New Fighting Style for Cinematic Battles

[Nagog]

For DMs and Players alike, how do you feel about this conceptual fighting style:


Iron Wall: During your turn, you may forgo any number of the melee attacks you can make (as part of your action or Bonus Action) to gain a number of charges equal to the forgone attacks.
When a creature targets you with a melee weapon attack, you may expend a charge and roll a competing attack roll. If your attack roll exceeds the creature's, you divert or block the attack with your weapon. If their attack roll exceeds yours, the attack resolves normally.

I could see this being a great fighting style or even an alternate style for Defensive Duelist to create far more cinematic fights for martial characters, and allows martial classes (like Fighters, Barbarians, and even Monks) to have more to do with their Actions than smack an enemy. This also increases the potency of magical items with a to-hit bonus, and particularly buffs the Monk and Fighter defensively as they can collect or overwhelm a larger number of charges with their many attacks.

[DarknessEternal]

You're missing an expiration for charges.

[Kuulvheysoon]

I find it a little odd that you can block with a weapon, but not a shield, especially on a feature called Iron Wall. Unless you happen to have the Shield Master feat (arguably - you can replace an attack with a Shove, and the feat gives you a BA Shove).

[GeneralVryth]

If you are spending an action on it, how is that any better than the Dodge action? In most cases it actually seems like it would be much worse than Dodge.

[TaiLiu]

It's pretty cool! It's more complex than the other fighting styles. It only works for melee weapon attacks, which means it might be best for humanoid-heavy campaigns. So it's somewhat restrictive. In such campaigns, depending on when these charges expire (as DarknessEternal asked), this fighting style can either be extremely potent or rather mediocre.

[Gurgeh]

I'm pretty sure "weapon attack" in 5e parlance includes natural weapons as well. It's not a very well thought-out term. >_>

The biggest problem I can see with it is that since it effectively uses opposed attack rolls, it's least effective against the threats you'll most want to use it on - since big nasty bruisers will have correspondingly big nasty bonuses to their attack rolls.

[TaiLiu]

I'm pretty sure "weapon attack" in 5e parlance includes natural weapons as well. It's not a very well thought-out term. >_>
Thanks for the correction! I can't keep track of the types of attacks in my head.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

If you are spending an action on it, how is that any better than the Dodge action? In most cases it actually seems like it would be much worse than Dodge.
It allows you to attack and still be defensive.

If you fighting with enemies with less attacks than you(high level fighter, monks).
Also, it may be better than dodge in case you have higher attack modifier.

[quindraco]

For DMs and Players alike, how do you feel about this conceptual fighting style:


Iron Wall: During your turn, you may forgo any number of the melee attacks you can make (as part of your action or Bonus Action) to gain a number of charges equal to the forgone attacks.
When a creature targets you with a melee weapon attack, you may expend a charge and roll a competing attack roll. If your attack roll exceeds the creature's, you divert or block the attack with your weapon. If their attack roll exceeds yours, the attack resolves normally.

I could see this being a great fighting style or even an alternate style for Defensive Duelist to create far more cinematic fights for martial characters, and allows martial classes (like Fighters, Barbarians, and even Monks) to have more to do with their Actions than smack an enemy. This also increases the potency of magical items with a to-hit bonus, and particularly buffs the Monk and Fighter defensively as they can collect or overwhelm a larger number of charges with their many attacks.

So when the attack rolls are equal, the universe implodes? And you can spend a minute gathering so many charges you can blow through any fight without running out?

[Amnestic]

Personally this doesn't seem to have enough of an upside to warrant it being a fighting style I'd take over something else. It might make a neat Optional/Variant rule though.

[GeneralVryth]

It allows you to attack and still be defensive.

If you fighting with enemies with less attacks than you(high level fighter, monks).
Also, it may be better than dodge in case you have higher attack modifier.

Monks can literally bonus actions dodge instead of getting some of their attacks.

But just focusing on the math. The issue is you need to beat the average roll that would hit you (since you wouldn't waste a charge on a miss), and the odds of you matching/beating it need to exceed the odds of the enemy hitting you for this to be worth it. For example if you have AC 17 (on the low end for a front line character), and the enemy has +7 attack (this matters less than you would think) they hit you on a 10+, with the average roll that will hit you being 15. 15 plus 7 is 22, which means you need +11 on your attack to on average have a better chance of stopping the hit with this fighting style versus just letting Dodge do its thing. +11 being an attack mode you would see with a maxed prof bonus and ability mod without magical bonuses. As your armor goes up this actually gets worse. If you have 21 AC they would hit you on a 14+ with an average of 17. A simple Dodge would turn a hit into a miss 65% of the time to beat 24 (17+7) 65% of the time you would need a +16 attack mod which is essentially impossible though passive bonuses.

In short the math just makes this worse than Dodge in pretty much every situation, and this is before you take into account the limited charges (assuming you can't just build them infinitely which doesn't seem to be the intention). You could probably just allow this effect for free as a variant rule (as suggested above) and it would be balanced.