I want to create a 5e custom class based on being a doctor, but not necessarily a magic healer...

I want to create a 5e custom class based on being a doctor, but not necessarily a magic healer. My basic idea is to essentially "cast spells" through syringes or something that need to be prepared beforehand based on level like spell slots, and need ingredients/time to prepare. I haven't prepared anything, but i wanted to get an idea of where to go with this. How do i go about homebrewing a whole class? Does the syringe sort of thing seem fun/appropriate? Should the doctor be a front line healer actually going in and keeping people alive and using harmful syringes on their enemies? If you were DM, would you allow something along these lines if it was balanced?

>custom class based on being a doctor, but not necessarily a magic healer
You are going to have a bad time

I should probably specify what I mean by these "syringes"
Think single target "spells", many of which will be renamed/edited spells converted to be applied with a syringe. I'm kind of thinking something along the lines of warlock where they cast at their highest level and recharge at short rest, but if ingredients are needed/can only be used in melee then there should be some sort of power compensation? As well the class would have no cantrips so I'm really not sure where to go from here.

You could just do something similar to the healer feat that scales with levels. Not really sure where else you could go with it.

Sounds like you want to be an alchemist. You could try converting from another system

Biomancer alchemist?

Why would medicine even advance to such a stage where you can heal someones sword-wounds when you have perfectly good magic around?

This, really. In your standard D&D setting, conventional medical techniques wouldn't advance much past advanced emergency care since the most efficient way of healing someone is a load and go to the nearest cleric.

This is of course assuming clerics are commonplace in the setting.

Just reflavor cleric, dumbass

Cleric to the God of Medicine.

Casts healing spells but also researches mundane medicine in the hopes that one day commoners won't need to rely on the clergy. The irony that they would then need to rely on doctors is not lost on them.

I looked at the alchemist in PF, thinking I could convert it, while it's similar to my idea its focused on bombs and such.

Probably will just reflavor the cleric. Will it change the way the game works at all if I cast healing spells and such but flavor it as using mundane medicine? It seems kind of stupid but I dislike conventional healers and want to do something a little different

That LotR supplement for 5e from the One Ring has a non-magical heal-bitch class. It'd be really easy to refluff his touch-heal to syringes.

>Will it change the way the game works at all if I cast healing spells and such but flavor it as using mundane medicine?

Well it kind of flies in the face of the way healing works in D&D. There is a Medicine or a Healing skill but IIRC it's mostly used to stabilize people rather than actually heal HP.

There's also the problem of articulating how you administer this healing and why it's so effective. A cleric can cast Cure Wounds on someone in the middle of combat and that person's HP will restore that round. How does that work if you're, what, giving them a tetanus shot? It's still basically magic healing but you're just being contrarian about it.

I don't like being the "have you tried not playing D&D guy" but what you seem to want to do might be better suited for a generic system.

Just take the alchemist spellcasting from pathfinder and apply it to the bard or something.

I don't see why you'd hombebrew an entire class when all you plan on doing is making a custom spell list

>If you were DM, would you allow something along these lines if it was balanced?

Only in a light-hearted setting. Syringes are fragile even when made of plastic, making them out of glass means that the odds that any of them will survive are very slim unless they're packed inside of a lot of soft material, in which case you're talking about having an entire chest full of them to have even a dozen or so different syringes, and getting one out and using it on the battlefield would probably be a full-round action. Using a syringe on an enemy would mean attacking the enemy with a weapon that is three inches long, hitting them hard enough to pierce through any armor with a weapon that is, again, only three inches long, so you pretty much are required to stab it up to the hilt, and you'd have to hit them accurately enough to hit close enough to a vein, /and/ you'd have to do all this while the enemy is swinging a sword at you. Bear in mind that you are doing all of this with a weapon made of easily shattered glass.

Plus, reducing a doctor down to "injects people with stuff in syringes" is kind of drastically underutilizing the concept anyway, but so much of a doctor's concept is going to be dedicated to stuff done between encounters. Examinations, surgery, dressing wounds and setting broken bones, and all kinds of other shit that takes forever and is only a helpful field of study in a world where Cure Wounds is not a thing.

Rather then being a "doctor" class, you should instead have an "expert" class, of which one kit is a doctor, another is a scholar, and so on.

I WILL get people to use "kits" to refer to 5e subclasses.

Considering you can heal more than a Cure spell just by resting for an hour, I think you are overestimating the power of healing magic.

You can make a syringe out of metal, you know.

Name a single clear, or even translucent metal.

Why does a syringe need to be clear/translucent?

So you can tell how much is in it and make sure there aren't any air bubbles. Injecting air directly into your bloodstream is pretty bad for you.

By lvl 7 a life domain cleric, on any giving turn, is sharing HP with warding bond, mass healing with channel divinity, bonus action ranged healing with healing word, self healing with Blessed Healer, has an death ward somewhere, and is maintaining whatever concentration spell that usually represents virtual HP of some sort. That's a lot to reflavour as "syringes"

So you can quickly tell what fluid and how much is inside of it?

>So you can tell how much is in it
Can be marked on the plunger.

>and make sure there aren't any air bubbles.
Why do you think doctors have that habit of turning the syringe upward and squirting?

Have you ever handled a syringe? The squirting thing isn't foolproof

>Why do you think doctors have that habit of turning the syringe upward and squirting?
You know they flick it first to push all bubbles to the base of the needle and control it visually?