare it to the volcano guy who’s like okay I’m gonna really take on a large group of people in erupt and yeah distro uh lemur a been a hurricane could should disrupt missile attack so that’s another good way to to differentiate the tsunami from the hurricane so let’s do something like that some defensive powers defensive upgrade which maybe means like this guy is pretty good at getting into areas and rather than dealing lots of damage to lots of guys he’s pretty good at tanking them so let’s do something like that because if you’ve got like some defensive upgrades that’s pretty good that’s a nice really distinct feel from the volcano now let’s take a look at earthquake so this is a pretty simple one that you know I think maybe look at more of a control element compared to the other two so I’m gonna put you know control here which would really fit in with this idea of seismic waves knock enemies prone you might also get some sort of liking or earthy aspect tougher to hurt so I like the idea of the hurricane is tougher to hit and the earthquake is tougher to hurt I think it’s one of those things that’s simple but we really get this feel architect Eric mentioned limited fly on 14th level totem barbarian yeah I think what’s the eagle while ranging of a fly speed equals your current walking speed oh that’s oh that’s a good point so we should probably make sure that if we’re doing something with the hurricane that’s flying that’s more it is more limited so I will underline this to make sure we don’t lose track of that um so we’ve got our guy who’s really good at dealing damage we’ve got our guy who’s pretty good at moving around and is harder to hit so our mobile character our earthquake character so far is looking at someone who is tougher to hurt and tinker in the sense that like knocking enemies prone means it’s harder for them to move away so you know you can smash people maybe also three and something here like you know good at demolishing objects not sure and that might just be like the the siege monster ability we see on some creatures where they do extra damage to buildings but maybe that would be a good thing for the ER and remember these now keep in mind these are like four or five bullet points under each so we’re not gonna implement all of these we’re just looking forward directional abilities and again this is something I like to do when we have like four options under one subclass it you really want to make sure that conceptually not only you’re not touching the other subclasses but that these four things feel very distinct when you give someone four options you want to push them as far apart as you can you don’t want it to come down to it’s kind of a design directive and fifth we don’t want people to really puzzle over well I could be across I could be a longbow expert or shortbow expert and there’s actually like a difference there so I think one of the things about the tsunami is that this idea of overwhelming force I need some sort of charge effect sweeping things away you might move around and like knock people out of the way control water small share DVI to check that out as we do some research so we poke at things and flush out our abilities the actually you know what I’ll take a look at that right now why not we have that ability to do a handy-dandy DME beyond right let’s look at our official spells and let’s just take a look at control water not control water under our control water control water I know one thing maybe is inspiring to you is how terrible my spelling is and my typing if you’re writing it to be a good game is a game designer I would say good that’s really judge not for me to decide but the that that’s not something necessary to have the let’s hear some flood effects part water oh cool okay yes this might be something and maybe this is something we have we find spells for all of the the sort of disasters and maybe this is something we could drop in that they can use uh once per day or some like that once for long rest so D&D characters don’t don’t they don’t have days they have rests what did you do last long rest or before your long rest the all right so sweeping things away and I do think you know higher peak lower its Kota call a cruising altitude compared to hurricane so I just want to make sure we’re not they don’t feel too much alike if they’re moving people around but I think if we have this idea of sweeping things away that’ll feel a lot different than the hurricane in fact this might be something pretty simple like knock people away and keep people close I like the idea the hurricane kind of like you get trapped in it the tsunami noxious sends you flying alright so let’s take a pass at actually designing one of these so we’re gonna head back to our barbarians there we go rules again Player’s Handbook I’m gonna go to our and now one thing we’re gonna do if you member last week I was doing a lot of comparisons to the Berserker I’m not gonna do that as much this week because I think when you have two subclasses that have a similar structure it makes sense to just use those as your comparisons so let’s take a look at alright so actually to try to write this right so I like to do my sort of subclass ability names that sound like the names of heavy metal albums will call this avatar the disaster that sounds like something like definite like you could