Optional Fighter Fighting Style

[Lacrimosa]

Looking for some balancing help with a Fighting style I made to go with my Fighters background any suggestions would be helpful. So I use Hero Lab to make my characters and while reading Fighting Styles I did not find one I liked all that much to go with my Polearm Master/Sentinel Fighter.
Great weapon fighting was meh doesn't scale well nor is the effect good enough to lock down your style. Than I came across this little Gem.....

Tunnel Fighter
You excel at defending narrow passages,
doorways, and other tight spaces. As a
bonus action, you can enter a defensive
stance that lasts until the start of your next turn.
While in your defensive stance, you can make
opportunity attacks without using your reaction,
and you can use your reaction to make a melee
attack against a creature that moves more
than 5 feet while within your reach

I mean Wow that's what I wanted than I read it again and realized you would get unlimited OA's against anything moving within your 10' reach. No way would any sane GM allow this style it was just too broken for dungeon crawling.

So Off to the drawing board this is what I've come up with thus far and I have conditional approval to run it while the GM watches to see how powerful it will make my Fighter.

Stand Your Ground

Prerequisite: Reach Weapon

Through training you have become a master of
Standing Your Ground. As a bonus action,
you may enter a defensive stance,
while using this stance you gain
1 bonus Attack of Opportunity against targets
that move 5' while in your Reach.
Gain a second Bonus Attack at level 11

These bonuses are in addition to normal Reaction bonus thus granting you 2 AO's levels 1 through 10 and a 3rd 11 on I don't know the math to get avg damage so I'm not quite sure how broken this is. Help breaking it down and balancing it better would be welcome.

[djreynolds]

I love it.

Folk Hero could use any farm implement and have it treated as spear or pole arm, depending on whether it is slashing or piercing, sort of like tavern brawler

Survivor could use animal horns and bones etc

I was working on a defensive fighting style.

Option 1 was, you when you gain the extra attack feature you may give up and attack to take the dodge action after attacking. But it might devalue patient defense.

Option 2 was, you attack with disadvantage (opposite of the barbarian) but all attacks made versus you are a disadvantage.

The thing is not to devalue patient defense, but give the fighter something akin yet opposing reckless attack.

[SillyPopeNachos]

This is actually more powerful than a feat, as it lets one bypass action economy to gain an additional attack. It also kind of makes a joke out of fighters being the only ones who normally exceed 2 attacks.

[Lacrimosa]

Comments like that are why I posted here for Balance help yes it breaks the action economy but having a 2nd AO won't break it as much as you'd think and your GM could always load up monsters with ranged weapons as mine did or Reach attacks/weapons.
A few melee to test my power level and a lot of archers I didn't feel all that powerful than again i'm not even level 4 yet.

[DanyBallon]

What I did to tone down Tunnel Fighter, is to remove the free OA, and just state that you can use your reaction to make an OA against a creature that move more than 5' feat within your reach.

This way it does't screw the action economy, and expand your possibilities to trigger an OA.

[BillyBobShorton]

That is much more a FEAT than a fighting ability, IMO. And a damn powerful one at that. It may even be its own class or prestige, depending on how the DM sees it. It basically takes from both Polearm Master and Sentinel while granting you a bunch of extra attacks at level 1. Just guessing, I'd say it would have you averaging 13-17ish pts of damage/turn while avoiding much damage yourself.

If it were accepted as a feat, you'd have to consider that a human variant having access at level 1 can't see in the dark, kind of rendering it useless in most caves without someone casting light on your helmet or something.

I would draw up a rough draft & approach your DM with an idea to create a new fighter archetype, possibly dwarf-only racial limit, like the bladesinger with elf or spike armor barb with dwarves. Even then you'd have to wait until level 3 at least to start reaping the benefits. Maybe scale back the initial "total dunjin pwnage" perks and add them in along with other cool stuff at levels the other archetypes receive bonuses.

Your concept sounds like a viable class option, don't get me wrong, and would make dungeon crawls a lot easier, especially at lower levels when 2-3 hits can drop a party's "tank" character stuck at the front of the line against an Ogre in a hallway that lands a crit.

