Little changes, big returns: Alt Ghil
Homebrew, house rules, rule of cool: these are various terms for winging it, for making small changes to the rules of 5e in order to have fun. Often they were used for rulings made by the DM to make actions by the characters better attune to their, well, character: to let them do something not normally detailed or allowed in the basic rules. But it can start at character creation as well.
We will use Ghil, who we just described, to take a look at ways players and DMs can work together to make small changes that can have a big return on the investment made to customize the rules to fit the players’ concept of their character.
Reimagining Classes and Subclasses
Letting players be truly creative and come up with new ideas for their characters can be one of the most fun things for DMs and players to cooperate on doing. Ambitious DMs may do the work to create completely new options for their players including species, classes, subclasses, feats, origins, etc. But often, just making a few conceptual tweaks, or minor changes to features, can work and be a lot quicker and easier.
We already looked at how to create new species using the human species when we created Ghil as an urchin without making a new species.
Damage types are one way to make a minor change to spells and abilities to help a player fit their character’s abilities to their concept. We talked about this a little in the Character Themes entry. There are two primary ways to look at this.
First, any damage type can be changed to another as a DM sees fit. Say a prayer doesn’t like Force to be the damage type of their shillelagh spell, let them change it. Now, if they do, it will actually limit the spell more than enhance it since force is the least resisted damage type; even more reason to let them. If they are willing to give up some ‘power’ in some cases where their damage could be resisted let them change it to thunder, or another elemental damage like fire or cold or lightning. Heck, even necrotic could work depending how the character is described. It may not make sense initially for a primordial nature connected character to do necrotic, but maybe their character is connected to the harvest and winter cycles, or their theme is fungal, or even nature’s wrath. If a cleric gets fire-based spells let them be radiant, or vice versa.
Second, if—especially if—their subclass already gives them new spells or features that do a damage type their class normally doesn’t get access to: let them use that damage type in spells on their class spell list that don’t normally include it as an option. It would make as much sense for a Gloom Stalker ranger who gets power from the Shadowfell to do necrotic vs. psychic—maybe more sense as psychic makes more sense for a fey source (which the Fey Wander already gets, thus further differentiating the two subclasses). Start with Hunter’s Mark. Why do Force damage when your bonus damage is psychic? Why not double down on the psychic or necrotic theme? Let their Ensnaring Strike and Spike Growth manifest like Arms of Hadar or Everard’s Black Tentacles and be aberrant tentacles that do force or psychic or necrotic damage.
The main thing a DM needs to be careful of is tweaking things too much. In some cases things like damage types are limited for a reason and changing it could wildly affect the power level through stacking abilities that weren’t meant to. This isn’t about min/maxing or optimizing, but just creating a character thematically that makes sense and carries over into their primary abilities.
An Alternate Ghil ‘Grimeye’
We already said that Ghil is a rogue, and will use psionic or psychic powers. You will have to wait to read what that pretty obvious choice will be, but there are other class routes we could have taken. The ranger class, with the Gloom Stalker subclass—with the psychic damage bonus from dreadful strikes—would be another great and obvious option and work really well. But Ghil is not a ‘wise’ character and it wouldn’t make sense to have to put a high ability score in Wisdom as needed by rangers. He could also be a Psi-warrior Fighter, but their damage is force, not psychic. Warlocks have a psychic option from the Great Old One patron, but Ghil is not sworn to an otherworldly being: his powers are innate. Sorcerer is the class that offers the ability to make psychic attacks using innate power through the Aberrant sorcery option. But, while this is a powerful option, thematically some of the primary sorcerer abilities are not supported by pursuing a psychic damage type sorcerer. However, a Cooperative DM may make some concessions for the player to resolve these issues.
Psychic Sorcery tweaks
The Aberrant Sorcery subclass gives psychic powers spells and abilities. Gaining spells like Dissonant Whispers and already having access to Mind Sliver give them offensive spells that do Psychic damage type. But for the most part, their primary spells that take advantage of being a sorcerer, two of the iconic sorcerer spells of 5e, do not give the ability to do psychic damage: Sorcerous Burst and Chromatic Orb. This is because sorcerers are seen as primal magic types, similar to druids, who mostly do elemental damage. But this subclass is so tuned to psionic and psychic powers that it should include the subclass features the ability to cast some additional spells, like the two above, as Psychic.
If I was a DM and player wanted to play an Aberrant Sorcery sorcerer, at minimum I would allow both of these spells to be cast doing Psychic damage, and I would be open to some other spells being able to be swapped. If I was to play Ghil as an Aberrant Sorcerer, I would talk to the DM about this. Yes, I know that there is a Metamagic option for this: Transmuted Spell allows a sorcerer to change the damage type, but this also does not include Psychic damage (Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, Poison, and Thunder). As DM I would start with the two listed above as freebies, then any other spells I would let them include Psychic as one of the damage types of Transmuted Spell.
While these tweaks would amp up his psychic power, in the end, Ghil is more of a skill than combat focused character, and the loss of proficiencies by not being a rogue—even with origin feat options that could help—is too much of a stray from his concept so I would, and will, stick with rogue as his primary class. However, it could be interesting to look at Multiclassing into sorcerer for more psychic abilities than he will get.