see like the latest album from jackal with hawai avatars aster so um let’s see starting at third level ah the superscript we don’t superscript in D&D but word always wants to do that like as a default stop automatically doing that thank you yeah game developer challenge is getting ms word to do exactly what I want it to do so starting a third level when you rage you undergo a not just any transformation you want to see some like serious like this is game designer startling or Sartre Ling see this is the kind of thing where you’ve got like I can admit you and I when I’m you know writing I will sometimes like I don’t let’s let’s lay on the cheese let’s like get people to go like oh this is like it’s exciting I’m gonna tell you it’s exciting that’s how you know it’s exciting I’ll tell you this is exciting believe me the I’m gonna start the transformation let’s see there’s probably language in here that I have to write about how to pick one of these but I don’t care I’ll just let you figure I will do that I’ll let Jeremy Crawford deal with that he’s coming on the next hour anyways to tell you how he actually fixes this stuff up and this something you can actually use in a game so we’ll go bow he know while raging do you transform into a creature of rock and fire let’s say obsidian and fire obsidian the official mineral of heavy metal the transformed a creature of obsidian in fire when you are hit as a reaction when you’re hit by as a reaction when you are hit by an attack you can well maybe we do the reaction that’s like kind of what Stokes your own fire that’s oh that might be kind of funny it dairy crackers porygon fun no be kind of funny right like you’ve had fun and now you have to like have the fun drained out of you so I was thinking like as a reaction when you’re hit by an attack you can like sort of stoke your inner flame and I don’t want to do an aura because I know a fire bub belches Oddie like no no but like could it be that every time you when you get hit we’ll tie it to a reaction just some maybe avoid some of that bookkeeping so it’s not just you’re surrounded by a bunch of guys the and it’s you know kind of scaling up endlessly maybe it’s as a reaction you’re hit by an attack you can ink you can double I’m gonna put double I know that’s a bad idea I know it’s a terrible idea the and I don’t I kidnapped I don’t want to do a hellish rebuke effect because I think I want this guy to really feel like I am doing this stuff rather than it’s kind of happening passively but maybe this is a horrible idea I’m gonna ride this out and then you chat you can tell me if this is a bad idea you can double your in the make sure I get it right we always look stuff up because I will get it wrong I was about to call it your rage a bonus rage damage okay but what is it and the rage ability what do we call it oh it’s just a show so yeah okay your your bonus to damage roles from raging until the end of your next turn okay so yes it’s because it’s real you want to make sure this is this is what I’m gonna be very careful about so this is this is fun right so I’m gonna tell you why this is fun if they if you if has not occurred to you’re looking at this as a reaction when you’re hit by an attack you can double your damage but your bonus to damage roles from raging until the end of your next turn you could in theory on your turn run around in circles you know go up your foe and I jump in and out of there their reach to get them to APPA you and then hopefully hit you and then use your reaction aha I’ve doubled my damage to the end of my next turn then you hack at them with all your weapons and then next year next before your next turn maybe your enemy makes mistake of attacking you again and hitting you again and then you double it I think we would want to make sure we’re capping this so you can’t so we probably don’t want to say double I’m just gonna leave it here cuz I know I have to go back and fix us up but essentially we don’t want this funny thing of your fighting the volcano barbarian so what he does so he does this funny dance where like he jumps in and out of your reach hoping you hit him then he hits you then you attack him like a reasonable person in the battle does and then like you know that it’s just this kind of funny pattern that we probably don’t want to be in of this is how and I think if I remember right Shaq correct me if I’m wrong but I think this would just make it tripled or quadrupled constantly right because you would just keep triggering it on your turn that effect is still in effect and then you’ve triggered it again it’s only due your opportunity attacks that wouldn’t get quadrupled so the one thing I leave I’m out the reaction is what this is limiting it so I think I kind but I also does shut down your opportunity attacks so I think what we’re just going to say you know what maybe this was the best way let’s just let you triple it once per rage I don’t want to attach an action again cuz I don’t I don’t like the tax of like you can’t two up and fight as a barbarian so let’s do this you transfer motorcades so your rage bonus damage ah not able to type today and this is this is all pseudocode so I’m not exactly sure how in the game we should refer to that rage damage bonus so we’re gonna make it fire damage that’s really simple you know there’s probably apply also will let you