Frightened combatant (PEACH)

[Aleolus]

OK, here's a feat I came up with rather quickly, after reading through Hero's of Horror and how it presents fear. I got to thinking that not everyone reacts the same way to being fearful, so I came up with this.

Frightened Combatant
When you become fearful of someone, or panic strikes at your heart, you become an even more deadly opponent.
Benefit: Whenever you fail your saving throw against a fear effect, you you do not take the usual penalties. You take a -2 on all skill checks, ability checks, saving throws and your AC for each degree of fear you acquire (shaken, panicked, frightful), however you also gain a +2 desperation bonus to melee attack and damage rolls against either the source or the target of your fear, whichever is appropriate. These bonuses are cumulative with each other, for each degree of fear you acquire (shaken, panicked, frightened). You still can take no actions if reduced to cowering.
Example: Tordek, a 8th level fighter, fails his saving throw against both a Doom spell and a Cause Fear spell from an enemy necromancer, rendering him panicked. Instead of the usual penalties taken, he takes -4 to all skill checks, ability checks, saving throws and his AC, but recieves a +4 desperation bonus on melee attack and damage rolls against the source of his fear, the necromancer.

 

[Xulin]

"Levels of fear," is a bit vague; you should simply give the cases for each condition(shaken, frightened, panicked).

Also, an attack/damage bonus equal to 2*your penalty is too much. An equivalent bonus would be pushing it, but the way you have it going now is too much. You could willingly fail a saving throw for fear and then demolish everything near you with your +8 bonus to attacks/damage and great cleave feat. I think a 1/2 bonus would be reasonable considering your negating all of your other penalties from fear.

 

[Aleolus]

The only penalty fear usually gives that's negated is the one on attack rolls. Besides, the bonus only applies to the creature that the fear came from. If you failed your saving throw against a dragon's frightful presence, you would only get the bonus against that dragon. In the above example, Tordek only gets the bonus on rolls against the necromancer that made him fearful. Other creatures around, you get no bonuses against, and still have all the other penalties.

 

[Claudius Gaius]

Considering that the bonus here is triggered by external effects only, usually requires that you fail a save - and therefore may well become less useful as your abilities increase and will become less useful if you boost your saves somehow - and that Fear isn't usually one of the major attacks (if only because playing a character who can do nothing but cower or run away isn't very interesting or heroic), it looks entirely reasonable to me. After all, the character is spending a feat on something he may not get to use very often when he or she could have been buying something more generically useful. We'd probably handle this as a version of the Berserker feat sequence, from Eclipse, but that's just because we're used to using Eclipse for everything.

 

[Aleolus]

So, would you all be willing to incorporate this feat into your campaigns, do you think it's ready for normal play?

 

[Claudius Gaius]

Why not? It looks reasonable enough for most games, and in ours people could already build similar effects anyway.

 

[Xulin]

The only penalty fear usually gives that's negated is the one on attack rolls.

Uh, no. Frightened forces you to run away as best as your are able; you can only fight if you can't run. Panicked makes you drop everything you're holding and run away at full speed; if you can't run, you cower, meaning you can't move and you lose your dex bonus to AC, which means free sneak attack against you. This feat negates that.

However, since the bonus to attacks only works against the source of your fear, I suppose this is all right - It's not fear immunity, but the power up only works against one target. That's fairly reasonable, and it looks like you made the bonus match the penalty. I wouldn't choose it for my character, but Redbeard the Cowardly would be fun to have in my campaign.

Considering that the bonus here is triggered by external effects only, usually requires that you fail a save - and therefore may well become less useful as your abilities increase and will become less useful if you boost your saves somehow...

Just because your saves go up, that does not weaken this feat. Do you roll a saving throw every time the cleric casts cure critical wounds on you? You forget that you can CHOOSE to fail a saving throw. If you can only hit the dragon on a 20, simply fail the save against his frightful presence and BAM, more attack bonus.

 

[Claudius Gaius]

So you can - but you don't generally know what it is you're saving against. I'd rather not trust that it's Fear rather than, say, some sort of weird death effect.