Give shield walls something to talk about

[Stealthscout]

Shield walls are huge in melee warfare to give your support team a clear ‘safe’ area behind the line while the wall works as standing there or advancing slowly and stabbing the enemy when the option presents itself. This never works in D&D for three reasons:
It is boring to just hold the line but take the brunt of damage for others.
Spellcasters and monsters in fantasy often can target those behind limiting its effectiveness.
It requires planned teamwork between players which… yeah


This is an attempt to give that strategy some love without being too heavy.


Shield Wall Master
Prerequisite: shield proficiency
You are skilled at teamwork-based fighting styles often used by foot soldiers. Whenever you have a shield equipped you have the following capabilities:

• For purposes of line of sight and effect, you can choose to be treated as a solid opaque object that takes up your space to enemies. In most cases this prevents enemies from targeting those spaces or allies behind you.
• You grant advantage when resisting push/grapple attempts and strength saving throws to any ally adjacent to you.
• As a reaction, you can move up to 5’ to a space adjacent to an ally if they are pushed out of their original space or fail a saving throw that would render them unable to make an attack of opportunity (e.g. stun).
• If you roll for initiative when adjacent to an ally and beat their initiative, you grant them a +4 bonus up to but not exceeding your own.
• If an adjacent ally is wielding a shield, they gain all abilities listed above but cannot grant those abilities to others.


Analysis
The first three abilities are there to mimic a shield wall. In particular, you prevents enemies from targeting the squishies behind you with spells or teleporting past you entirely. This wouldn’t work for really large or flying creatures but very effective against everyone else.

The last two are intended to make others play along with you. Boosting initiative has the effect of others always sticking close to you and grouping your team together in the initiative list consistently. (Sure, you could delay actions consistently but… who would?) The final one gives abilities to others for ‘free’. Note that the wording implies that your ally is giving those special abilities to you as well.

I could see this as a ‘gimmie’ human military feat. The best party would have the shield wall at the front and a counter-caster behind them in relative safety. Skirmishers dash in and out creating your party combat dynamic with the cost of only one feat. Have two with the feat and some NPC soldiers and now your shield wall could be 30’ wide and can ‘repair’ itself in critical situations.

[MrStabby]

Probably better off in the homebrew section.

https://forums.giantitp.com/forumdisplay.php?15-Homebrew-Design

[JackPhoenix]

Shield wall is great in a warfare. Unfortunately, D&D parties engage in small skirmishes, not proper battlefield warfare on a scale that would make shield wall tactic viable.

And no, that feat is in no way reasonable. Too many abilities, half of which don't make sense. Initiative bonus? Sharing the entire feat with other people? That part about solid opaque object alone breaks a lot of things.

Leave shield wall tactics to the NPCs. Who, notably, don't need feats for that, just create an NPC with appropriate abilities.

[Greywander]

You can sort of shield wall in 5e, but most adventuring parties aren't large enough to use the tactic effectively, and some of the mechanics make it work a bit strangely. To shield wall, you'd have one line of characters (all with high AC) who form a solid line (no empty spaces between them) and all take the Dodge action. Meanwhile, your ranged/support characters stand behind the shield wall, gaining cover from it (half or three quarters, not sure which).

Now, you need a lot of people to make this work, otherwise it's pretty trivial to walk around the shield wall and flank the ranged characters behind. This can be more practically used in tight corridors, like those you might find in dungeons. The question then, though, is what your ranged character behind the shield wall do; if they have cover from the enemy, then the enemy also has cover. Either everyone needs to pick up Sharpshooter or Spell Sniper (which, if everyone does, PCs and NPCs, then shield walls no longer do anything at all), or you need to be using effects that use saving throws instead of attack rolls. This means the shield wall only really works with mages, not archers.

As JackPhoenix points out, you can justify shield walls not really working mechanically being down to combat being designed around skirmishes rather than large scale warfare. I don't know that a feat is the best way to address this (in part because this should be a team-based tactic, not something that a single character does), but let's take a look at what you've got.

So your first bullet point basically grants full cover to anyone behind you. Now, by RAW they should have at least half cover, and possible three quarters cover (I don't remember exactly, but I'd probably do three quarters if you had an actual shield wall). IMHO, three quarters cover should be sufficient, as it makes it a lot harder to target those behind the wall (it's a +5 to AC, equivalent to the Shield spell). I would think that an attack that was powerful enough would still be able to pierce through and hit someone on the back line, but regular soldiers aren't going to be that strong, so we're taking something like a dragon or beholder, which sounds about right. Since it seems like we can already get what we're looking for here using RAW (probably), then I'm not sure this bullet point is necessary, and am worried it might just be adding bloat and power creep. Something to consider.

Resisting grapple/shove attempts honestly sounds more like a property of the shield, specifically with interlocking shields. What I'd suggest is making it a special type of shield that allows you to spend an action to lock it in with an adjacent ally's shield, perhaps with the addition that if you do so then you can Dodge as a bonus action. And actually, while I can see being resistant to being shoved, grappling seems like a viable strategy for breaching a shield wall (provided you can get close enough without getting stabbed).

For the rest of the bullet points... I don't know, it just doesn't seem focused. I can see how these things might be helpful, but it seems like you're just throwing out bonuses at random. First, see if you can't already shield wall effectively without using any kind of homebrew feat. If you find that you can't, then try to figure out why, what is the one thing that's stopping it from working? Then, craft a feat (or, perhaps, a fighting style?) that is laser focused on fixing that one specific issue. And it might be more than one thing, so your feat might need to do two or three things, but you need to streamline it as much as possible. If you like, you can add on a fun and quirky bonus ability if it seems like it's underpowered. For example, I made a feat that lets you take two reactions, and it adds the quirk that you can take a 5-foot step immediately before or after using a reaction.

