Modular Characters for D&D?

How might 6e implement more modular characters, something a section of the player base is agitating for?

Lets stop for a moment and consider what you get when you level up:

• Everyone gets extra HP, which come from a hit dice - whether you roll or take the average rounded up - plus your CON modifier.
• If we count spell slots as a class feature, loosely speaking everyone gets a class feature or a sub-class feature. Some of these, like rogue's sneak attacks build upon earlier ones, and sometimes you get more than one - warlocks can get extra spell slots and extra invocations at the same level for example, monks can get two or more things together too. 
• Generally every four levels you get an ASI. (There are exceptions to this, but as a general rule that's how it works out.) 
• Every few levels you get a proficiency bonus increase.

This gives 6e a chunk of things it could play with. 

We've seen one option being put out for play-test already: Subclasses not restricted to specific classes. You can have caster subclasses available for wizards, sorcerers and warlocks for example. (There are other combinations too.) It's easy to imagine, although we haven't yet seen official content for it, a similar thing for martial classes. You could relatively easily have a barbarian, fighter and ranger subclass, or a fighter, monk and paladin subclass without stretching credulity too much, and something similar to the Oath of Ancients as a paladin/ranger subclass would work nicely. Given the prevalence of hexadins, paladin/warlock joint subclasses ought to be easy enough to do, a paladin that goes that extra step to dedicate themselves to a servant of their oath.

But imagine a situation where you could choose at each level from a selection of what size HD (or average HP) to take. If you're a barbarian or a fighter you get the choice of a d12(7) HP and taking that gets you the fewest other options for class features etc. As a barbarian, fighter, paladin, ranger, monk, rogue, cleric, druid, bard, alchemist or warlock you have an option for a d10(6) HP. This gets you more points for your class features. All of those characters, plus the other casters can choose a d8, which gets them more. The fighter and barbarian drop out when you reach a d6, and the wizard and sorcerer have the option to down as low as a d4(3) for more power!

Exactly what you get for your points varies a little from class to class. One option that I discussed when I was first writing this blog, was that the warlock invocations should be rolled out to all classes, in a different form, to let players customise their play style. Invocations to give you a skill proficiency, a point of bonus damage with a chosen weapon, or a chosen spell and the like (these need to be play tested for balance, they're very much first draft concepts), higher level invocations (warlocks have level requirements on some of their, why can't everyone else?) to let you increase your critical range with a chosen weapon, chosen spell and so on too - and create specialists that way. Casters could have, as warlocks currently do, access to unusual spells or free casting of spells (which effectively increases their spell slots), or just direct extra spell slots. Clerics and paladins might be able to buy extra uses of channel divinity and so on. Monks might be able to buy extra movement, extra ki points and more. 

You will notice a lot of the ideas I've taken are direct lifts from the class features. That's not entirely accidental. If you're going fully modular, which I'm not sure 6e will, you could attach the whole kit and caboodle to your HD pick. Take a d12, get no features. Take a d10, get 1. Take a d8, get 2, or 1 and a semi-caster level worth of slots. Take a d6 and get 3, or 2 and a semi-caster level worth of slot, or 1 and a caster level worth of slots. Take a d4 and get a caster level worth of slots plus 2. Arcane Trickster and Eldritch Knight might disappear as subclasses, or you can work them off a d8 and the semi-caster level for each, or the EK off a d10 and the right invocations. 

ASIs and Proficiency Bonuses

I've deliberately left both of these out of it. They're simple and they work, with the exception, to my mind, of the fighter who gets more. But invocations can take care of that - fighters get exciting weapon boosting invocations instead of feats, and potentially stat boosting invocations if needed, so they don't need the extra ASIs. 

While I don't mind skill point systems, I quite like the proficiency bonus system. Having the ability to spend invocation points on skill proficiencies does away with what is, to my mind, the worst part of the proficiency bonus system - your character doesn't learn new things. It prevents the worst of the skill points system, where you have to decide what to buy, what to be best at and what to dabble in. You can still keep the current pick from your class, pick your background, these are your starting skill proficiencies, but you can easily adjust and adapt for any weaknesses as you level up.

The Role of Subclasses

Subclasses don't disappear in this approach - although some might, or have to be totally rewritten. But subclasses will come in and give you a solid whack of extra. Exactly what that means is hard to define but consider, for a moment, the difference between the diviner wizard and the evocation wizard. 

Evocation feels thematically nice, but... a number of creatures equal to 1+spell's level automatically save, so your fireball does half damage to your mates - could be no damage honestly - potent cantrips is decent, and plus INT modifier to your total damage, c'mon. Overchannel is decent, but the damage to you soon stacks up. Ironically, your best bang for your buck from your bonus damage is dear old magic missile. You roll d4+1 and multiply the damage by the number of missiles. So (d4+1+INT modifier) x 3+one per level higher... much nicer! At third level, with 20 Int, that's an average of 9.5 damage more to a single target than you get to a single target from a fireball - and ok, it doesn't clear out the mooks in the same way, but it doesn't get resisted or saved against either!

