A New Evolution: The Mutophage V2
Hey Guys! So I'm Not Quite Dead yet! After nearly 2 years of playtesting, and several additional months of work redeveloping, I present the second full edition of the Mutophage! This one isn't as drastic a rework as some of my other classes have gotten recently, such as the Prizefighter and Hollower. But it does represent a serious update to the mechanics of the class, especially the all-important mutations. In previous version of the mutophage, Each mutation effectively worked like a spell powered by your hit points. you primed mutations in the same way you might prepare spells, and overall, I was just unhappy with how similar the class was starting to feel to a wizard. There was also a major issue with early game survivability, not only because the hit points you are spending for mutations count a lot more when you have so few at first and second level, but because the class lacked early game access to defensive abilities like the barbarian unarmored defense. And the fact that you had to waste mutations on specific natural weapons just to compete with other classes in damage wasn't great either. To solve all of this, I basically went back to the drawing board with the mutations. Admittedly, when I initially designed the class, 90% of mutations were copied direct from my Necroficer class, with only slight alterations. this seemed like a good idea at the time, but the issue came in that those mutations were still balanced for stacking on top of multiple monsters controlled by the Player, rather for expanding the capabilities of a single PC. The First thing I did was separate out all the weapon mutations. The unnatural weapon feature had been developed as sort of an afterthought, but I honestly liked the flexibility it gave, and opted to just define natural weapons with their own weapons table, rather than making claws, teeth, and similar each their own mutation. After that, I took to addressing the way mutations scaled with level. There were a lot of mutations that really needed to be available a lot sooner than they were, but I had gated them behind prerequisites and high cost to prevent abusing things like flight being early game evolutions. A lot of mutations also felt like natural progressions of other mutations. and that gave me an idea. In the new version, each mutation has 2-3 teirs, which can be activated by spending increasing number of hit dice. The tier 1 effects of each mutation are relatively simple, and work well as Evolutions, but the more hit dice you pour into a mutation, the more powerful the effects become. I tried to group effects based on a progression of flavor, rather than just pure mechanics. This helps create a spread of unique abilities, and encourages diversification rather than forcing the player to only take mutations that fit a specific mechanical build. At the end of the day, the number of individual mutations dropped from about 55 to around 35, but the total number of unique effects (no longer counting natural weapons) increased to 89. Because the player can now get more variety out of fewer mutations, the number of mutations the mutophage knows at each level has dropped by about half, and the need to prime a subset of those mutations each day like a wizard does their spells is gone. Once you know a mutation, you just know it. Evolutions changed a bit too. You get your first evolution earlier now, and have more total than you did before. Evolutions also no longer remain permanently active (this just wasn't viable with some mutation tiers) instead, they reduce the number of hit dice you have to spend when activating a specific mutation. Each evolution still leaves a visible deformity related to the mutation it is used for, but the exact nature of this deformity is up to you and your DM Preview images above are low resolution, and do not contain all 29 pages. For the latest high-resolution PDF, as well as a whole host of other work I have done, check out this handy dropbox link. And be sure to tell me what you think!
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