shut it off but again I’ll just well clean that up very well we’ll bury that in editing the UM and let’s do this once during your rage you can triple this damage bonus that benefit lasts until next so I’ll give you two rounds of just dealing massive amounts of damage to people the Oh tight reckless attack all that’s actually yeah well let’s do that you can double this damage bonus understand that you can double this damage bonus or triple it pit when using reckless attack oh that’s fun alright and so that’s so that’s not a nice like a basic thing I’m a little leery of doing more cuz I think that’s actually really nice doubling that damage is that’s really good but you know what it’s kind of in line with the other things we’ve seen the nice thing is it doesn’t incentivize you if you want to do two up and fighting you’re getting more tax that damage applies to them so yeah I kind of like that I think we’re gonna put that now here’s here’s a secret I’ve learned we when we’re actually working using this template we never use these buttons you’ve seen me using them but I shouldn’t be using them we instead use our styles and in this case we’re going to go to bold serif no wait no incorrect inline sub-header boom there we go that’s some what we should be using alright so let’s see let’s go over to hurricane so as you can see I had a lot of these things down here some of them might still migrate up like maybe we should give you the fire resistance will see the put manna just increased damage that’s well that’s only yeah your bridge bonus damage your rage bonus damages fire damage and one string rage you can double it that’s a good starting point let build up the other three in comparison I kind of feel like it might be still be missing something I think I don’t know if that necessary feels transformative enough to me so but you know I’m just gonna jump ahead enter a future of what’s the official mineral of storms I thought we Trevon say lightning and wind or lighting and wind you bet you’re very good at picking out like oh this is the lay up and go perfect in here no lightning you’re a barbarian not an interior decorator I mean you could be an interior decorator that could be a background we build but it’s not in the game yet okay you’re worried oh yeah you’re so this is your rage bonus damages look let’s just do this as lightning there we go there’s that and once during your rage I really like this pattern too so once during your rage we said over here in hurricane that you get a defensive upgrade taking a lot Sonny’s capable close hmm the I think we want to do something we talked about this this guy keeps people close so once during your rage yeah but I like the idea of the reckless attack this is that the the here let’s let’s not do this because that’s just the same thing we’ve changed the damage type we talked about hurricane winds that Buffett and enduring things so you know we don’t want to run stirring rage that’s right that’s what’s throwing me off we want this to be something that that’s constant so you’re rated your your rage bonus damage is lightning damage your speed let’s do this increases by 10 feet when you hit a melee attack let’s see you know kind of when I picture a hurricane and it son picturing more that that’s circular you know the winds around it the eye of the storm that you are kind of the eye of the storm the yeah so maybe it’s something where you can suck people into the attack you can reduce their speed so let’s do oh yeah but let’s do this let’s just say when that creature there’s a I’m just gonna put a big number in here – 28 I don’t think speed there we go so you gonna really slow people down they can’t get away from you there they’re caught you know and maybe hurricane isn’t the right one maybe we want like tornado or something like that or oh we could we could even do something like like a vortex that might actually get to get the flavor a bit more the nice thing is yes sucking people in because I think then the nice thing is it feels very different from the tsunami so there we go and we have two things that start with letter V which is why not none of these get used in the game now earthquake now I’m gonna say right now I’m designing these I’m not 100 I’m happy because I think we need someone want something it’s a little more transformative but I’m gonna charge ahead cuz finished is its own argument use creature of earthen stone because stone is the official mineral of earth you know it’s funny I’d say these things and I have no idea if any of these jokes are landing because I can’t completely watch trap Oh force damage yes very good called Eve I’m out let’s change that from lightning damage to force damage and then this is one thing that always irritates me about whatever you do earth elemental thing we don’t have an earth damage type right like I want to go so you originally is earth damage which doesn’t exist because getting hit with a rock is just bludgeoning the image right but we don’t need it right that’s just me being like I like parallelism which humans we naturally like but we don’t necessarily need so um I’m gonna say here check this out chat I’m going crazy your AC increases by 10 yeah by one and feet like my AC is 10 feet better I have no idea what that means say your AC increases that one keep it simple right and this is probably gonna go back to