tl;dr --->
THIS.
I like the feat, and I like the idea of a battle master maneuver that adds another OA, and, heck, adding them together won't hurt. I also feel like the DMG's rules for grid combat might up the robustness of this a little more.
But here's the thing: OA's don't seem to me to be the goal, just a common tool. And they come with a big cost: more attack rolls = slower combats. ESPECIALLY out-of-turn attack rolls that might change the declared action. So if I was looking to shore up a fighter's stickiness myself, I would absolutely want doodly-squat to do with the fighter making a pile of attack rolls between her turns. I don't want my game to become a series of "but wait! (five minutes of math and rolling) OK, keep going!" "Nope, he's dead." It is a grindy, flow-killing hassle, and it might look good on paper, but it is absolutely a bear in play for everyone who is not that fighter (and sometimes for that fighter, too).
I also am not sure that "a fighter who makes as many OA's as a 4e fighter" makes sense. 5e is a different system, it's got a different flow, a different logic. Just saying "the fighter can make one OA per turn" doesn't jive with 5e's "better faster stronger more efficient" philosophy. You could do it, but it doesn't seem native, it seems bolted-on. We don't want a thousand little cuts, we want big, distinctive, meaningful, broad effects, and ideally we want those effects to make sense in the world.
So maybe we don't need to treat the symptoms, and can instead address the root. "Stickiness" in and of itself isn't the goal, right? It's just one tool that is useful (mostly in grid combat) to make the fighter an attractive target. It does this by preventing creatures who try to disengage from the fighter from doing so. The end goal we want is to make it functionally difficult for the DM to target another creature.
The ways a fighter can do this now include
- Protection fighting style gives you an aura under which all attacks against anyone else in the aura take disadvantage.
- Goading Attack from the Battlemaster gives a target disadvantage on all attacks against anyone else if they fail a Wis save.
- Optionally, the Sentinel feat, which stops 1 enemy/round cold if they move and you hit, or lets you attack a critter who hit an ally back.
Pretty anemic! Protection asks everyone to bunch up, Goading Attack is two rolls to work, Sentinel is fine but "optional" and not really all that the doctor ordered just by itself.
It seems like we need
- A better way for the fighter to prevent damage to her allies (goading attack and protection fighting style are both kind of weak sauce for that if that is what you want to define yourself to do)
- A way for the fighter to "punish" those that attack her allies, or those that try to disengage with her.
- And why not, a way to use more than a single reaction to do so.
To me, these fit thematically as battlemaster maneuvers. Battle masters are the students of tactics and war, with a PHD in murderology, and the ability to effectively control the flow of battle.
A fighter who wants to do this essentially wants to do the same thing that a controller-y spellcaster wants to do: shut down enemy actions. 5e treats ongoing conditions as concentration effects. So why not adopt some concentration-like mechanic to apply these effects to targets in 5e?
In fact, lets steal a different kind of mechanic to do so: stances from 4e.
So maybe something like
this?
Three stances. A stance acts like concentration: while you're in the stance, you apply some effect (buff or debuff), and you can't stack effects because you can only be in one stance at a time. If someone saves against your stance, it breaks your stance and ends the effect, just like a save against a concentration spell breaks the spell. But even then, there's a lingering effect (damage like most maneuvers, or, in one case, an AC bonus, basically the inverse of
Precise Attack) as a bit of a special cherry on top. Because maneuvers are more precious than spells, the fact that this concentration can't be broken by damage (wouldn't be good for melee anyway) and have those little cherries on top doesn't seem too wonky. Plus, the effects are a little more narrow than most spells (it's not exactly paralysis!).
No OA's. No breaking the reaction economy. Just a constant debuff effect: You Can't Do X (and if you do it anyway, it's gonna hurt!). Even a good table effect: roll your superiority die, and have it hang out, pre-rolled, there on the table until your enemy earns its use.
They make sense in the context of the world. Punisher's Stance is the "Hurt anyone and you'll regret it!" style. Intimidating Stance is "HALT OR I'LL SHOOT (or stab!)!" Protector's Stance is "I will defend you with my life, my queen!"
A fighter with these mechanics will outright STOP creatures without their wits about them in their tracks. An enemy may get the courage to break the stance, but even if it does, it'll feel some sting.
(as an aside, I could see these also potentially being Charisma saves, what with the confidence, or even maybe Dexterity saves, with dodging the fighter's weapon, but defeating fear and spatial awareness are both usually Wisdom, and both of those I think would be most applicable)
