Level Up Gateway April Dev Update (and OPEN ALPHA!)
With the Bard, Sorcerer and Druid levels 6 - 10 added all classes are now available up to level 10 and we can start opening up the Gateway platform to a public alpha—it’s just gone live and you can try it right now!
Bard
The Bard grants a variety of features at levels 6 - 10. One that stood out during implementation on Gateway was the 8th level Battle Hymn Specialization which grants new uses for your bardic inspiration and interacts with spellcasting and battle hymns.
Sorcerer
For the sorcerer one interesting implementation was the 9th level Rapturous Presence feature with the “Larger Than Life” option. This grants a sorcerer advantage in intimidation checks when threatening someone with magic but on a failure the feature ceases to function until you “prove your reputation again” so we added a checkbox to the feature and toggle the advantage option based on it.
Druid
The Druid class is filled with an incredible number of choices between levels 6 and 10. At level 6 both the Guardian and Treespeaker archetypes offer three different options for their archetype features. And later at level 10 a Guardian Druid gets another option to either learn any of those options from level 6 or learn an enhancement to the option they already picked. One of those options is especially interesting because of how far reaching its effects are—the Treespeaker’s level six Primal Vitality feature has an option called Insidious Nature:
You gain a new Unarmed Strike action with poison damage.
Your spell save DC is increased by 2 when casting a spell of the poison school.
Whenever a spell you cast or a creature you’ve summoned deals poison damage it deals an extra 1d6 damage.
Adding an action is simple enough: we have a flag for Unarmed Strike actions so that features that interact with them specifically can identify them (like the Adept’s 1st level Martial Arts feature). Pictured here, a Druid with the Unarmed Strike from Insidious Nectar has one level in the Adept class and so the action uses Dexterity for the attack roll.
For the spells Gateway checks all the spells on the sheet; for spells with saves and the Poison school we add a modifier to the save which you can see in the breakdown when the spell is expanded:
And for spells in the Summoning school we add a note to the description about the poison damage because we can’t know whether the spell can summon a creature that deals poison damage—but a reminder is helpful in case it can.
Public Alpha
Implementing level 10 across the board was our goal before starting a public alpha test for Level Up Gateway opening up beyond the backers of the original Level Up Kickstarter. We have now removed the invite requirement for new accounts so that anyone can sign up for an account and start creating characters for free.
We would like to get feedback from as many people as possible so if you know anyone who might like to try Level Up with a character builder please let them know!