TheSword
Legend
It isn’t crappy - it’s appropriate now.The bottom line for me is that these rules make grappling significantly weaker than it was before.
Because you need to hit, grappling is no longer a way to bypass a high ac opponent.
Monsters in general will have a much much MUCH higher chance of resisting a grapple, so much so it’s night and day. Not to mention legendary resistance options.
The auto escape removes a lot of the benefit of grapple, forcing them to consume actions to escape. Actions are everything, this is a huge change.
Grapple is weak now, and I don’t like weak options so I’m a no on this right now. I do understand why they did it, hell I’ve had a pit fiend in my game just tossed around like a rag doll because he doesn’t have athletics prof…but you can solve that in monster design, not by making grappling crappy.
To hit rolls are the essential balancing force of the game. If you’re saying grappling is too poor because a hit roll is needed well then I think you have a bigger problem because every one else is making to hit rolls.
To me being able to easily grapple a pit fiend or troll is a sign grapple rules were already broken.
Now it’s a reasonable difficulty (rather than trivially easy) but at least it does something worthwhile when it works.