Path of War Draconic Discipline [WIP]

[CGNefarious]

So after seeing Lords of the Night, Lords of the Wild, and Lords of the Mists, I gained hopes of a continuation of the series to some of my favorite types of fantasy creatures. My favorite D&D creature has always been the dragon (it's cliche, so sue me) and I really do hope that Dreamscarred Press will eventually do a Lords of the Scale type supplement in the future. But in the meantime I decided to start on my first ever homebrew, my own draconic themed discipline for the Path of War system.


For now, I'm calling this discipline Scaled Tyrant (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cA4viy-d6kfL3IAF3aURt-zBBBlNOpD58ZkjWAyGIVY/edit?usp=sharing). The name is a working title, as are most things in the discipline.


The concept is fairly simple, and borrows a lot of ideas from already existing Path of War disciplines. The first thing I wanted to give this discipline was the fairly strong dragon themed stances. At early levels they're pretty simple, but the higher level stances give you more and more dragon-like abilities until you can eventually take the form of a dragon.

Another big thing for this discipline was the breath weapons. I wanted to give access to breath like attacks as maneuvers, so they can be used even by people who choose not to take the form of a dragon. But I also wanted it to be a focus of the discipline, so I added special boosts that only interact with breath weapons and breath weapon maneuvers. These include extending the range of your breath weapon, increasing the damage of your breath weapon, and even completely changing the effects of your breath weapon to offer more utility. Since these boost can only be used in conjunction with breath weapons, I wanted to make sure their restrictive nature was offset by their usefulness, but I also don't want to make them too powerful. Unfortunately game balance isn't exactly my strong suit, so these are likely to change (so is the rest of the discipline, but that's beside the point).

I also blatantly ripped off the major theme of Elemental Flux where your active element will determine the damage type and special effects of certain maneuvers. The difference here is that when you gain access to Scaled Tyrant you have to choose a dragon type, and once chosen it cannot ever be changed. This will make the discipline considerably less flexible, and your dragon choice will be much more important, but by sacrificing flexibility I want to give the added effects a little more omph. Again, not too much, because I don't want to upset balance, but enough to make this discipline competitive with the other Path of War disciplines of similar natures. Currently I'm only working on options for the five chromatic dragon types, and coming up with special effects for just those five is difficult enough as it is. But after I get the basics of the discipline down and figure out everything for the chromatics, I do want to add in options for the metallic dragons.

I'm also considering doing a prestige class that will help a disciple truly embody what it means to be a dragon. Unfortunately the name Dragon Disciple is already taken. :smallfrown: But I can worry about that once I have the actual discipline completed.

Comments have been enabled on the Google Doc and I both welcome and would greatly appreciate any criticisms or suggestions you all may have, either on the doc itself or in this thread. Like I said, this is my first homebrew, so I'm bound to be making a lot of mistakes that would be obvious to the more experienced of you. Thank you all in advance.

[Thealtruistorc]

Seems interesting so far, and I could certainly envision a character being built around this concept. However, I would advise creating extended descriptions for the maneuvers and coming up with names for them all asap.

Also, I would advise style feats rather than a prestige class, as they open up easier accessibilty. Maybe the first could grant a breath weapon while the others could allow integration of your breath weapon into martial strikes.

Also, just choose a damage type rather than explicitly associating each with a type of dragon. I like the idea of a zealot who becomes a psionic dragon.

[CGNefarious]

Seems interesting so far, and I could certainly envision a character being built around this concept. However, I would advise creating extended descriptions for the maneuvers and coming up with names for them all asap.

Thanks. I'll work on getting full descriptions and names for them first thing next week. Naming everything actually scares me more than coming up with different abilities for the different dragon types.


Also, I would advise style feats rather than a prestige class, as they open up easier accessibility. Maybe the first could grant a breath weapon while the others could allow integration of your breath weapon into martial strikes.

The reason I decided on doing a prestige class was because when I was brainstorming this initial concept with a friend, she mentioned that I was trying to do far too much for just a discipline. Disciplines shouldn't define the character more than their actual class does, but I was trying to make it that way. A prestige class could just fit with my ideas better I think. That said, I will probably try to do style feats as well. They're always fun. Though I don't think giving breath weapons are the way to go for them, since you have three breath weapon maneuvers and two stances that also give breath weapons. But maybe something to run off of that.


Also, just choose a damage type rather than explicitly associating each with a type of dragon. I like the idea of a zealot who becomes a psionic dragon.

I see what you're saying. It certainly would be a lot less work to have just five or six energy types that are related to dragons and have the abilities based off of those types. But there are two reasons I'm reluctant to do that. The first is that such a set up would be almost identical to Elemental Flux. The second is that by doing it that way, it feels more like you're picking an element than a dragon type. That's why there are so many Green Dragon Disciples. They're picking it because it gets a cone of acid, which is mechanically the (arguably) best choice. In pathfinder each dragon type has a certain personality to it and a certain set of abilities associated with it. When I wrote the Alternative Breath maneuver I had the bestiary open and was taking notes, writing down specific themes and abilities related to each color. I feel like that makes it not only more interesting, but also makes the choice feel like much more than just picking an element and breath shape.

But that could be stemming from my own personal bias that more options is generally preferable to too few options. I don't want this discipline to be too overly complicated, so while I currently plan to stick to dragon types, I'll still keep your suggestion in mind.

Thank you for the input. I'll spend some time next week trying to get this fully fleshed out. I just want to make sure the basic ideas are neither bad nor boring, and that I'm not completely missing something.

[Xzoltar]

Seem really interesting, will wait for more for sure

[Elricaltovilla]

Stances should be at maneuver levels 1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8. They were standardized in PoW:E.