Bringing a knife to a swordfight.

[comrade raoul]

Here are a pair of feats for knife specialists. Each emulates a paradigmatic feature of knife-fighting as I tend to think of it, at least in gaming or fantasy contexts. Note that this is only the initial version of these feats; edited versions in light of feedback are below.

Vicious Knifefighter [General]
You're a fierce and resourceful brawler, and know how to use a knife to quickly kill an opponent in close quarters.
Prerequisites: Improved Grapple, Improved Unarmed Strike, Weapon Focus (dagger), base attack bonus +1.
Benefit: If you successfully hit an opponent with a dagger, and you have a free hand, you can make a touch attack against that opponent to start a grapple as a free action. In addition, you take no penalty to your attack rolls when attacking with a dagger during a grapple.

Deceptive Strike [General]
You can take advantage of your dagger's speed against opponents who don't expect it.
Prerequisites: Dex 13, Weapon Focus (dagger).
Benefit: When making a melee attack with a dagger against a flanked opponent, or one denied his Dexterity bonus to his AC, you gain a +2 bonus to your attack rolls.

Thoughts?

 

[Kularian]

I like Deceptive Strike. It makes sense, and seems like it would be a viable knife-fighting tactic. It seems like weapon finesse might be needed, though. Being good with a dagger is one thing, but being able to use speed instead of strength (what weapon finesse is all about) to hit an opponent is a little different, IMO.

Vicious Knifefighter is good, but I can't envision it, to be honest. Stabbing a person, then initiating a grapple seems...cumbersome. Perhaps, if a grapple attempt is successful, the character gets a free attack of opportunity against his opponent at his highest bonus? And keep the no penalty to attack rolls w/ daggers.

Just a few thoughts

 

[Narsil]

From reading 'Vicious Knife-fighter', I read it as 'stab with one hand, grapple with the other, then keep stabbing'. It's like most barfights that include knives, essentially...

 

[Kularian]

Eh, maybe. I've never seen a barfight, so I don't know, hehe. I guess if it makes sense, keep it that way,

 

[Simm]

Vicious Knife-fighter seems a lot like the bear fang weapon style feat to me, and considering the much higher cost in prerequisites it has I wonder about the balance of your feat.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Maybe it should be the other way around. Make a touch attack to initiate a grapple, then a free attack with the dagger if you're successful. Much like improved trip. Or, start a fullround action to initiate a grapple, then if you're successful, get a full attack with the dagger in hand, maybe with a bonus. Grab and Stab makes a good feat name, don't you think?

Or, even better, if you're involved in a grapple, you can make a special AoO against anyone who tries to make a grapple check against you, for whatever reason.
Someone tries to get away from you *stab* tries to twist your arm *stab* tries to pick you up *stab* It'd make grapple monkey creatures think twice about picking on you. Most things won't keep trying to grab stuff that hurts them, intelligent or no.

 

[ValhallaGH]

I've always been fond of Razor Fiend.

Prerequisite: Proficient with dagger used.
Benefit: In your hands, a dagger becomes a blur of lethal metal. You gain the benefits of the Quick Draw general feat with all daggers.
In combat, you may take an additional attack when you use a full attack action while armed only with one or two daggers. You gain this benefit when using a dagger in a ranged or melee attack. However, these attacks trade speed for hitting power. You make the bonus attack at your highest base attack bonus, but all of your attacks (including the bonus attack) suffer a –2 penalty. You gain only half your Strength bonus to damage when you fight in this manner.
These penalties last until the beginning of your next action.

There are a couple of expansion feats that give further attacks (at -4 and -6, total, for two and three attacks, total). There's also one cool one.

Benefit: Each cut you inflict upon an opponent builds upon previous ones. After you slash into a foe’s flesh with one attack, you widen the injury with your next. During your action, you gain a +1 bonus to damage with each dagger attack for every previous dagger attack that hit your opponent. You gain this bonus damage based only on attacks that hit during your current action.

That might be of help to you.

 

[comrade raoul]

So thanks for the really quick and helpful feedback!

Vicious Knife-fighter seems a lot like the bear fang weapon style feat to me, and considering the much higher cost in prerequisites it has I wonder about the balance of your feat.

I think the comparison is apt, but I'd say Bear Fang is a slightly stronger feat: it offers a chance to grapple without provoking attacks of oppportunity without having to take Improved Grab (and thus the mostly-useless Improved Unarmed Strike), and it lets you use it with a somewhat stronger set of equipment (an axe and a dagger, instead of a dagger by itself). In both cases, you're basically wasting a feat (Weapon Focus (dagger) for Bear Fang, Improved Unarmed Strike for Vicious Knifefighter), and while you can get VK a little earlier, I don't think that's much of a problem.

A bunch of you have also been suggesting that you should get a free dagger attack after the successful grab, rather than the other way around, so that the feat is parallel to Improved Trip. I think this makes sense, but I'm more interested in it the other way around: initiating a grapple is a big risk (you can easily fail to grab on to your opponent, which means you waste a valuable melee attack), and I wanted to try to let dagger wielders go for the grapple for free: so that once you hit with the dagger, you can try to grapple at no opportunity cost. The other version increases the payoff of grappling (you also get a dagger attack), but doesn't reduce the risk, and it's not immediately clear whether that advantage justifies sinking two feats (VK and Weapon Focus) into what was initially a very suboptimal combat style (again, a lone dagger).

So this version might be overpowered, but I'm hoping--again, because the dagger is weak by itself, you can get away with a lot!-- it's not that bad. If it works, it gives the player a big incentive to grapple a lot, which I think can could yield a very interesting change from the normal pace of D&D combat.

I've always been fond of Razor Fiend.

I like Razor Fiend, too; I think it's cool and flavorful, and my first thought was actually indeed to try to adapt a version of it. But then I thought that there were basically two things a feat like Razor Fiend might be good for: it might help rogues get more sneak attack damage in, and it might help fighters increase their overall damage output. But most of the time I'm not too fond of specialized feats to help fighters increase their damage output: there are already a number of things that do that, and I think adding additional such feats just makes choosing combat feats more complicated. (If you're interested in damage output, the question of whether you should focus on, say, daggers or paired shortswords requires you to do some mildly involved math over the projected life of your character, but it typically has one right answer.) So I thought: if you just want to make daggers appealing for sneak-attacking rogues, why not just design a feat that does it directly? Hence, Deceptive Strike instead of Razor Fiend.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

I really like both of these feats and I can see both of them in action. Cutting someone quickly then taking advantage of their surprise to grab them. Or making the flank attack an even more attractive option.

I actually got a great image of a crazed berserker barbarian rogue tripping a guy unsuspectingly with his whip, then leaping into the air and landing on the mook in a flurry of stabbing. Really cool, I'd definitely like to use these. Let us know if you've got any more.

 

[Quartz]

The Deceptive Strike feat is too good - it's an auto-pick for Rogues. Maybe trade 1d6 of SA damage per +2 to hit? Sort of like Power Attack for Rogues in reverse.

And both should be [General, Fighter]