D&D 5E Battlemaster and Superiority Dice are causing martials to suffer.

[Plaguescarred]

Making battlemasters unique with maneuver is same as making sorcerers unique with metamagic. A design flaw.

Battlemaster should be better with them, same as sorcerers with converting spells to sorcery points and vice versa.

Battlemaster Fighters are better with Superiority Dice to use Maneuvers than when they don't have any left.

Granting features to subclasses that make them unique is not a design flaw, literally all subclasses are designed this way!

 

[Plaguescarred]

If we are to compare Champion vs Battlemaster then they are better at different things. Champion is better at DPR while Battlemaster is better for choices & tactics having a plethora of options to choose from both when leveling up and during game play making it better to many at being less boring ☺

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

This is exactly how I see it, a champion could spend their Action to attempt to goad someone into focusing on them, the battlemaster does it with a single enhanced attack.

Which is a weak option due to action economy. The dice the battlemaster gets to add to the attempt should be the bonus, not the ability to add a rider to an attack.

We need at will weapon attacks that do stuff, at least on par with weapon cantrips. My preference would be weapon group based to differentiate styles.

"Wide Sweep - action, requires 2 hander - attack a number of adjacent targets equal to your proficiency bonus. Add an extra weapon die at 5/11/15"

 

[Weiley31]

As a Battlemaster player, I have no regerts.

 

[FallenRX]

Then make it use an attack instead of an action. I still don't think the battle master is taking these things away from fighters or any other class, rather I feel people look at the battle master moves and get hung up on the idea that this is the only subclass that can do these things when it's not true, the main difference is that the battle master is better, he gets to make an attack with an addition rider, others have to give up something.

That was a solution i said in my OP.
I think the "Special Attack" thing that Grapple and Shove have going on is a design space that can be expanded, in a unique scalable way for martials better than tying them to arbitrary resources

 

[Shardstone]

I agree with OP.

Manuevers are not fun to track and they really do not do a good job of abstracting the fiction into game mechanics. In reality, a martial should be able to just pin these special features onto their attacks on demand. I disarm with my attack, and I DO DAMAGE WHILE ALSO DISARMING THEM. I try to trip them with my attack, and STILL DO DAMAGE IN ADDITION TO THEM BEING KNOCKED PRONE. This is where PF1E and 3.5 fail; its substitute the damage for an effect. In a game where HP is king, you almost never will take an option that does no damage unless its an edge case or you're doing some nut stuff, like Hypnotic Pattern.

I don't even think this is overpowered or unbalanced. It makes martials more interesting to play, and the Attack action gains nuance; suddenly, you can disarm someone and trip them at level 5, or if you're a fighter, disarm + trip + goad another enemy at 11th level. You get dynamic turns putting out CC and pulling out different fighting techniques.

AiR so far does it the best. You get 1d4 points every turn, and you spend those points on your battle techniques. These points represent your building focus and combat adrenaline, and you can always do something interesting as a martial on your turn.

Battlemaster is a really inadequate way to achieve this same fantasy to me. Let's remove the unnecessary dice pool, and let's start spicing up the attack action so that way instead of "Kill them" or "Do cool combat move" I can do BOTH, which is the POINT of cool combat moves!

 

[Willie the Duck]

I don't think this is true... they can't use exactly those mechanics, but there are other (less effective, but also free) mechanics for many battlemaster maneuvers. Maybe a couple of them like Goad do not have a non-battlemaster general rule for it, in which case the DM can probably steps in and just use the basic ability check rules to represent that.

Yeah, I'm inclined to say that maneuvers are an interesting implementation for a battlemaster class, but that I don't see them as a model to fix the issue of overall battlefield ability as in not-just-attack actions).

The thing is, making these things use a limited resource allows them to be stronger and under the control of the attacker. Anyone can Shove (Athletics vs Athletics or Acrobatics) as long as they have a free hand, but it takes up an attack. The Battlemaster can make an attack that hits, and then determine both that they'll add damage and potentially Trip their foe, and doesn't need a free hand to do it.

3e had a number of combat maneuvers that were, in theory, open to everyone (bull rush, disarm, trip, grapple). However, in most cases there were such severe penalties for trying them without special training (in the form of feats) that you might as well not bother, and if you did spend the feats they became an expected part of your routine and not a Special Cool Thing to do on occasion. The classical example was of course the Spiked Chain fighter with Improved Trip, who would trip you at a distance, use Improved Trip to give you an extra hit, then hit you again while you were down with their second attack and 5'-step away, and then use an attack of opportunity to trip you again when you tried to close, and then repeat the process. That's just boring and exploitative

But the 3e situation illustrates a problem: it's really hard to balance at-will maneuvers. Either you make them difficult to pull off in which case no-one will do them, or you make them easy in which case they become a routine thing to do. I think the closest thing anyone has managed to do for them is the 13th Age fighter, who gets to trigger various maneuvers based on their attack roll (usually "X or higher" or "even"). This, on the other hand, has the disadvantage of not letting the fighter decide when to do a cool thing.

What 3e illustrated to me was that simply affixing these status-effect riders to the existing since-~'74 D&D combat framework is likely to always be a challenge. Things will usually be either too good not to use (3e spiked chain trip) or never worth giving up a normal attack. Battlemaster or 4e fighter (or also many 5e paladin and ranger spells like the smite spells or hail of thorns, which would be maneuvers instead of spells in other systems) does so, but uses the resource management component (which I don't personally have a problem with, but don't get a vote on whether others do, so it's worth discussing alternatives). Fundamentally, there are few things better to use an action to do to an opponent than working towards them being long-term or irrevocably downed -- even true with spells, where most of the best combat spells sacrificing an action to either inconvenience many opponents or take one or two out of the fight (banishment, hypnotic pattern) or unlikely to contribute (blindness, entangle) for several rounds.
I think combat could be rethought, with the idea of special move riders being associated with each attack (so alongside regular attack and damage). Me and the other main GM in my group developed a game with this as a standard -- all attacks had normal to-hit/damage, but then would have one special effect alongside (intimidation, trip, disarm, parry, etc.) that you would also be testing for. It worked... okay (game in general was rushed into play with insufficient playtests, there were clear and obvious 'always best choices' among the rider effects).

I have only one Champion in any groups that I played, and that was for a half-orc barbarian critfish build with Piercer feat.

I have seen many, both with people new to D&D and people coming back from the TSR era (and a few others here and there). Obviously the current implementation is undertuned, but I think there is a market for the general concept. This leads to my other point -- there are (at least) two camps regarding 'the Fighter' -- those that want it to be more complex and have more options, and those that want it to be readily playable as straightforwardly as possible. Both sides are hamstrung by being married to a core class skeleton that accommodates both of them poorly. Either fighter ought be split in half, or Champion get peeled off and made into a thing onto itself, or some similar avenue towards the same end.

 

[the Jester]

Most of the battlemaster maneuvers are totally available to other characters, it's just that the battlemaster is better at them. They can do damage and disarm you, for instance, while another character has to choose.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

If we are to compare Champion vs Battlemaster then they are better at different things. Champion is better at DPR while Battlemaster is better for choices & tactics having a plethora of options to choose from both when leveling up and during game play making it better to many at being less boring ☺

In the majority of games, the Battlemaster deals more damage than the Champion.

 

[FallenRX]

Most of the battlemaster maneuvers are totally available to other characters, it's just that the battlemaster is better at them. They can do damage and disarm you, for instance, while another character has to choose.

But they can't honestly, Grapple and shove sure, but not everything else, like taunts, Parries, frightens, among other things, when within reason they should be able to do these things.