Melee Combat Boost

[Yakk]

The goal is to give melee combat a bit more oomph, tactically. Baseline damage is unchanged.

Surrounded: If a combatant starts and ends its turn surrounded by foes, it becomes flanked until the end of its next turn. Attacks on a flanked creature are at advantage.

A creature can be surrounded by 2 creatures of its own size or larger (on opposite sides), plus 1 for every size smaller the smallest surrounding creature is. So a Huge dragon requires 4 medium sized, or 5 medium and small sized, creatures to surround it.

Engaged: When a creature hits another on its turn with a melee weapon attack, they engage the target. If they do not take damage or fail a saving throw before the start of their next turn, their melee weapon attacks deal maximum damage on that creature on their next turn.

Follow-up: If you score a critical hit with a melee weapon attack or reduce a creature to 0 HP with a melee weapon attack on your turn, you may make a push or grab without expending an action.

Wrangler: You can attempt grab a creature larger than you and instead of grappling, move into their space and Wrangle them. Wrangled creatures are not immobalized, nor can the grabber move them, but otherwise act like they are grabbed. When the creature moves, the Wrangler moves along with them. You can initiate and defend a Wrangle using Dexterity(Acrobatics) instead of Strength(Athletics).

Extra Opportunity: If you have the extra attack feature, you can make a number of melee weapon opportunity attacks without expending your reaction equal to the number of attacks you can take in an attack action. You can only make one opportunity attack on a given turn, however.

Close range Criticals: When making a melee attack with advantage or disadvantage, if the attack hits and both d20s are the same value, the attack counts as a critical hit.

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Design notes:

Surrounded can make combat more positional. It also avoids the congo-line because combatants can reposition themselves to avoid the flank; with traditional flanking, it isn't practical to avoid being flanked, so working to avoid it isn't a good plan.

Engaged attempts to make spreading attacks over melee foes smart instead of dumb. If you ignore someone in melee with you, you get punished severely. Next turn, instead of now, which keeps the game flowing. The things that break engage -- damage or failing a save -- mean that dragon's "wing buffet" is now a defensive feature (as it breaks the engage penalty).

Follow-up is an attempt to add some status condition stuff "organically" to a fight. You don't do this every round, but with it in play you'll be getting more shoves and grabs I hope. And not just on "I shove every turn" builds.

Wrangler is just good fiction. You can climb on top of a dragon or giant and attack them as they fly off.

Extra Opportunity is an attempt to make overrunning the front line a bit harder. It only applies to PCs, not minions (none of which have extra attack). So a level 5+ combatant has up to 3 OAs (1 reaction, 2 free).

Close range Criticals seems to make disadvantage give more crits, but does not. The chance of doubles is 5% times your hit chance. A strait 1d20 has a 5% crit chance; if you hit on a 11+, the chance you roll doubles and hit is 2.5%, plus the chance you roll a 20, is still under 5%. This is about the only one that isn't melee weapon restricted; cause wounds, eat your heart out.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Isn't Wrangle just a version of the variant Climb on Larger Creatures rule? Edit--except worse (because the variant rule provides advantage on attacks by the smaller creature against the larger one)?

[Kane0]

Extra opportunity looks a lot like marking too.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Extra opportunity looks a lot like marking too.

It's evidence for my heuristic--

When someone says "there's no rule for X or 5e doesn't give guidance on X", check the DMG. It's probably mentioned in there and there's likely a variant rule for it already.

As a heuristic, it's not infallible. But it's been right quite often.