D&D 5E Does anyone boost GWF style?

[JPicasso]

I think it's great that everyone has a passion for the game on these boards. All the inputs are great perspectives.

As for my game, we are not shy to alter RAW as long as everyone agrees, and it doesn't slow down everything.
GWF for 2d6 gives a 1.3 bonus, and while this helps skew the results to the higher dice rolls, it caps at 12. So not only is 1.3 < 2, the max possible damage is 12, plus the minimum is also still the same (though, less likely)
So, I could either just bump it to +2, but that seems so vanilla, right?
I'm partial to something similar to Saelorn's idea to actually let the player pick a style bonus every 4 levels, that sounds neat. (This would be for dueling and GWF only. the others would need some thinking)
pick a +1 to hit, dmg or saves, or other incremental boost. This would scale up as they improved. However, not for my current game; we have some new players so KISS for now.

I like the idea of +1d4, our pally can roll his 2d6, his d8(s) and a d4 all at once! He'll be stoked.

So really, I'm all set with what I wanted for my original question, but if anyone has some other ideas to tweak GWF I'd love to hear them.

 

[MiraMels]

Ha ha ha -- so many people hated that!

Heh, yeah I admit I was being a little impish in my suggestion.

But I honestly didn't hate that mechanic. I played a fighter who used it back in Murder In Baldur's Gate, during the playtest. Though the creation rules did allow you to get an 18 right out the gate, so the rest of the party may have hated the fighting style.

 

[CapnZapp]

I allow players to reroll 1's and 2's on any damage dice on an attack with a weapon that qualifies for the style. Sneak attack, flaming weapon damage, hex damage, smite damage, etc.

This

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[BookBarbarian]

I saw on one of the D&D forums (I forget which one) an idea to scrap GWF style, and just have Dueling apply whenever your wielding only one melee weapon.

I'm planing on trying that in the future.

 

[snickersnax]

At the very least, GWF shouldn't make you take a dice reroll that is less then the original roll. There is nothing worse than rolling two 2s for a great sword and then rerolling two 1s. That feel when choosing GWF caused you to do 2 less damage than you would have if you took defensive instead

 

[cooperjer]

Some time ago one of my players was concerned that Two Weapon Fighting style was inferior to Dueling style. I took a look at Dueling, Two Weapon Fighting, and Great Weapon fighting styles. I took a look at how these play out with our house rules on a critical and with a barbarian, fighter, cleric, ranger, and warlock builds. In the end, the simple change I proposed was to swap the Dueling style +2 bonus with the GWF style die re-roll. Two weapon fighting wouldn't change. GWF received a static +2 bonus. Dueling was allowed to re-roll 1s and 2s. The net results was a clear separation between the fighting styles meeting the players expectations in that two handed weapons will do more damage than two weapons or a single weapon and two weapons do more damage than a single weapon.

We never did implement this rule change. The player who was concerned about it didn't see any more benefit to himself and did not see giving the barbarian player additional damage was a worth while argument. I didn't see a need to mess with the rules as written if the player no longer was concerned.