once during your age once during a rage you you can cause your melee weapon attacks to knock creatures thrown that’s not done we’ll throw in the the save DC and you know save and activations put a question mark there and again same thing kind of like our volcano guy except you’re just clobbering dudes knocking them prone really good probably combo with a rogue I can knock punch people prone the road can come in and start sneak attacking I just want to shut down the abilities you know for one round they can’t really move they’re gonna waste a lot to move standing up again really control the kind of like new tanki kind of things you guys are sticking near me the vortex with that that speed penalty is kind of going there to that being constant would have to take a look to make sure these two things aren’t stepping on each other too much the big difference is that a speed penalty is not you know I’m now not getting advantage for free just by walking up next to you which is a pretty big difference you also generally will find that it does take some sort of tactical sort of planning on the party’s part to take real advantage of a speed penalty a lot of times you’re the barbarians next to the monster and that’s why they all want to be right that’s that that minus 20 the Oh mad hatter him putting up over here mock does forced image so it’s probably they’re just get aside that overwhelming force of boom an AC increasing by ranged damage Archmage dere it’s probably a little too good especially at higher levels were + – yeah but I’d be a little worried this +4 might just get to the point where you’re just not getting hit sent me to think of typically +1 bonuses are for AC because it’s constant but yeah maybe we’ll see we’ll see let me meditate on that doesn’t which we definitely have to I mean obviously that’s something play test but you know what yeah I forget it I don’t go crazy I’m gonna do it here increases you get a bonus Stacey let’s do it well let someone else tell us we can’t have fun I won’t stop the fun I’m the very permissive do whatever you want night that spells at first level and it’s a story justification it’s fine you can get it doesn’t break anything too badly we’ll just blame it all on diem skill what you can’t handle complains casting meteor smart first leveled cut a damn are you right oh yeah and I’m JP cotton we could also do it by half so oh no sorry reduced damage by oh that’s d ours a bit tricky sorry ed z9x one was the one range damage JC run it up we could have it we do that dr is a little tricky cuz often players will forget to track it especially higher levels if you’re getting smacked around just like 20-25 damage the four might not feel big even though we know over the every round it’s actually really really good there’s it’s one of those funny effects where if you really know the math of the game and like optimizing dr can look really good you do the math and you really realize i’m saving so much damage but for players who aren’t thinking of it mathematically they just think of in terms of like oh i transformed especially when that tens digit doesn’t shift i went from 25 to 21 it doesn’t feel good and that’s one of the really interesting areas of D&D designed feel versus effectiveness and trying to bring them both into a damage threshold the one trick there is a lot of our creatures just baked in like getting that number right is really tricky it’s like imagine you’re balancing something and it’s either way way way way way too good you always taking zero damage or it’s never comes up you’re never taking any damage at all getting that thing right in the middle with a damage threshold it’s really tricky i know in testing we have yet to really get a good value especially over levels tracking it again like if some report does it mean we won’t try it it’s just something where it’s gonna require them what kind of a breakthrough that aha moment we’re like wait this is actual make this work I’m not necessarily a fan of damage to our soul to myself I’ll have to admit we’ve been play testing some rules for our vehicles just fleshing them out and the thresholds that currently sit on vehicles which we’re keeping in place we’re not getting rid of but um it does lead sometimes some funny things I was designing an encounter and I realized oh like if this like you if if the crack had lifts the ship up and drops it the damage threshold on I think the the sailing ship I think was 15 or 20 it wouldn’t take any damage from the fall you know now IV sec I just I can just sort of hand wave that but it just kind of it’s it’s it’s tricky because what you’re really what you want to say is one-handed like melee weapons like swords and daggers can’t really hurt a ship but if you take the I almost want to want to say the threshold is a based on weapon size or type but anyway getting way further afield let’s focus a little bit the on our tzunami so we said by the tsunami was overlaying force and knocking people away so while raging you transform into a creature of let’s see what’s the official is it coral the official mineral of the sea and I’ll say seawater none of this lake water or tap water it’s seawater for us but that’ll get my change um let’s see here and we have semi it’s overwhelming a higher peak so let’s do this one stirring you can consummate it male have taps to knock creatures I’m