u/Equal_Cartoonist8838

The Kennel Master is a fully nonmagical martial class for 2014 D&D 5e built around fighting alongside persistent, trainable hounds. Rather than summoned companions or disposable stat blocks, your hounds are individual members of the pack: they level alongside you, develop their own specialisations, and can even be permanently lost. In combat, the class revolves around positioning and coordinating attacks between handler and hound, while different hound specialisations let you build toward damage, defence, or support

I’ve been developing and playtesting this for a while now, and I’m at the point where I’d really appreciate some outside eyes on it—particularly around balance, action economy, and anything that looks exploitable in actual play

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a homebrew martial class built around fighting alongside and training persistent non-magical hounds, and I think it’s finally at the point where I’d like to put it in front of people who haven’t been involved in designing it.

The main idea behind the Kennel Master is that the hounds are actual companions rather than summons or disposable stat blocks. They have their own hound levels, develop their own specializations, and can be injured or permanently killed. A replacement starts inexperienced and has to be trained back up.

Combat is built primarily around Coordinated Attack, where the Kennel Master and a hound combine their attacks to trigger additional effects. At higher levels you can maintain two hounds, with three different specializations:

• Ravager — offensive/target disruption
• Bulwark — tanking and battlefield control
• Hearthound — support and protecting allies

The class does not follow strict standardized Dnd models where the player character gains a subclass but instead your hound specializations are how you would choose different build paths and playstyles. There’s no spell casting or magical pet summoning — I wanted the class to feel like someone who has become exceptionally good at training and fighting alongside working animals.

I’ve done quite a bit of damage/balance testing against the existing martial classes, but obviously designing your own class makes it very easy to miss interactions or assumptions that seem obvious to you.

So I’d particularly appreciate feedback on balance, action economy, unclear wording, exploitable interactions, multiclass problems, and anything that looks stronger/weaker in actual play than it does on paper.

This is Playtest v1.0, so criticism is very welcome. I’d rather find the things that break now than defend something just because I wrote it.

Full class PDF below.