Divination wizards get the awesome Portent - control of two d20 dice rolls per day, rising to three at 14th level. Then they get the rarely fully used, but always fun, recharging fountain - cast a divination spell of fifth level or lower and get a spell slot of the next level lower back. At 10th level they get a special sense thanks to their mastery of their magic, darkvision, permanent see invisibility, permanent see ethereal, or the ability to read any language. All rather nice (although the last one is quite situational) - but it's a choice, and you can reset after any rest. 

So one is very flashy, but doesn't really deliver much above the normal wizard, the other delivers an awesome power, extra spell slots and extra senses. They might not all work all the time, but generally speaking none of these are bad things to have on any given day, even in a one-shot (where you're probably least likely to get mileage out of your extra spell slots). 

Similarly, generally speaking the Way of the Four Elements is considered a bad monk subclass - it chews Ki points for poor rewards in terms of spell casting. So lets reimagine that in a system where a monk might choose to drop to d6 HP, but take 2 invocations and a semi-caster's worth of spell-slots. They still get their Ki points and most of their other stuff, but they get a chunk of spells too. How would we have a subclass to make that sing? Well one would be to say at 6th and 11th levels you can weave your Ki into your casting, allowing you to make an attack and to cast a cantrip (6th level) and a spell (11th level) as a bonus action. (There's probably some fine tuning to go in there, you might be able to cast the spell as an action, and make an unarmed attack as a bonus action or something but the broad principle is ok.) It still needs something at 3rd and 17th, so how about proficiency in Arcana and for 1Ki and an action (you can still make a bonus action unarmed attack because you've spent a ki point under the Tasha's class variant rules) you can cast Armor of Agathys at a spell level equal to half your Monk level for your 3rd level features. 17th I haven't thought of yet. But this makes you a caster monk with some nice integration, lets you still get up close and personal, and you can take shield, mirror image etc. to boost your defence, haste and so on, fly and whatever you need to add some Gish.

Pros and Cons of this approach?

Experienced players get to have a lot more builds to play with. If WOTC produce, say, 20 general invocations for all levels, and 10 available at each of level 5, 11 and 17 (for the current tiers), and then an additional 10 for each class at each of those breakpoints. I'm not looking for miraculous, game-breaking ones, take the class features as a starting point, and one line out of each of the multi-line feats, assign it a level. "When a hostile creature's movement provokes an opportunity attack from you, you can use your reaction to cast a spell at the creature, rather than making an opportunity attack. The spell must have a casting time of 1 action and must target only that creature" for example - not necessarily the most important bit of War Caster for most people, but still part of it, and bang that in to all the caster's as an invocation from level 1. Put "You can perform the somatic components of spells even when you have weapons or a shield in one or both hands" that one in as a general invocation at level 1. And the advantage on Con saves for concentration checks at level 5. Three invocations written... 

Players can also focus on what they want. You might have a more mobile monk, or a monk with the same movement speed as everyone else, but extra ki points, or monk that eschews ki points, but is a caster with unarmored defence and unarmed attacks for an unusual Gish character.

The major downsides are obvious: with increased choice comes increased ability to make bad characters. We're not talking the Int 8 wizard deliberately bad character, but we're talking trap choices and the like, and a bewildering array of choices for new players.

If you generally avoid a mess of trees, possibly with the exception of "chosen weapon" trees - so you can build up a string of small bonuses to a particular weapon over time - and have simple benefits each time, so each choice is a benefit, you reduce the potential for traps. People can argue over the merits of proficiency in Animal Handling vs +1 damage with your chosen weapon, but if you've got the choice to take two or three such picks at a time and you want/need animal handling, being able to take it easily like that is worth it. 

There are obvious answers to the risk of bamboozling new players too. 5e produced "vanilla" subclasses for each of the classes in the PHB. Taking a step beyond that and producing two or three suggested builds per class is not much harder. For example, to stay with an old classic, you might have a page that says "if you want to play a fighter, there are many different play styles. Three common ones are the sword and board tank, the two-handed weapon damage dealer and the archer. Here are suggested builds for each of these... And then with each subclass, you list a suggested build or two as well. They're probably not going to be optimal, but they'll give new players a solid starting point to say "OK, we'll I'll start with that so I don't feel overwhelmed." I would suggest, in terms of layout, they present one of these in line with each class description, and one per subclass too, and the others in an appendix for the print book, just so you don't have pages of sample characters to leaf through.

Old Skool Revisionists will scream. I'm not sure this is a pro or a con to be honest! D&D has evolved over the years. I'm old enough to have played it since the beginning and, in all honesty, I don't really hanker to go back. I don't miss the days of a wizard at first level going "I've cast my magic missile, now I'll get my staff out and join the combat with my d4 (rolled) hp." I know some people still play with rolled stats, but I honestly don't miss them either. Being able to choose where you assign your stats and make decisions about how you play, works better for me, even if it does encourage mini-maxing. Being stuck with a crap character because you rolled exactly on whatever the DM set as the limit for rerolling is no fun. They will scream because this absolutely, definitely, breaks the link between character class and role. You can't say any more than the barbarian does this, the fighter does that and so on. It's been moving that way anyway. But you can make a fighter who is a decent caster - at the expense of their HP - a barbarian who is a decent skills monkey and so on. Or you can make a sorcerer or wizard who is a decent front rank fighter (HP and all) with a limited spell repertoire but more than enough to be a solid Gish.