I have a player who is running a bard with the Master of Masks archetype, a homebrew found online.
It allows a player to spend 8 hrs and 100 gp to create a mask they can wear that grants them different abilities, as well as changing the appearence of their alignment. I glanced over it and thought it cool so allowed it.
It doesn't give much to the player other than an odd kind of utility. It also costs 100 gold to use any of the masks listed in the class.
My player, at level 3, spent all of his gold and 8 hours and created the Dragon mask, which imitates the dragonborn's breath weapon.
It allows him, as an action, to breath fire in a 15 ft cone, causing targets to make a dex save. On a fail, targets take 4d6 fire damage. It then goes on cooldown for 1d4 rounds. This is what he gets at level three.
I'm concerned this may be more power at that level than I feel comfortable allowing. The barbarian can do around the same damage range at level 3 with a combination of rage and frenzy (path of the beserker) and they don't have to pay the 100 gold.
Does this seem too overpowered for level 3?
Best Answer
This particular ability is quite strong; it's identical to a Burning Hands spell cast from a 2nd-level spell slot. This is, of course, a power normally available to many characters at level 3. However, those characters can only cast it twice per day, where the Master of Masks can use it an unlimited number of times.
While the recharge limitation slows down the number of uses, the DMG suggests characters should be dealing with six to eight encounters per day. So even if the Master of Masks only gets to use this power once per encounter, they're still using it 3 or 4 times as often as anyone else could.
Leaving aside this specific ability, the archetype as a whole is not really balanced. It has a "lite" version of many of the other class's main features, as well as some powerful abilities specific to itself. The Bard is already one of the most versatile classes, and this would make it definitively the most versatile by a long shot.
As a final note, with this many different features available, there is almost certainly the potential for game-breaking builds hidden with the archetype, particularly since it only requires 3 levels to acquire any of the class's features a character might want. Extensive analysis would be required to guarantee this class as "safe" to use, but due to the sheer number of options available to it, that kind of analysis would be extremely time-consuming.