You Need a Teacher!-Training Rewards
The 5e Dungeon Master's Guide very briefly glosses over immaterial rewards, or at least rewards that are not magical items, gold, and other treasure. We can break these down to several different categories, among supernatural gifts, marks of prestige, and training. For the sake of today's article, as I am scratching down more interesting weapons for you guys currently, we will look at possible rewards of training.
"I Can Show You The Ways of the Force!"
(He can also show you how to be emo. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Disney/LucasFilm)
Dungeons and Dragons sort of assumes that your character is learning by doing. Perhaps they studied under a teacher once upon a time, but we often assume that they do not have someone directly overseeing their progress. Some variants insist on training, but there is never much mention of a teacher anywhere in the equation. If there is, they may be more of some random NPC who knows more than your character. Not to insult your game, or way of DMing, or DM (if you are a player), but that in itself is a missed roleplaying/story opportunity. Teachers are fantastic characters not just in fiction, but in real life. You can probably remember your teachers names you had throughout elementary school to highschool, in order, and what each one of them were like, or maybe that's just me. However, regardless of where we start out in Dungeons and Dragons, character classes will generally be the same minus subclasses.
Though what if we had some sort of nifty reward for characters seeking out wise and powerful teachers who can impart knowledge and skills to them? Perhaps they could offer skills, techniques, and spells of a by-gone era. Perhaps they developed a technique themselves, and have been waiting for someone to pass it on to? If only there were troves of things we could come up with to fill in stuff that we could include in our 5e games...
Oh my gosh! Previous editions of D&D? What are you guys doing here?... What's that? You're awesome sources of inspiration for old mechanics to reinvent?
Aside from this silly... aside, I'm not saying rewrite any old thing in previous editions. For example, say the party rogue is training with an old duelist for a little extra edge in combat. We can absolutely gift this player the Martial Adept feat at the end of this training montage/quest, but if you are a GM who prefers to give your players a unique experience each time and balance is important but your player's experience is paramount, you may struggle to come up with a unique gift.
Recently, I have started gifting players new, fun features based on material in previous examples. In my one-on-one game with my wife, one of her frequent characters, Anja, is an acrobatic thief who has sort of come into the unfortunate circumstance of dealing with a lot of heavily armed enemies, and when fights break out, she is often alone, as cat-burglar thieves tend to be. She has been training with the head acrobat of a travelling circus, that moonlights as a thieves' guild. By training with this character, Anja gained two new abilities. The first ability is the Sidestep Stance:
"As a bonus action, you may focus your acrobatic prowess into a defensive blur of movement against a single foe. For the next minute, you gain a bonus to your AC equal to your proficiency bonus against any ranged or melee attack against a creature of your choice within 30 feet of you. As long as you can see that creature, you benefit from this bonus to your AC. You may choose a different creature as a bonus action. Once you use this ability, you must finish a short rest or long rest before you can use it again." This may seem powerful, but it is meant to be useful regardless of level. Where we to make it a flat bonus, that bonus may be very well outclassed at higher levels, combining it with two caveats, the need to see the target, and the benefit is only against one opponent at a time. You may be asking, "Where did you get this from?"
The much hated 4e of course! Even though the game's fourth edition is much debated, there are definitely things I liked about it, and the ability to build a character the way you saw fit, was one of those fun aspects. That's one reason why people really enjoy 5e's Warlock- the ability to choose. Converting this to 5e was simple. Keep in mind, that this was only supposed to be once per day, but the key to remember is that powers (as they were called) were broken up by frequency in a different way. Abilities were at-will, encounter, and daily. Whenever you want, whenever you roll initiative they recharge, and once a day, respectively. 5e has a different "recharge" economy. Most abilities will recharge on a short or long rest depending on their power, however it also varies between class and flavor. Magic tends to usually recharge between long rest while extraordinary but mundane abilities usually recharge per short rest, unless they are numbered like the Barbarian's rage. However, there is a design flaw in "per long rest" features. Players often feel like there are few situations that warrant a use of something they can only use once per long rest. Segmented features like spellcasting mitigate this feeling, but single use features for one effect are hard to get the player to use. The point of these features should be to use them and to give the players the feeling that they have option to use. 4e managed this by giving the players multiple daily abilities. However, as this is 5e, making something dependent on a short rest, like action surge, isn't a bad choice. This ability fits the character both teaching it, and learning it, and thus we're done here. If balancing is an issue, we can always come back to it.
