[Homebrew] Has anyone produced a more varied martial combat system?

[Eldariel]

I'm thinking of running a 5e game for some of my old friends. Many of them like martial characters conceptually but prefer some complexity and are dead bored of "I attack again". Battlemaster just doesn't cut it and they explicitly prefer to play characters without spellcasting when playing martials. We had a lot of fun together with ToB in 3e and PoW in PF 1e; I wonder if anyone's produced anything to the tune for 5e with decent balance and variety (at least to the point, where we can even talk about balance in this edition)?

[Man_Over_Game]

I was working.on.something like that:
Fighters get Superiority Dice instead of Action Surge, more with each Extra Attack.

Barbarian Rage no longer gives resistance but THP for the real HP you lose. Your next hit spends all of this THP to deal that much more damage. Lose life each turn you're raging, regenerate HP equal to your Barbarian level if your HP is less than 50% while not raging, and Rage is now a Short Rest feature.

Rogue Sneak Attack no longer deals bonus damage but instead afflicts status conditions based on their existing conditions. To Stun someone, they must be Blind. To Blind someone, they must be silenced. And so on, with Prone being the standard and them taking a reduction to their movement equal to your sneak attack roll.

Fighter seemed to work well, haven't tested the Rogue or Barbarian yet.

[Dienekes]

I’ve made several.

The one I find most interesting is the one I’m currently working on here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?610037-Differentiating-Martials-(Please-Peach))

The goal was making the classes play as differently as I could. With Barbarians being the most basic play pattern of running up to people and smashing their face in. Fighters got superiority dice and 3 ranks of maneuvers starting with Basic, and getting Advanced and Masterful maneuvers as they gain levels. This is probably the closest to a Warblade you’ll find. And Rogues are now much more about disrupting combat than they are about dealing damage or attacks.

Though as a warning, only Barbarian is done up to 20. I should hopefully have Fighter finished today or tomorrow. With Rogue following shortly after.

I have an idea for making Paladin’s play more unique by having each Order gain a handful of abilities that reflect the tenets of the class. Devotion, for example would gain an ability that lets them tank hits from their allies. While Conquest would have one that lets them see which of their enemies has the lowest hit points. When the Devotion Paladin protects their ally, or the Conquest Paladin attacks an enemy weaker than them they would give them some kind of Order Points that they can then spend on more powerful Smites or other special abilities.

The idea being that they get stronger the more devoted to the tenets of their Order they play. Unfortunately I haven’t really found a way of making this work while maintaining the flexibility granted by their spells. So that might take time.

[Eldariel]

One of the things I enjoyed in ToB and PoW was that not all the maneuvers were available each round but they still weren't artificially short rest/encounter resources or anything of the sort. Have you thought of implementing something like that? One of my biggest gripes with BM is that you have all your options constantly available meaning you always just take the best option for the circumstance instead of having to weave in others or spend time recovering your best option. That and the ability to combine maneuvers and boosts with stances, and having tailored counters is what I most miss. I was thinking of trying just running PoW straight-up as a direct conversion but of course that's a fair bit of work and the abilities are calibrated for PF play, not 5e play.

[Dienekes]

One of the things I enjoyed in ToB and PoW was that not all the maneuvers were available each round but they still weren't artificially short rest/encounter resources or anything of the sort. Have you thought of implementing something like that? One of my biggest gripes with BM is that you have all your options constantly available meaning you always just take the best option for the circumstance instead of having to weave in others or spend time recovering your best option. That and the ability to combine maneuvers and boosts with stances, and having tailored counters is what I most miss. I was thinking of trying just running PoW straight-up as a direct conversion but of course that's a fair bit of work and the abilities are calibrated for PF play, not 5e play.

Personally, no.

But honestly that doesn’t sound all that hard to implement, but it would mean changing things around.

My current plan was having more powerful maneuvers cost more superiority dice. If we were going to design a system your way. I’d instead say everything costs 1. And each available die needed to be fit with a known maneuver. You can change which maneuvers you have readied during a short or long rest, or when refreshing your maneuvers.

Converting PoW to 5e may take some doing. Mostly because the scaling between games is so different, in everything from damage to ability checks.