gonna say like somewhere between like 20 to 30 feet away I wanted to be really like boom like you know they go flying away the you know for flavor-wise you might want to say they’re all in the same direction I think naturally be kind of picture in your head like everyone’s kind of flying out from our Burien so maybe it’s oh you know actually something we could do here is it doesn’t have to be an attack this could actually be a magical effect once during your age why don’t we do this you can do a cone let’s do something similar a cone effect con cone effect similar to thunder wave we could just do that where basically you can get essentially what a spell like effect I just focus in boom setting when flying away from me and doing some damage to them so that that feels pretty good and okay so we kind of have our starting thing here this is another good example too of why I like to just go through and do all four rather than trying to like get one perfect in the blonde to the next because after walking through these through these we found a couple things that started to merge at least you know when I was writing them I thought oh that’s fun like what can i play with this I like the idea of reckless attack having a higher benefit that kind of what I really want you to feel is that you have transformed and I think when I can take an effect and then have it flow into your other abilities that really feels like my characters options are really changing but I didn’t see anything that popped out immediately for these other ones but maybe it’s just for lack of trying this you know I’m a little leery about making it too complicated but I think I think right now we’re not getting really that that transformative effect what I think I want on each of these is a constant thing you get I think we want a once per rage effect with the exception of vortex because that’s one which is more constant for the other three and then so we have a constant thing a thing that you activate once and then maybe something tied to reckless attack that augments that and somebody may be the constant effect gets augmented that might actually kind of fun so let’s do this we got volcano so your rage bonus damage inspired image once I don’t think we need to make this requirement simply because again earth you can make a forest damage but I don’t want to force the issue so so your age when it says fire damage once during your age you can double this this damage once or triple it when using reckless attack this benefit lasts into the enemy next turns let’s remodel this a little bit right is doubled when using reckless attack once during your age you can double this or triple it when using earth at that benefit last so there I think that’s pretty solid your age damage is gonna be fire you’re probably gonna just say hey I want a reckless attack that feels pretty good for a no tv-shows Cleveland yes we’re crazy there’s always gonna be a pun lurking in there somewhere the the wandering pun table does not include a no pun found entry the so this feels like I think this feels solid up to start with I still kind of feel like the volcano might be missing something but dealing fire damage the rage bonus is pretty useful now it can get shut down so maybe we need to let you turn that off if you want double been using reckless attack I actually really like that because it really does feel it’s speaking to that transform development if you’re a volcano barbarian you’re gonna reckless attack you’re just gonna go crazy and that feels that feels pretty good it might also set up at higher levels we might give you something we’re getting it does help you once during your age double this damage or triple when using reckless attack that benefit lasts till any my next term so then you can do a big damage spike so you probably raged use this immediately like you just want to hack down enemies as quickly as you can and that feels kind of like the blocking like boom right and then you start fighting okay so vortex your rage bonus damage is forced damage yeah we might still be able to say lightning damage here because then I don’t feel so bad about earthquake being for you but then or tsunamis talking before us two forces like our generic damage right it’s like generic damage its force damage sure right it’s like the universe just if it detects damage it can identify just calls a forest damage so but I think I’m gonna keep this as lightning damage because I kind of liked it it’s not just the vortexes like if it’s a storm you know it’s stormy clouds and lightning that feels cool your speed increases by 10 feet so I kind of I like that feel of something that’s just happening you’re faster now and the we wanted this to be constant why don’t we do this why don’t we also tie this to reckless attack the let’s do this when you use reckless attack features new hitch their speed reduced to zero until the end of your next turn then we’re probably put a savings there there and then once Turing let’s let’s make us a bonus action so I when I’m to give it some more weight once doing ages bonus action and they’ll be a saving throw attached to this by just say I trap creatures next to you will just throw that in there boom so basically this is the vortex you know the the other way we do is we don’t the necessary and go through reckless attack with us we could just say