Mastering Magic
(Ron is salty that Hermoine has a higher Int modifier, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Warner Bros.)
You don't always need to rehash abilities for martial characters. Perhaps there is a spell you remember from AD&D, 3.5, or 4e that you feel may work for a pc in your game. Maybe they discover it in an old scroll, and they study and master this forgotten spell, or the last person to master such a spell offers to teach it. Spells are awesome extensions of the ideas of having options. We'll use another example of one I re-purposed for a player.
Umbral Touch Conjuration Level: 3 Range: Self Components: V, S Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute Umbral touch infuses one of your hands with dark, shadowy energy, allowing you to use your to make debilitating attacks. Make a melee spell attack against a creature within your reach. On a hit, the spell deals 3d8 points of necrotic damage to a target, which must succeed on a Constitution saving throw. On a failed saving throw, the target’s speed is halved, it takes a -2 penalty to attacks, AC, and ability checks and saving throws relying on Strength or Dexterity, and it can’t use reactions until this spell ends. At the end of it's turn, a creature affected by this spell can repeat its Constitution saving throw. Until the spell ends, you can make the attack again on each of your turns as an action.While this spell is active, you can make opportunity attacks with your umbral touch.
The original spell came from 3.5's Tome of Magic, and as you may be thinking, "3.5 was a mess, how did you remake it?" Well, I started with the original and compared it to two modern spells, Flame Blade and Vampiric Touch, while incorporating inspiration from Slow. Flame Blade lasts a long time for a spell, a whole ten minutes, where as Vampiric Touch lasts for a minute, but siphons half of it's damage as hit points for the caster. Slow partially debilitates the target's stats, while also tearing its action economy in half. To balance umbral touch, I incorporated a saving throw. 3d8 damage is already a lot and better than both Flame Blade and Vampiric Touch's damage, but with the damage being high, the trade-off is, the secondary effect can be avoided even if the target is hit. Yes, it slows their movement, but a -2 penalty is a weaker debuff than disadvantage, so even though it affects more than slow does, it only increases margins of failure by 10%, while still allowing the standard action economy minus reactions. Though, like any homebrew creation, we can still watch and make adjustments as we go. Players are usually more receptive to adjusting homebrew content in the name of balance more than anything else, just try not to have to change it too many times.
Limiting Learning
(Yoda silently judges Luke on his perception of limits, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Lucasfilm)
How do we regulate this system of learning new features and spells outside class progression? We can offer a few ways to do so because, fortunately for us, D&D offers a lot of built in parameters for accessing features. We might at first consider a character's Intelligence modifier to be a go to limit of learning, however that would be limiting to characters with lower Intelligence scores. Even with a low Intelligence, characters are still capable of learning. 5e offers us an excellent limiter: proficiency bonus. We could limit these extra abilities to proficiency bonuses, but when we inspect supernatural gifts in the coming weeks, we may feel that we want to incorporate a mix of both. Though, we may actually be more comfortable looking at these abilities through a different lens: Treat these extra abilities like you would treat magic items. The one bonus is you don't need to worry about attunement! Only the characters that learn these abilities can use them. My recommendation is any of these three:
A number of learned extra features equal to the character's proficiency bonus.
A number of learned extra features equal to the character's proficiency bonus + Intelligence modifier.
No limits!
It is up to the GM to determine when to stop allowing these abilities. After all, the same nutjob is handing you magic items. What should set these apart is that they should suit the character. They are a neat way of curbing that "perfect build" mindset or constantly needing a new subclass or multiclass combo to make a character perfect. These little additions add flavor to each character pretty nicely. Just remember, do or do not, there is no try. Happy gaming everyone!