MrStabby
2016-12-15, 11:59 AM
So a bit of context on what I am working on here.
I don’t think martial classes are underpowered, at least not in a combat heavy campaign. They are great at damage and that is an important feature of the game. I do think there remain some problems with martial classes – poor scaling at high levels is one, and a lack of meaningful choice is another. Move, attack action, bonus action attack, repeat can get a little dull where there is a lot of combat. I wasn't going to stick this up but as other people were discussing some things with an overlap I thought I could try and contribute.
Here I present some alternative rules/new content. It does represent a small power creep for some martial classes but is designed to stack less well with the most powerful martial builds. If these rules are successful it should mean there are many more mechanically viable martial characters which can be differentiated from each other. Each of these should now be able to offer more different choices on a turn by turn basis. Whilst these options will primarily be useful to martial builds they are general rules and may be used by any character. I am also working on some caster adjustments to bring them into line – enabling DMs to just scale difficulty appropriately (if you do not want to change encounters then just lower everyone’s proficiency bonus by 1)
There are four parts to this set of changes.
1) Weapons. There is a new weapons list – exotic weapons. These are typically more powerful than martial weapons and tend to have special rules. Some weapons have been moved to this category from martial weapons. The aim of this is to make more diversely equipped characters common. These will be accessible from the weaponmaster feat (and hopefully make that feat attractive) and can be warlock pact weapons. Some like the scimitar are explicitly made available through class descriptions – in this case the druid.
2) Exertions. This is a rule that allows characters to spend hit dice from their pool of hit dice to power certain abilities. Classes with bigger HD will be able to do this more effectively. At present the options here are limited (as of now I only have one example) but could be grown with more ideas. Part of the idea was to give classes who don’t have many resources to expend some new tools. As players are tracking hit dice anyway there is no additional bookkeeping. Furthermore, healing through hit dice is very effective and I found that HP/HD recovery is fast enough to kind of erode the effects of bad encounters pretty quickly. Making a choice about how many HD to keep for abilities and how may to turn into HP on a short rest is designed to be fun.
3) Stances. A good feature that I think is missing from 5th edition. These will replace fighting styles. Whenever you would learn a fighting style you may learn two stances. You may use an ASI to learn three stances. These range from the mundane to the mystical to allow players to select stances that match their expectation of their character. A character may be in up to one stance at a time. They select their stance at the start of their first turn after rolling for initiative and may expend a bonus action to change stance. A number of stances allow uses of non-prime attack stats to encourage people to not dump other stats so hard.
4) Other attacks. Shoving people away or prone with an attack or grappling them are popular moves and add an extra layer of tactical gameplay. At present they are limited to athletics as a skill and lean heavily towards only strength builds getting these options. Here are more options that players can take to replace an attack.
Exotic Weapons
Nets (no penalty for using in 5ft of an enemy, can use dex as the attack stat)
Scimitar (extended critical range 19-20)
Flail (no attack roll, enemy makes dex save instead vs 8+attack stat+proficiency)
Sickle (d6 damage, light, finesse, triple the dice on critical)
Trident (d6/d10 damage, polearm, versatile, 10ft reach)
Blowpipe (add double stat bonus to damage if attack was made with advantage)
Scythe (heavy, triple dice on critical, d12 damage die)
Bastard Sword (Versatile, d10 damage 1 handed, d12 two handed)
Torch (d4 fire damage; on a hit from attack action may use a bonus action to force a con save. On a fail target is blinded for one round)
Exertions
You are able to expend your reserves of energy to achieve incredible feats of physical and mental resilience.
1) Whenever you make a save, other than a death save, instead of rolling a d20 you may instead roll any number of your remaining hit dice and treat the sum as your roll.
Stances
This section is the easiest to add content to and also the area where more options are likely to actually be felt in a game. Remember only one of these can be used at a time and there is a cost to switching so they are generally worse than feats that look similar but are "always on"
Viper Stance
Whenever an enemy comes within your reach range you may use your reaction to make an attack of opportunity
Panther Stance
When using strength to make an attack, instead of adding your strength modifier to damage instead you may add both your strength and dexterity modifier to damage.
Bear Stance
You gain advantage on any ability check or save using strength that would move or restrain you
Shadowform
You may teleport up to 10 ft using 10 ft of your movement, you must be able to see your destination. If you do you leave this stance.
Spellbreaker style
You use your highest statictic modifier when making saves against spells. This doesn’t give you proficiency in that save. When determining the DC of a concentration save against your attack the difficulty is increased by 2.
