D&D 5E Current take on GWM/SS

[Hussar]

In my experience, and opinion, this is precisely the opposite of what most players want. Everyone wants to do decent damage. Spread the love.

Just checking the % on the poll, seems like it's whack. Should be about 50% "no problem" and "50" the rest..?

See, this is where you are mistaken. I'm playing a sword and board Champion fighter in our Dragonlance game. I'm very much sucking hind when it comes to damage per round. Everyone in the group does more than I do. But, when it comes to blocking attacks, and being the meat shield, I'm fantastic. More HP (by a considerable amount) than anyone in the game, and disadvantage on allies 1/round means that I'm good at what I want to do.

So, no, DPR is not the be all and end all of characters.

 

[Psikerlord#]

See, this is where you are mistaken. I'm playing a sword and board Champion fighter in our Dragonlance game. I'm very much sucking hind when it comes to damage per round. Everyone in the group does more than I do. But, when it comes to blocking attacks, and being the meat shield, I'm fantastic. More HP (by a considerable amount) than anyone in the game, and disadvantage on allies 1/round means that I'm good at what I want to do.

So, no, DPR is not the be all and end all of characters.

I understand that position, but at least you have a choice if the +10 is removed. If the +10 is in, competitive damage is completely out of the question.

 

[Celtavian]

See, this is where you are mistaken. I'm playing a sword and board Champion fighter in our Dragonlance game. I'm very much sucking hind when it comes to damage per round. Everyone in the group does more than I do. But, when it comes to blocking attacks, and being the meat shield, I'm fantastic. More HP (by a considerable amount) than anyone in the game, and disadvantage on allies 1/round means that I'm good at what I want to do.

So, no, DPR is not the be all and end all of characters.

I don't include sword and board in the discussion because they have other options for being highly effective. Not sure Protection Style is the best for a defensive fighter. It's not bad. Seeing a defensive fighter in action, taking Sentinel seems to be more helpful. It competes for the reaction with Protection Style. You can lock someone down with Sentinel, which keeps them from attacking the ranged and casters. If you can, go Eldritch Knight. If you have plate armor, defensive fighting style, and take the shield spell and maybe cast blur or haste later on, you can get a ridiculous AC even without magic items. Plate Armor, Shield, and shield can give you a 26 AC four plus times a day. That is ridiculous hard to hit. If you pick up Shield Master, you can still get a bonus action knockdown attack and good resistance to dex-based attacks. You can build an extremely good defensive martial in this game.

 

[DaveDash]

See, this is where you are mistaken. I'm playing a sword and board Champion fighter in our Dragonlance game. I'm very much sucking hind when it comes to damage per round. Everyone in the group does more than I do. But, when it comes to blocking attacks, and being the meat shield, I'm fantastic. More HP (by a considerable amount) than anyone in the game, and disadvantage on allies 1/round means that I'm good at what I want to do.

So, no, DPR is not the be all and end all of characters.

I agree with you here.

While I detest the concept introduced by XBE and SS - which is a character with few weaknesses - optimizing as a group is still critically important. Which is why having classes like a Paladin and a Bard in your party are so amazingly strong, because they bring the means to deal with a whole bunch of situations in which pure damage simply cannot resolve.

 

[CapnZapp]

I'm pretty sure I've said several times that without feats, fighters are boring. (Some people disagree, which is fine, but I've definitely said it.) Furthermore I've argued that SS/GWM are on par with other good feats, and that removing them simply narrows the number of good options, thus making fighters slightly more boring. You can infer from that that I think these feats are good for the game.

In fact, I'll go slightly further and argue that SS/GWM are even better for the game than most feats because they enable a new tactical option (sniping/power attacking), and interesting tactical options are more fun than boring old bonuses.

(The only caveat is that it wouldn't kill me if the option were available to everybody even without the feat (maybe at -5/+5) and the feat just brought it up to +10. Under that variant rule the game would be approximately as good with or without the feat, because everyone would still have an interesting option regardless.)

Just so we're all on the same page: I'm discussing the +10 part of these feats, and specifically how (if) they *reduce* choice, by virtue of overshadowing other options.

That means, no I don't want to solve the problem by running a feat-less game. The issue isn't that fighters become too much fun ;-) or gain too many options; the issue is if some options are *too* good - so good any optimization-aware player feels unable to skip them, even when she wants to play another martial archetype.

Cheers

 

[CapnZapp]

Actually I've said before feats allow an offensive character to focus. It allows for the striker to fill the role stronger and frees up other characters to take other roles as healer, face, defender, leader, controller, explorer, etc.

In a featless damage, every party member is heavily encouraged to be a damage dealer. Nothing wrong with that, but you can't stray from damage too much else you weaken the group or the DM stops using DMG assumptions. But if your archer fighter deals crazy damage, your defensive mage loses the need spend some many slots to blast as much and can fall back to cantrips early.

And that's well and all, but it doesn't adress the issue; being how I can't bring myself to playing a sword and board or two weapon fighter when (if) I am so much better at allowing your defensive mage to do his thing by playing that archer or greatweapon fighter.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You're quoting from the email notification you got, not the actual edited post of mine, which I edited seconds after posting.

Sorry, email notifications are the only times I see your posts, so I don't ever see any edits you make.

 

[Minigiant]

In my experience, and opinion, this is precisely the opposite of what most players want. Everyone wants to do decent damage. Spread the love.

I would say some players, not most. Many put the concept first and just try to get some damage out of the system.

Everyone doing decent damage is how the featless game works. But this "everyone deals decent damage" quickly becomes "everyone must be a damage dealer". Focused defensive, utility, social, or exploration PCs end up bringing the party down when there is no damage dealer taking up the slack. You can't play the protection sentinel warrior without a high damage PC backing them up or changing the DMG assumptions.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I would say some players, not most. Many put the concept first and just try to get some damage out of the system.

Everyone doing decent damage is how the featless game works. But this "everyone deals decent damage" quickly becomes "everyone must be a damage dealer". Focused defensive, utility, social, or exploration PCs end up bringing the party down when there is no damage dealer taking up the slack. You can't play the protection sentinel warrior without a high damage PC backing them up or changing the DMG assumptions.

I dunno, I think it's when you introduce the +10 feats that your choices become limited, not the other way around... I think you can play a protection sentinel warrior no problem without the +10 feat appearing in your party somewhere. My current party is a thief, open hand monk and sword & board eldritch knight, and they are perfectly capable.

 

[Minigiant]

I dunno, I think it's when you introduce the +10 feats that your choices become limited, not the other way around... I think you can play a protection sentinel warrior no problem without the +10 feat appearing in your party somewhere. My current party is a thief, open hand monk and sword & board eldritch knight, and they are perfectly capable.

It really depends on the DM and group style like I said many times. But the DMG assumption (5-8 encounters using XP budget and varying enemy composition) really wants a party were 80% of the party is built for or spends most of their resources on offense OR 1 or 2 party members designed heavily for killing.

5th edition gets very deadly if you get a little unlucky or let fight drag on too long. It's not rocket tag but you don't want enemies and traps to get multiple chances to do anything. Things get dicey if you aren't cleaning up or chasing off the enemy by round 5.