This article is a quick run-down of the sidekick rules as they’re presented in Dragon of Icespire Peak and how they've evolved in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. Sidekicks have actually undergone a major revamp in Tasha's! This subsystem is now so robust that you could play entire sessions of D&D with sidekicks as heroes, if you wanted-but they also work perfectly for their original purpose of supporting the main characters on their adventures. However, these rules will also appear in updated and expanded form in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. They start at 1st level, just like characters, and can advance up to 6th level-a limitation likely imposed because the boxed set itself only advances the characters to 6th level. In that set, there are three types of sidekicks: the expert, the spellcaster, and the warrior. Sidekicks were first introduced in Dragon of Icespire Peak, the adventure included in the boxed set D&D Essentials Kit. If you expect a character to tag along with the party for a while and want them to grow over the course of their adventures, then sidekicks are the perfect way to model these NPCs!
When you’re just playing a single adventure, using an nonplayer character stat block from appendix A of the Monster Manual like guard or scout for an NPC is just fine. Or, you’re a player and you’re in search of hirelings to help you out as you explore the infamous Tomb of Horrors. You’re a Dungeon Master, and your party has grown to love one of your NPCs and wants to invite them to help on their adventures. It’s up to you and the DM to decide who controls the sidekick in play. The DM will either tell you which type of sidekick to use or let you choose one. Warrior, a martial companion who specializes in striking your foes or defending you and your allies Spellcaster, a magic-user who can cast spells to harm your foes or heal you and your friends This appendix presents the game statistics for sidekicks, of which there are three types:Įxpert, an agile and exceedingly helpful jack of all trades More time than any of us are happy about.On your adventures, the DM might reveal that you’ve befriended a special character called a sidekick, who joins your party. It has come back to haunt them, and they’ve been slowly untangling the monolith and building out mini services with more flexibility, but it takes time. They knew that, but it was what they had at the time. One of the main developers said a year or more ago that when they first built DDB, they built it on/in infrastructure that was near obsolete at the time. It is also my assessment (from the outside, as a customer with some database experience, but no programming/coding experience) that when they built the original,system, they didn’t not build in much flexibility. That rebuilding takes time because they are tinkering with a live system and can’t take it down for the rewrite.
They have a LOT of things on the “to do” list, many of which require rebuilding huge chunks of the backend/core of the system. I’m sure it’s still on the roadmap/future plans.
The last post here was a year ago, is it still in the works? The only tricky thing is the formatting for making the dice notations rollable, but there’s a handy spreadsheet another user made that creates that “code” for (generic) you.ĭid a builder get made? Love that idea. As homebrew goes, it pretty easy, as attacks, features, etc. While we wait for a sidekick system (which they hope to build eventually), I’m doing what was suggested above: homebrewing sidekicks. (One of my players, for example, has a wolf warrior sidekick). (It wasn’t just sidekicks Tasha’s added a number of subclasses with “pets”) Plus, Tasha’s rules allow for sidekicks to start from a wide range of races AND beasts, then add class features. With the advent of Tasha’s, they decided that to continue to use the kludge of creating monster statblocks for such things wasn’t feasible-they would be filling up the monsters sections with things that weren’t actually monsters. Honestly, I'm interested why the sidekicks haven't been updated to add level 13-20 after the release of Tasha's.īecause the existing sidekicks in the system are from Dragon of Icespire Peak, and Tasha’s sidekicks are not the same.