Close Quarters Fighting is an example of something that fighters absolutely need to stay relevant, but it brings up an important point here and that is feat tax. If you can compose a list of feats a fighter absolutely has to have to stay relevant, then you are actually creating a count of how many feat slots the fighter is short of in its design to being balanced. You have to either grant these feats as class abilities or else add that many slots to the fighter if you are going to go this route. My rebuilt fighter gets 17 bonus feats and six class abilities compared to the 11 bonus feats of the stock fighter, filling in for what I feel is a short fall of 12
feats.
Again, you and I are on the same page here. I'm definitely aware of the effect, but haven't made any real changes in the area yet. I think the biggest thing holding me back is that I just started a new group this year. The group has a mix of people new to D&D and people returning after a long hiatus, and I'm reluctant to make major homebrew changes to the game while they are still learning it. Because of this I've deliberately decided to limit most of my changes for now to new feats. But over the long term your changes sound a lot more like the direction I want to go.
The other thing I'm weighing is, if I'm making this many changes to the system, would it be better to just look to an alternate system. 5E seems decent (although I can already think of a few houserules I would want), and PF2 actually looks like it may be promising. Of course, I was hoping that PF1 would address the very issues we're discussing in this thread, but instead it made them arguably worse, so I don't know how much hope I have for PF2.
The rebuilt fighter also gets 4 skill points and access to four new skills: leadership, tactics, porter, and run. The first two let you do minor buffs in combat and remove morale debuffs, plus open up feat trees to make you good at that stuff (like using them as free actions). The second two grant you flat bonus to your carrying capacity and base movement rate, both of which give you problem solving ability. In the long run I also intend to tie tactics and leadership to a mass combat system, so that fighters naturally excel other classes in leading armies in battle.
That actually sounds really cool. The skills system is a great way to open up more possibilities without tying combat potential to feats. I'd be really interested in seeing your skill writeups, if you're willing to share.
Imagine for example a feat that says, "If you suffer a condition like dazzled, stunned, dazed, blah blah blah, that condition automatically lasts 1 round less". If that doesn't go far enough, you could just flat out half the duration of the conditions (rounding down).
My current incarnation of this is a new feat:
Heroic Resilience
Pre-req: One of Great Fortitude, Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes
If you are under the effects of a negative magical effect, you can take a standard action to end the effect by making another saving throw against the effect's original DC. You can only make one additional save against any given magical effect.
I haven't seen it in play, so I'm not sure if it will be effective enough.
It's one of those nigh game breaking abilities to change the rules of reality. You are going to have a hard time matching that and not turning a martial character into a spell-caster. It's not just the ability it grants in combat, but the fact that it is a massively powerful problem solver for a wide variety of out of combat situations.
You keep focusing on dealing damage in combat as if that's the real problem martials face. It's not. The real problem is what does a martial do in response to a wall of stone or more to the point a wall of force being raised in their face. And that points to general problems that extend outside the area of the martial class design, like the fact that wall of force is written to have no responses to it other than equally powerful magic. It's written in absolute language and without any sort of quantification. It would be one thing if it said, "The wall of force has hardness 100." Instead, it has immunity. If you want martials to compete with spellcasters, one area you have to start dealing with is the fact that spellcasters get agency without qualification or quantification.
Well, I don't actually think I've been completely focused on damage. After all, my OP specifically was asking for advice on new tactical options. I definitely think the problem is a lot bigger than just damage.
Wall of Force (and worse, Forcecage) is a particularly challenging problem, but it is likewise a problem for pretty much everything in the game that doesn't have teleportation or blink abilities. I'll settle for not solving that one outright if I can at least address some of the others.
Survival, heal, endurance. The Endurance feat can be very powerful if you have a hazards system well tied to it, and I've even considered turning Endurance into a skill. You have to start making skills matter in very tangible ways, and if that means things like allowing the Heal skill to heal wounds via first aid in some limited way, then you need to go there. Of course, skills don't always just help martials, but if you start looking at martials get more skills than spellcasters and the fact that spell-casting itself is a skill sink (concentration, spellcraft and in my game scry) then you can start getting more balance going.
I think you're on to something with the skills. This gives me a whole new area to think about it, so I'm going to see what I can come up with. As I said before, I'd also love to see any houserules you have in this area.
I don't know what you mean by nerf, but you have to be very careful about increasing the available spells or you will never get balance. And you have to really pay close attention to how spells work. Spells like Spider Climb and Jump in and of themselves go a long way to making Martials second class citizens because they let you do things as a low level character or with a trivial exercise of power that martials would struggle to do as a high level character.
Oh yeah, for sure. I always felt the Orb spells, for example, and the notion that SR doesn't apply to Conjuration, were a terrible design approach. It essentially just became a way to put good spells in Conjuration and skirt SR as a meaningful defense. On the subject of Spider Climb and Jump, I'm fine with them at low-levels, because they still represent a significant investment of capability for the spellcasters. At higher levels, though, when those slots are throwaways, the non-casters should definitely be competitive.
Overall it sounds like you see some of the challenges in much the same way as I do, and you've actually had the time and experience to implement some changes to address them. Thanks!
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