Opening up maneuvers to everyone.

[Itzmatt86]

Hey folks! Looooong time lurker, coming in with a question as a DM. I am experienced with 5e, but wanted a second opinion.

In my next game i am planning to make many of the maneuvers from battle Master available to anyone. To compensate, some classes will not have a superiority die, some will have a d4, 6, or 8.

Full casters, half caster, third caster, and martial (rogue barbarian fighter, MAYBE monk, likely they would fall in third or half)

Superiority dice will be limited as well for non-martial. Im thinking proficiency and long rest recharge. But they would still be able to do them without a die, just no bonus.

The martials would have unlimited dice, but limited to 1 maneuver per action (still deciding exactly how) and for out of combat ones, like ambush, it would be on a proficiency Long rest recharge.

The goal is to try to make martials more fun, to make melee combat more interesting beyond "i swing my sword" or the occasional shove. Also this is kind of my own touch to address the "martials screwed vs casters out of combat" thing.

Npc would have access to this as well.

Opinions?

[Bobthewizard]

I think it would be fine. It would be simpler to just give everyone the martial adept feat at level 1 and then give all martial classes Combat Superiority at level 3 and Improved Combat Superiority at level 10.

Obviously, don't do this if there is a battlemaster in the party.

Martial classes would be everyone except full casters. So Artificers, Barbarians, Fighters, Monks, Paladins, Rangers, and Rogues.

Excluding Bards, Clerics, Druids, Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards. Perhaps add the maneuvers to swords/valor bards, war clerics, pact of the blade warlocks, and war/bladesinger wizards, but I probably wouldn't.

[strangebloke]

The damage die isn't enough to balance the utility of this. Some options such as trip attack for example really only view the dice as a secondary consideration at best, with the primary payoff being the ability to set up advantage for subsequent attacks. Conversely almost all the benefit of precision attack is conferred by the dice itself.

Beyond that, some thoughts

In general, this is going to make everyone a lot more accurate, so features like GWM and SS will be even stronger than they currently are.
This also potentially slows down combat by a good deal with extra rolls on every attack.


Overall... go for it? But frankly its too big a change to really understand.

[EggKookoo]

Wouldn't it be simpler to just give everyone the Martial Adept (http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/feat:martial-adept) feat at 1st level?

[stoutstien]

It probably be easier just to tie certain maneuver like tags to the weapons themselves.

[Itzmatt86]

I appreciate the ideas. I talked with one of my players last night and trip is one of the questions that came up. We are going to see how it feels an early level, and adjust as necessary.