Fox Style
Whilst unarmoured you may use dex bonus + intelligence bonus as your armour class
Grey Lobster Stance
Whenever you hit an enemy with a melee attack you may use your bonus action to make a grapple attempt against them. If you make this attempt you leave the stance.
Guardian Stance
As a bonus action you can confer a +2 bonus to armour class to any other creature within 5ft of you until the start of your next turn.
Whenever a hostile creature makes a melee attack against a creature that is within 5ft of you, you may use your reaction to impose disadvantage on the roll. If you do you leave the stance.
Dervish Style
When you hit an enemy with a melee attack made as a bonus action you may instead make two attacks of that same type against that creature.
Templar Style
When you make a critical hit or reduce an enemy to zero HP with an attack you may use your bonus action to make another attack.
Mantis style
When you make an attack with a thrown weapon you may add both strength and dexterity to your roll to hit.
Vindicator Stance
Whenever you roll for damage on a weapon attack you may reroll any die showing a 1 or a 2. If you have not moved this turn you may use your bonus action to shove and enemy you hit with the attack action.
Path of the Turtle
You gain +1 to AC. On any turn in which you do not move, a shield you use grants you a +3 bonus to AC against ranged attacks instead of +2.
Other Attacks
I would like to add a little more here, especially if i can make some more stats useful to martial characters in combat. I would like some ranged ones (which for balance may be weaker, but still at least adds something)
Feint
When you take the attack action, instead of making a melee attack you may instead make a feint. Take a deception (dexterity) check opposed by your opponent’s perception (wisdom) check. If you win you have advantage on all attacks against that enemy until the end of your turn.
Surgical Strike
When you take the attack action, instead of making an attack you may study the target’s anatomy for weaknesses. Make a Medicine (int) check opposed by the AC of your target, if you succeed your next attack that hits this target before the end of your next turn is a critical hit.
Blind
Using an unexpected move you throw fine sand or grit in your opponent’s eyes. If you would make an attack as part of the attack action make a slight of hand (dex) check opposed by your enemy’s dexterity save. If your enemy is large or larger they get advantage on this save. If you are successful the target is blinded until the start of its next turn. This is not effective if your opponent does not have eyes or other exposed sensory organs.
Still a work in progress - I have done the maths on most of the content but have yet to thoroughly test much of this in game.
I don’t think martial classes are underpowered, at least not in a combat heavy campaign. They are great at damage and that is an important feature of the game. I do think there remain some problems with martial classes – poor scaling at high levels is one, and a lack of meaningful choice is another. Move, attack action, bonus action attack, repeat can get a little dull where there is a lot of combat. I wasn't going to stick this up but as other people were discussing some things with an overlap I thought I could try and contribute.
Here I present some alternative rules/new content. It does represent a small power creep for some martial classes but is designed to stack less well with the most powerful martial builds. If these rules are successful it should mean there are many more mechanically viable martial characters which can be differentiated from each other. Each of these should now be able to offer more different choices on a turn by turn basis. Whilst these options will primarily be useful to martial builds they are general rules and may be used by any character. I am also working on some caster adjustments to bring them into line – enabling DMs to just scale difficulty appropriately (if you do not want to change encounters then just lower everyone’s proficiency bonus by 1)
There are four parts to this set of changes.
1) Weapons. There is a new weapons list – exotic weapons. These are typically more powerful than martial weapons and tend to have special rules. Some weapons have been moved to this category from martial weapons. The aim of this is to make more diversely equipped characters common. These will be accessible from the weaponmaster feat (and hopefully make that feat attractive) and can be warlock pact weapons. Some like the scimitar are explicitly made available through class descriptions – in this case the druid.
2) Exertions. This is a rule that allows characters to spend hit dice from their pool of hit dice to power certain abilities. Classes with bigger HD will be able to do this more effectively. At present the options here are limited (as of now I only have one example) but could be grown with more ideas. Part of the idea was to give classes who don’t have many resources to expend some new tools. As players are tracking hit dice anyway there is no additional bookkeeping. Furthermore, healing through hit dice is very effective and I found that HP/HD recovery is fast enough to kind of erode the effects of bad encounters pretty quickly. Making a choice about how many HD to keep for abilities and how may to turn into HP on a short rest is designed to be fun.
3) Stances. A good feature that I think is missing from 5th edition. These will replace fighting styles. Whenever you would learn a fighting style you may learn two stances. You may use an ASI to learn three stances. These range from the mundane to the mystical to allow players to select stances that match their expectation of their character. A character may be in up to one stance at a time. They select their stance at the start of their first turn after rolling for initiative and may expend a bonus action to change stance. A number of stances allow uses of non-prime attack stats to encourage people to not dump other stats so hard.
