Expanded Optional Class Features!
Over my time playing 5e there's a few small tweaks I've wanted to make to the core classes, below are just a few of the tweaks I personally use at my tables!
Below are optional class features for Barbarians, Clerics, Monks, Paladins, Rangers and Warlocks, with reasoning given for them all
Rage stops barbarians casting spells, but that leaves races that get spells a little high and dry, not able to use their spells in most fights, this is intended to fix that. Nothing super crazy, but tiefling barbarians will have just a little more fun.
The latest barbarian playtests have let barbarians use bonus actions to keep raging, and let them rage for 10 minutes. While I think this doesn't really work thematically, it made me realise Rage probably shouldn't be as limited either. Will this come up much, not really, but it's a little less tracking and it's more thematic.
Force damage is becoming a lot more common on higher CR monsters, so having resistance to it for barbarians is pretty important. It's a fix to the main problem I have with barbarians, like I spoke about in THIS tumblr post.
Channel Divinity: Spirit Guardians
Once again this is a fix to my biggest problem with the class, I don't really think turn undead is thematic for all clerics, but I think the spirit guardians spell both is pretty thematic for all clerics (or can easily be reflavoured to be), and is such a must pick for the class, it should just be built in, so this does! Scales with your proficiency bonus so it'll stay useful at all levels, and frees up your third level slots for something else
Monks need more ki points, and while this might look like it's giving them less at first, the recharge on this is a lot better, you might have less ki points overall, but you'll have all of them for all every combat
Similarly to overflowing ki, monks deserve a better capstone, so this is it, a constant flow of ki points, so you can always do what you need in a fight
Again a fix to my biggest problem with paladins. The source of sorcerers power is their subclass, so they get it at level 1, same with clerics and warlocks, so why not paladins? This feature, while not doing anything mechanical, helps the thematics of paladins immensely
Potentially the first part of a full ranger rework, rangers need a better feature than Favoured Enemy, and this is it. In an ideal world rangers would have a core class feature like this that subclasses could build off...... maybe....
Survivalist's Spellcasting
Another fix, rangers are the masters of the wilderness, they should be able to prepare for any situation.... but no, they're known casters, well no longer
The final fix I've spoken about before, it's such a must-have, that it just needs to be a class feature. Plus having it be a class feature means it doesn't scale with multiclassing which helps a lot (still not quite enough to stop hexblades, but I've got another fix there
Warlocks were int based in the D&DNext playtests, and they still absolutely make sense to be, so this just does that!