the yeah but they don’t want to make a difficult terrain around you because then it’s just feels starting to feel like more like an aura this one is kind of drifting a bit toward the the other barbarian subclass but I think it’s fine for now okay earthquake wind raging you transform into a creature of earth and stone you get a bonus to AC equal to half let’s do with the half thing right have you rated him is bonus that a seed bonus increases to your well this is totally not what we put in the book but I’m just gonna read it because we’re running at a time that babies when it’s going to full when you use reckless attack oh there we go so now I want to use reckless attack because I get a in higher AC and I think once during a rage you can use you can knock people prone I think that actually works pretty well too because this is really nice you’re attacking with the bandage but I’m getting a really nice AC boost that’s pretty cool I’m not as worried with to up and fighting here on this one I think something some just pointed that out I’m Draco because I think the earthquake guy being more control Eid offensive he might actually carrying a shield like in my head I would definitely not want the fire guy though I want the volcano gotta feel pretty good using two weapons to get as much as possible out of that thing now let’s just double check this reckless attack use it once action no you can just decide to do it okay good the so I’m okay if two of these point to two I’ve been fighting and one doesn’t especially the more defensive one because I think it’s okay if the AC boost is sort of trending you toward even wanting to make your AC go higher or to use a bigger weapon all right and let’s knock out our tzunami here so well transforming Royden you transform your creature of coral and sea water so once during your age you get a cone effect similar to thunder wave I think that’s cool when you reckless attack let’s say you knock people knock target away in a straight line we’ll just put that down annex we’ve got about oh let’s lit over one minute to go till I get I get out of here so I think let’s see you wreck this tactic do we want let’s see yeah well we need a what’s our constant effect if you’re the tsunami guy you know maybe it’s something like while raging I want to see something like you could just go anywhere you want the Oh wasn’t whirling so sweet weapon yeah well it’s we started Lee uh Lee Moorabbin but like we end up with volcano being that way the see this is the winding twisty road that but maybe we’ll end up you don’t I’ll give it some thought this week what happened it’s a good example though we started with this idea of like the hurricane like the the whirlwind but then we end up with a vortex so much more control the character and a lot of that is getting driven by looking at these four we want to make them all feel distinct so yeah it’s kind of funny like as I designed I just ended up the vortex being the control the guy earthquake being tanky and volcano being our DPS or DPR in Dungeons and Dragons terms what I think I’d like to something with the tsunami is a movement effect and my first pass would be through anyone’s space because I like the idea of the implacable nature like a tsunami you just move through no one can stop you so the yeah avoid the opportunity text engaging with like water I was thinking like like that I just did again but a little more offensive where I want to use it to move in so I’m okay with you taking opportunity attacks cuz you’re raging you’re gonna have your resistance up so I’m okay with that rather than making it feel more finesse to me that it just it I want to have a real brute feeling like I’m just gonna walk right into the middle the group of enemies and then just start smashing into them or send them all flying away with my attacks okay well here we go I think I’m not gonna promise you anything because you never know like this has been the most like roller coaster ride of a sub class we’ve ever done but I think I’m feeling really good about this it’s hitting that note I think the transformation is just about there I’m gonna ruminate on this over the week and maybe tinker with it a bit more to maybe play up I still wanna up I like that the warden was one of my favorite classes I loved that tree like really hulking out feel like I’m changing right the we did kind of capture that with the giant sorcerer a couple weeks ago but I think this is in a pretty good place now so I think what we’ll do we’re gonna call it there hope you enjoyed the show about our 56 minutes together we’ll next week we’ll do some more work on the Barbarian hopefully finish it off with the four features I think we’ll probably spend all the next week finishing it up because essentially have to do four things for each slot if not maybe we’ll take a look at you I’ve been doing some thing about backgrounds maybe we’ll do we’ll take a break from subclasses and talk a bit about backgrounds and the role they play in the game but anyways okay so until next week I hope you had fun I keep designing keep playing keep DMing and keep creating and I will see you next Tuesday take it easy everyone

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Disaster Barbarian subclass – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

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