Variant Classes and Spell Points

We have received many requests for instructions on how to modify existing classes to change some aspect of an existing class, especially around published variants of classes like the revised Ranger. While it is possible to change an existing class that can quickly get confusing since you likely don’t want to use just the modified class. Creating a copy of an existing class mostly works, but doesn’t copy the subclasses or support new subclasses without lots of manual copying. To support this scenario, we introduced variant classes in this week’s update.

Variant classes are versions of classes that can be modified as needed, but share the subclasses of the base class. Typically a variant class will be created by copying the base class as a variant and then making changes to the new class. Subclasses will be the full list of subclasses of the base class, including any new subclasses created for the variant. Note: new subclasses will appear for both the base class and the variant independent of which class is selected to create the subclass. This feature makes it easy to create all of those Ranger variants out there.

Spell Points

Variant rules to allow spellcasting based on points instead of spell slots have been a frequent request. It is now possible to configure a class to use spell points instead of spell slots for either spellcasters or pact magic users.

There are some ambiguities in those rules though that we have tried to address to make spell casting work in a fully integrated fashion.

Pact Magic. There are no clear rules on pact magic. Our implementation converts the pact slots into the equivalent number of points based on the number of pact slots and their slot level. These points recover on a short rest just like pact slots.

Multiclassing. Since any split of spell slots and points would seriously penalize the character, if any of the classes use spell points they are used for all classes. Points are less common yet more flexible, so this seemed like the right call.

Limits on high-level spells. Some implementations define limits on the number spells of 6th level and higher spells that can be cast each day. Shard does not track or limit these uses.

In conjunction with this release, we are providing a free product, Spell Point Class Variants, that contains spell point variants for all of the SRD spellcasting classes.

We look forward to your feedback on these changes.

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