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The Searcher class for 5e

This is something I wrote up years ago but the forums I posted it to are now dead as disco so I'm rewriting it here. It's inspired by Searchers of the Unknown, by Three Sixteen Carnage among the Stars, and it's anti-inspired by Black Hack and Microlite 5e, as in the latter two provoked me into writing this as a reaction to them.

“The Searcher” character sheet.

This is a class for 5e that is stripped waaaaaay down. As in, it doesn’t even have Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis or Cha way down.

It’s designed to be able to sit shoulder to shoulder with very

complicated builds of the normal classes. Yes, you can run a mixed table of searchers and weird full feat multiclass shenanigans normal characters. That’s the intent.

It’s stronger in some ways and weaker in others but in a way that is fine.

You look up your level in the table on the right to see how many HP you have, what your attack bonus is, and your ability bonus is and you fill those three boxes in.

People who remember the “fighting ability” and “non-fighting ability“ from Three Sixteen are free to nod along at this point♥

Basically that’s what this is: to attack you roll attack bonus, to do anything else, like saving throws, skill checks etc you roll ability bonus.

Then in “damage dealt” you write 1d8+your ability bonus, and under Hit Dice you write in [your level] d10, so on third level you write 3d10.

For groups using defense rolls, you defend with your ability bonus too (I know it is technically “fighting”, but, it’s not attacking so it uses the ability bonus.) For groups that use AC, your AC is twelve plus your ability bonus.

Use your imagination to describe your attacks! Divine smiting, spear attacks, sword fencing, fireballs, beautiful bird song, IDGAF!

When I have a new player who I think is gonna get into D&D fully, I give them a choice of pregens of real characters instead of this.

If I have a guest player or someone who I think is not gonna get into the nerdy stuff about subclasses and spell choices and ability scores, I give them this, the Searcher. Who knows, maybe they switch to a full character later or maybe they stick with this?