Skill Tricks for Martials

[strangebloke]

This is an idea I can get behind, though I would suggest some things:

that's what we're here for!

- Instead of gaining X skill tricks at Y level, I propose one skill proficiency is tradable for 2 skill tricks whenever you would acquire a skill proficiency after level 1 (in certain classes if you wish it to be limited). From the dev side this gives us a baseline of how good/strong any given trick should be and stops power creep/subsystem fatigue by taking advantage of existing mechanics, and on the play side gives much more reason to pick up feats like Skilled and get more excited about features like Primal Knowledge, Arcane Archer Lore and Survivalist.

I also don't really want to try to balance around 2 tricks = 1 skill prof, since a skill prof is not generally worth that much. As one example of how this ends up working out, you'd get six tricks for skilled, which moves that feat from "sorta bad" to "compulsory." I don't want to tone things down to that level of balance, especially the higher tier abilities.

My feeling is basically that martials are a bit weaker overall especially at high tiers and that balance has always been very fuzzy because this is a team game, so its fine to freely give out abilities that are mostly situational/OOC to them, as long as these abilities are balanced with each other.

- I assume to qualify for a skill trick you first need proficiency in that skill, but I don't think that was explicitly stated

yes, I will add that.

- Instead of level requirements gate by proficiency bonus, and allow skill tricks to be exchanged when you level up. Just because I feel this better fits the current (post-Tasha's) design trends

That does work, and arguably makes multiclassing into fighter (rather than just dipping) a lot more practical. You're a 8th level wizard, 3rd level battlemaster, but next level you can grab Dauntless and that seems cool.

- Rule of thumb is that skill tricks shouldn't use their own actions, bonus actions and maybe not even reactions. Everything a martial chooses (the classes you have designated) will pretty much always be compared against their attack action or whatever bonus action/reaction their class/subclass/feat choices make available to them, so skill tricks that don't tie into those will face strong competition

That's by design.

I really don't want skill tricks to ever get into the situation where you're just spamming piledriver every turn, that's lame. Rather, I'd want piledriver to be a more situational thing. The damage is good, but by the time you get it most targets you can piledrive aren't worth using it on. But then you're a rune knight and you have haste cast on you and suddenly you're grabbing giants and then suplexing them twice.

Ultimately the system needs some constraints and you're left with either resource economy (didn't want to add another resource to these classes) or action economy.

Though something like stabilizing an ally with a healer's kit is already situational so that can just be strictly improved.

- To make things as interesting as possible for using these we want these to not trigger by passive actions, eg landing a crit, but rather by a decision on the player's part. The above makes this harder but I think you already have a good example with the Medicine Healing Hands trick

I did try to do this, the only counterexample is dauntless.

which I really like but I suppose you are supposed to kill your darlings.

- Skill tricks should scale where possible so as soon as the big jumps at levels 5, 11 and 17 happen they aren't immediately phased out

True. For one example healing hands should definitely scale.