Hot take: I can’t stand the word “dunamancy”. I don’t care for critical role, so maybe it’s justified somehow (or maybe just if someone I liked said it a lot I’d learn to let it go), but as it is, it hate it. It’s not duna/dyna- (physical force or potential energy) it’s not a -mancy (a form of divination), and it sounds like a cringelord teenager’s invented name for sand magic. Plus now that it’s canonized, I have to argue with every group I run for that my setting doesn’t subscribe to the many-worlds theory and that is not an acceptable flavour for their magic in my game.
Anyway to answer the question, I once saw a class entirely reflavoured from top to bottom as a Chronomancer. You probably think it was a wizard or a warlock or something, but no, it was the Battle Master Fighter.
Weapon/armour proficiency and extra ASIs were because they did extra training in a personal timeloop. Second Wind was a short personal rewind, Action Surge was a personal fast-forward. Most of their maneuvers were various manipulations of time; rewinding themself to parry, slowing the enemy for precision strike, looping themself for feinting strike, rewinding an ally for rally.
I don’t remember all the flavour, but god dang it was cool.
Much as I’m generally not keen on CR stuff and will never not be salty about them accidentally turning D&D firbolgs into cow folk, the name “dunamancy” is actually a bit better than that. It’s just based on another meaning of the Greek word that “dyna-” comes from. This version is better translated as “potentiality” or “possibility”. Aristotle used it for a bunch of stuff, so it got brought into English with that meaning as “dunamis”. The -mancy bit is definitely just because fantasy stuff uses it to mean any magic though
I honestly wasn’t aware it was a Critical Role thing until I posted this.
Wow that fighter is awesome. I’ll add it to the list of characters I would play if I wasn’t a forever DM.
So wait, you’re telling me I could just be walking down the street, minding my own business, when some jerkass wizard from another universe merges our realities or whatever to heal my doppelganger? I’m out 6 HP because of some guy who doesn’t live in my universe and I don’t even like got hurt?
I’m imagining as a consequence to doing this all the time, eventually the wizard is going to have a class action lawsuit against them from all the innocent bystanders they’ve hurt. And just imagine the legal complexity of serving all these suits across different universe’ legal codes. This wizard’s going to be bogged down for an eternity in the courts.
In all the multiverse, there’s got to be someone who specializes in parallel-universe case law. A Parallelalegal, if you will.
Damn, this gives me an idea for a PC: Raz is a novice dunamancer who believes he has the worst luck in the world until he realizes that his wealthy and successful alternate self has been manipulating fate to always be in HIS favor instead. Now the only thing Raz wants is to find and kill his other self and take back what fate owes him.
