D&D 5E Building a better Fighter

Quickleaf said:

[SECTION]Forced Movement. Starting at 2nd level, once per turn when you hit a creature with a melee or ranged attack, you may slide the creature up to 5 feet in a direction of your choosing if you wish. You can only force a creature into an unoccupied space.[/SECTION]

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This sounds like a really cool idea, but I think is a little powerful. I would say it should have a save but that becomes too fiddly with more dice rolls.

I would really have liked to see "tier 2" fighting styles. where whatever you chose at level 1 becomes a little more powerful, though feats tend to cover this.

Paul Smart said:

Lets talk Fighters. What works about them? What would you change and why? How can they be improved?

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The 5e version of the Fighter class is my favourite ever. It does exactly what I want it do i.e. be the best at non-magical combat, with enough unique abilities to set it apart from other martial classes, and enough room for differentiation within the class itself. It also has enough narrative for me to be its own class, even tho it suffers from the old problem of the authors not talking about it enough in the printed books.

If I could back in time and change something in the PHB Fighter, I would perhaps (but not necessarily) roll back to when Combat Superiority was a base class feature instead of Battlemaster only.

For instance, I would remove the 2 extra feats compared to other classes, and put Combat Superiority in their place (not necessarily at the same levels, which is quite late).

Why would I do that? First of all because Combat Superiority is IMHO one of the best thing in the whole game, and it's kind of missed when you have a non-Battlemaster Fighter. In fact, it's now creeping back into other Fighter archetypes (the Cavalier at least).

Among the PHB Fighter archetypes, it actually makes sense that only the Battlemaster gets Combat Superiority, because the Champion is supposed to be low-complexity, and the Eldritch Knight already has spells, and probably having both might be too much to manage.

But here's the second reason: the Champion is part of a failed promise to deliver low-complexity options for all classes (or at least for the "core four"). There is no low-complexity option for anyone else, just the Champion for the Fighter, at which point they could have just forget about that promise and ditch the Champion completely or give Combat Superiority to it too.

I'd dump the existing subclasses and replace them with something more flavourable and story driven.
The problem with the fighter's subclasses is they have no identity. No story or hook beyond the mechanical.

Instead of making the complexity tied to their subclass, I would have made one of their features - likely action surge or extra attack - modular. You swap that out and gain maneuvers that allow you to do other things in combat, giving choices and complexity.

Jester David said:

I'd dump the existing subclasses and replace them with something more flavourable and story driven.
The problem with the fighter's subclasses is they have no identity. No story or hook beyond the mechanical.

Instead of making the complexity tied to their subclass, I would have made one of their features - likely action surge or extra attack - modular. You swap that out and gain maneuvers that allow you to do other things in combat, giving choices and complexity.

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Yeah I agree with you entirely. It's especially annoying that some of the new subclasses are being designed with superiority dice while others aren't. It makes the fighter class seem really disjointed.

Should have just stuck with superiority dice as the standard for all fighters.

I mean... is having 4-5 dice to spend on an extra something THAT more complicated than "I attack"? I truly believe that with dice, was the way the 5e fighter was meant to be based on. Should have been based on.

My change would be to enforce and build off that mechanic, more flavorful maneuvers for certain sub-classes, and have these abilities scale to some extent to keep them relative. Or alternatively, allow additional dice to be spent on a maneuver to empower it. This might mean the quantity of superiority dice may need to increase as you level. Perhaps this is more evident on just the battle master sub-class. Being able to improve on his/her maneuvers across the board, while other subs get to do this for one or two signature moves.

I'm not the biggest fan of superiority dice.

I'd like to see a version of D&D that treats all the classes as simply as the Champion, investing more heavily in backgrounds as the story-driven differentiator between characters.

I'd do this = http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?559288-Eldritch-Knight-the-reimagining-cantrip-warrior!

I think I would rather have them do one cool trick per round than have the ability to alpha-strike like nobody else.

Also I would delete the Rogue and give the Fighter their stuff. Spread out among various subclasses, of course.

TallIan said:

This sounds like a really cool idea, but I think is a little powerful. I would say it should have a save but that becomes too fiddly with more dice rolls.

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One of the things it does is gives the fighter one cool trick they can do every round, rather than using Action Surge to alpha strike like [MENTION=53176]Leatherhead[/MENTION] points out.

In many situations, it's not going to be that powerful (e.g. fighting gnolls on mostly flat surface without any hazards around). However, it encourages a fighter player to be aware of the terrain and circumstances of combat, and can be powerful in the right circumstances (i.e. holding a chokepoint, protecting allies, pushing monsters into hazards/ongoing spells, clearing a path, and so on).

I would really have liked to see "tier 2" fighting styles. where whatever you chose at level 1 becomes a little more powerful, though feats tend to cover this.

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Interesting, yeah, I agree that feats mostly have this covered.

Istbor said:

Should have just stuck with superiority dice as the standard for all fighters.

I mean... is having 4-5 dice to spend on an extra something THAT more complicated than "I attack"? I truly believe that with dice, was the way the 5e fighter was meant to be based on. Should have been based on. .

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I don't think anyone who has argued for the basic fighter has complained superiority dice are too complicated. Rather, they just don't want it, or like it. They want an option that doesn't have many bells and whistles. And that's all the reason people need. Probably for the same reason why a lot of people liked Basic D&D over AD&D back in the day. Just a preference issue, and more options is not automatically a better thing.