4) Other attacks. Shoving people away or prone with an attack or grappling them are popular moves and add an extra layer of tactical gameplay. At present they are limited to athletics as a skill and lean heavily towards only strength builds getting these options. Here are more options that players can take to replace an attack.
Exotic Weapons
Nets (no penalty for using in 5ft of an enemy, can use dex as the attack stat)
Scimitar (extended critical range 19-20)
Flail (no attack roll, enemy makes dex save instead vs 8+attack stat+proficiency)
Sickle (d6 damage, light, finesse, triple the dice on critical)
Trident (d6/d10 damage, polearm, versatile, 10ft reach)
Blowpipe (add double stat bonus to damage if attack was made with advantage)
Scythe (heavy, triple dice on critical, d12 damage die)
Bastard Sword (Versatile, d10 damage 1 handed, d12 two handed)
Torch (d4 fire damage; on a hit from attack action may use a bonus action to force a con save. On a fail target is blinded for one round)
Exertions
You are able to expend your reserves of energy to achieve incredible feats of physical and mental resilience.
1) Whenever you make a save, other than a death save, instead of rolling a d20 you may instead roll any number of your remaining hit dice and treat the sum as your roll.
Stances
This section is the easiest to add content to and also the area where more options are likely to actually be felt in a game. Remember only one of these can be used at a time and there is a cost to switching so they are generally worse than feats that look similar but are "always on"
Viper Stance
Whenever an enemy comes within your reach range you may use your reaction to make an attack of opportunity
Panther Stance
When using strength to make an attack, instead of adding your strength modifier to damage instead you may add both your strength and dexterity modifier to damage.
Bear Stance
You gain advantage on any ability check or save using strength that would move or restrain you
Shadowform
You may teleport up to 10 ft using 10 ft of your movement, you must be able to see your destination. If you do you leave this stance.
Spellbreaker style
You use your highest statictic modifier when making saves against spells. This doesn’t give you proficiency in that save. When determining the DC of a concentration save against your attack the difficulty is increased by 2.
Fox Style
Whilst unarmoured you may use dex bonus + intelligence bonus as your armour class
Grey Lobster Stance
Whenever you hit an enemy with a melee attack you may use your bonus action to make a grapple attempt against them. If you make this attempt you leave the stance.
Guardian Stance
As a bonus action you can confer a +2 bonus to armour class to any other creature within 5ft of you until the start of your next turn.
Whenever a hostile creature makes a melee attack against a creature that is within 5ft of you, you may use your reaction to impose disadvantage on the roll. If you do you leave the stance.
Dervish Style
When you hit an enemy with a melee attack made as a bonus action you may instead make two attacks of that same type against that creature.
Templar Style
When you make a critical hit or reduce an enemy to zero HP with an attack you may use your bonus action to make another attack.
Mantis style
When you make an attack with a thrown weapon you may add both strength and dexterity to your roll to hit.
Vindicator Stance
Whenever you roll for damage on a weapon attack you may reroll any die showing a 1 or a 2. If you have not moved this turn you may use your bonus action to shove and enemy you hit with the attack action.
Path of the Turtle
You gain +1 to AC. On any turn in which you do not move, a shield you use grants you a +3 bonus to AC against ranged attacks instead of +2.
Other Attacks
I would like to add a little more here, especially if i can make some more stats useful to martial characters in combat. I would like some ranged ones (which for balance may be weaker, but still at least adds something)
Feint
When you take the attack action, instead of making a melee attack you may instead make a feint. Take a deception (dexterity) check opposed by your opponent’s perception (wisdom) check. If you win you have advantage on all attacks against that enemy until the end of your turn.
Surgical Strike
When you take the attack action, instead of making an attack you may study the target’s anatomy for weaknesses. Make a Medicine (int) check opposed by the AC of your target, if you succeed your next attack that hits this target before the end of your next turn is a critical hit.
Blind
Using an unexpected move you throw fine sand or grit in your opponent’s eyes. If you would make an attack as part of the attack action make a slight of hand (dex) check opposed by your enemy’s dexterity save. If your enemy is large or larger they get advantage on this save. If you are successful the target is blinded until the start of its next turn. This is not effective if your opponent does not have eyes or other exposed sensory organs.
Still a work in progress - I have done the maths on most of the content but have yet to thoroughly test much of this in game.