And actually, there's also already the Protection fighting style. Just have your allies stand directly behind you, and not only do you grant them partial cover, but you can also use a reaction to impose disadvantage on an enemy attack.

Perhaps as an alternative to the Dodge action, you might consider something like a Brace or Defend action, no feat required (it may or may not require a shield, though). It would set your speed to 0 (or possible to a very small number, like 5 or 10 feet), but give you advantage on STR checks and saves, as well as imposing disadvantage on enemy attacks. So pretty much like dodging, but with a bonus to STR checks/saves instead of DEX saves. Perhaps allies standing behind you would be granted three quarters cover, while you'd only grant half cover to enemies. It needs some work, but there might be a workable idea hidden in there.

[tKUUNK]

How would you feel about replacing the first benefit with:

"When wielding a shield, you grant 3/4 cover to allies behind you". (EDIT: cool, I see Greywander has the same suggestion)

Note: usually you grant only half cover. and "behind" relies on Line of Sight, as usual.

[Eldariel]

The best way to make Shield Wall work is just have a bunch of hard-to-hit guys with Interception fighting style stand side by side completely negating any attacks that get through with a total of two reactions each to mitigate any attacks that do hit their AC (could do it with Protection too but Interception is generally more reliable - though Protection all but negating crits is nice).

[DwarfFighter]

It seems to me that a proper shield wall requires everyone is trained and knows what to do. Having one trained character and some untrained mooks create an effective shield wall seems unrealistic to me. I base this on my personal observation that groups of people are very poor at coordinating their efforts without training.

-DF

[fbelanger]

At best in DnD you will have two or three characters to form a shield wall. You really call this a shield wall?

[quindraco]

I think all characters, without exception, should have the ability to make their initiative worse at roll time, so if the party wants to act as a block, they have the choice of acting at the worst roller's initiative. I hate being forced to go early, especially if the party has a plan for this situation and it needs me to go after someone who rolled worse than I did.

[DarknessEternal]

D&D has no mass combat rules that work. And that's the only place a shield wall can exist.

Unless your party is like 20 guys, no point.

[Dienekes]

D&D has no mass combat rules that work. And that's the only place a shield wall can exist.

Unless your party is like 20 guys, no point.

I'm uncertain about this. From experience I've seen as few as four guys (three with shield, one with spear) doing a bit of nasty work, provided the three stick together and keep their wits about them in mock battles. While the term wall is perhaps overly generous the principle remains. That sort of thing can work in smaller skirmishes, and we have record of it working as well with royal bodyguards and huskarls and the like using themselves as a wall between the person they're trying to protect.

It's not as big or as glorious as a full phalanx of course, but it is a legitimate strategy for smaller scale tactics. Though one that is not universally applicable. And in a setting where there are people that shoot fire from their fingertips doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But then this is D&D. Most of the setting doesn't make sense when broken down that way, so why should we start applying realism here?


Anyway, I kind of think this is a bit for a feat. However, the concept of shielded soldier who protects allies as a first line of defense is perfect for a whole Fighter subclass. And kind of already is, since the Cavalier seemed to be unable to decide if it was trying to represent a shock cavalry knight or a shield and spear grunt and just sort of did both kinda mediocre-ly. Though it does end up making a decent enough subclass out of it.

[Stealthscout]

I'm uncertain about this. From experience I've seen as few as four guys (three with shield, one with spear) doing a bit of nasty work, provided the three stick together and keep their wits about them in mock battles.

That's more of what I was thinking. In real life you can make an effective wall (with numbers) that prevents most risks other than a high-angle volley of arrows (or explosives to take down a portion of the line).

DnD adds a few twists to it that need to be managed somehow like extra strong creatures that can push/pull others around much easier, flying monsters, and casting spells on the other side of the wall. The last one is the killer scenario IMO - try making a shield wall three men deep using hundreds of people and then send 2-3 apprentices with Flaming Sphere to negate it. Anything less than 100% is not enough to work.

I'm trying to work on a feat that makes the strategy feasible in more than your standard low-level goblin encounter with a specialized force of at minimum 10 fighters. Shouldn't the same strategy work in a dungeon hallway or indoors by a tactical leader?

I could see the option of a shield fighter getting this sort of stuff (not a bad idea actually...) but if PCs wanted to take this strategy would that really be the most flexible way to do it?

Thank you all for the input.

[HappyDaze]

D&D has no mass combat rules that work. And that's the only place a shield wall can exist.

Unless your party is like 20 guys, no point.

Hire some basic mercenaries (use NPC Guard from MM, and then equip as you can afford). We had six of them with us, suitably boosted with Inspiring Leader and such. They were quite effective in combat even when the group was at Levels 5-8. If we had been using the flanking rules, they would have been utterly nuts at boosting PC attacks too.

[Democratus]

Two fighters standing side-by-side with shields and the Protection fighting style can be a serious pain to get through - blocking a 10' wide corridor very well. They can still even attack any enemies in front of them.

In a recent campaign, we had two dwarven brothers who nearly always fought this way - using their shields to protect each other and form a wall of steel that stopped most foes from getting past them to the archer and wizard.

When delving dungeons, look for choke points. If needed, have the scout go ahead of the party to draw enemies into your prepared defensive position.

[Sherlockpwns]

I’d say interception over protection. In theory all members of the wall have high AC, so the hope would be very few hits get in anyway. A 1d10+prof reduction in damage would make the wall seriously beefy at basically no cost. Maybe toss in HAM to go full beef... er... pig.

A human fighter duo or more can do this at level 1, which more than just being neat that you can shield wall immediately, also means two players could have radically different characters and still do this. The biggest hurdle is getting your initiatives to line up, lol