This type of character could be achieved for the most part through a build, but I get the feeling you don't want to wait until level 6 or ten for those feats to stack nicely enough to accomplish it. Trying to get that kind of mileage at 1st level seems a bit OP, IMO. Scale it back to a reasonable degree and talk to your DM. Best of luck.

[CNagy]

The fighting style doesn't actually live up to its potential. "Unlimited OAs" depend on a DM who doesn't play opponents realistically. The best I've seen it used was as a defensive position; a Battlemaster with Polearm Master and Sentinel essentially blocked off a bridge being used by an advancing mob of orcs for a couple of turns before the orcs started pushing one another in close enough to force him to retreat.

It's a terribly niche style that can be really good but it takes preparation and if you aren't getting at least 2 attacks from it, it's an action economy waste (a PAM can use their bonus action to attack and their reaction to OA when an opponent comes within reach).

[Lacrimosa]

Nice feedback folks thank you very much I'll make sure to show GM this so he can make a final decision on the ability.

[Lacrimosa]

How about removing the extra scaling from the style to help balance it out as a Fighting Style and not a Feat.


Stand Your Ground or Hold the Line

Prerequisite: Reach Weapon

Through training you have become a master of
Standing Your Ground. As a bonus action,
you may enter a defensive stance,
while using this stance you gain
1 bonus Attack of Opportunity against targets
that move 5' while in your Reach.

The idea behind this is my Fighter was a Pikeman as part of his Soldier background which is where the "training" has come from Yes it can be powerful but has reasonable limits I think what are your thoughts about removing the extra scaling and just leaving it as a possible bonus AO while in the stance. Maybe making it a Turn action instead of a bonus action to get into the stance?

[Lollerabe]

Your suggestion in OP isn't broken at all, so let's say I got PAM - I use stand my ground as BA (which lasts until the start of my next turn) in exchange for a + 1 OA. So I can't use my 1d4 buttend BA attack but I gain a 1d10 OA instead that has trigger requirements ?

That's a + 3 damage bump assuming there are more than 1 target entering my reach.

Seems fair enough, yeah sentinel makes the trade even better and at lvl 11 it's a no brainer (if it becomes 2 OAs) but hardly anywhere near the original UA brokenness.

[Lacrimosa]

Does it fit with a Fighting Style is my next question I don't want to make it a feat since you are fairly limited on the feats you get in 5e and giving up stat bumps to do them isn't fun. Do I make my character mechanically better or statistically better? its a hard call early the feats help a ton and can create wonderful interactions within the party make up and characters roleplay. Later however having lower stats to improve your mechanics is a much bigger trade off(unless your GM allows you to find magic items tomes ect to improve that weakness) I'm just annoyed with the lack of interesting fighting styles.

Defensive +1 ac by far out paces other styles both early and mid game and remains valuable later in the game

Duelist/Archery are great early increasing overall damage of a character giving them a bonus like having an 18 in their main stat. falls off fast as feats and other stat increases are gained.

Great Weapon Fighting So a chance to change bad rolls. If ya couldn't tell I hate this stance it comes no where near the power level of the above abilities I'd be much happier with a Duelist/Archer style 2hd Fighting though a +2/2 on a 2hder might be a bit much

Two Weapon Fighting this style is very very bad levels 1-3 its good wouldn't use it outside of a 1 shot dungeon crawl. Too many broken 3.5/4.0 Two weapon fighters created a ton of nerf bat hits to this style of fighting.

Protection pure flavor fighting style fun to RP and nice if you had a party member with super high stats that you want to protect or super low stats that you want to RP around.

So Imho outside of Homebrew options Fighting Styles are kind of sad considering how much they define your character. Top 3 being Defensive, Duelist/Archery imho which is why I'm tried making my own.

[Lollerabe]

You lost me a bit in the end ;) is it stronger than other fightstyles ? Yes. 5e fightstyles are super boring and a few of them even super bad (GWF after that new 'rule clearing' fx).

Does your suggestion in your original post break anything? No.

As I said, before lvl 11 you are gaining a +3 damg if you got PAM and certain triggers are met - hardly game breaking.

So at this point I'm confused as to what you want to know - your dm said ok to your blueprint so you should be golden right?

If your asking if I would allow it, then the answer is a firm no. The tunnel fighter fightstyle is IMO a abomination and anything that resembles it should be killed with fire, but that's my personal opinion.