The Witch Class Homebrew for D&D 5e

The Witch Class is a homebrewed class that I have been continuously working on for Dungeons and Dragons 5e since 2021. I am proud of it as it has gone through very rigorous playtesting and I have learned a lot while making it!

The core idea of the class when I began working on it was a desire to give Dungeons and Dragons a new kind of spellcaster that had magic that resembled Wiccan practices and felt more like actual Witchcraft. To this end, the first major mechanic I set to figuring out was how to make Ritual Casting during Combat sections plausible and interesting for players. From there, many more mechanics were added to give texture to the Witch class itself.

In it's current iteration, the class can feel a bit bloated and difficult to understand. It has multiple different mechanics, resources, and crafting features built into the core, while the subclasses have interesting themes but languish in content. In my next major reworking of the project, I plan to solve these by digging further into what each of these subclasses can bring, and then breaking out the complexity of the main class into each of the subclasses.

For example, currently, any Witch could: Cast complex Rituals, Summon powerful familiars, Take on powerful magical forms, Brew unique potions, Craft magical items, and more. Since the class has six subclasses, each one loosely themed around different types of D&D Hags, the idea would be to give the base class access to minor versions of these features, with the different subclasses expanding a specific mechanic greatly. The subclass based on Green Hags could be far better at Potion Brewing than the others, and the one based on Annis Hags could be better at taking on magical forms, the like.

For playtesting it, much of it was done in an actual-play setting. A friend of mine had chosen to run a campaign, in this instance Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and I had chosen to use this as a chance to playtest this homebrew in a setting that mirrored how players would actually experience the content. I was not the only person testing the class, as another player wished to do so as well. This proved very useful, as I could see how our different playstyles worked in favor of the class, and even revealed oversights of mine that I corrected in future revisions. One of the biggest oversights of mine was not putting a bottom cap on certain features, so a character with a negative Wisdom modifier could end up absolutely screwing themselves in multiple scenarios by being even worse than sub-optimal. This was a particularly helpful revelation to me, because it showed where I would need to put slight "guard-rails" in the design to prevent such a build from being unpleasant to experience. Because of this playtesting format, levels 1-8 of the class are the most thoroughly developed, as that was the level range the campaign was working in.

I've been spending a lot of time editing the class in a Google Doc for ease of editing, but once it gets to a more finished state, I am going to move it over into a new format to be cleaned up and appear more official, and I am currently contemplating releasing it on services like DMsGuild.

Currently, I am considering updating the class to be compatible with the 2024 Revised rules for D&D 5e.

Header Image: Art of my Witch character, Morrigan Thistleblight. Artwork done by Microraptor13.