Giving the Fighter a Unique Identity

[Falling Icicle]

In the recent Legend's and Lore Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Playtest: First Round Overview) Mike Mearls says that "We're thinking about granting fighters two themes at 1st level, so if you want to test that I'd suggest grabbing the dwarf cleric's guardian theme and adding it to this fighter."

I think that giving fighters two themes is a terrible idea. They need to give fighters special things that no other class gets, not more of the same things that everyone gets. The fighter is a class with an identity crisis. It needs unique abilities of its own. To borrow a few ideas from 4e:

Tide of Iron
Fighter exploit
Requirement: Must be using a shield
You slam your foe with your shield, knocking him back.
Effect: When you hit an opponent that is your size or smaller with a shield slam, you can also knock them back. The target must make a Strength saving throw, DC 10 + your Strength modifier, or be knocked back 5 feet. If there is no room for the target to be knocked back, such as if its back is already against a wall, it is knocked prone on a failed save instead.

Villain's Menace
Fighter exploit
You focus your wrath upon a hated foe.
Effect: You can expend one daily use of your Fighter's Surge to use this ability. Choose one creature that you can see. You gain a +1 bonus on attack and +2 bonus on damage rolls against that opponent for 1 minute. Activating this ability does not take an action.

Give fighters abilities like that. Don't just make them a stripped down, auto-attacking class that just gets more themes or feats than other characters. When people talk about fighters, they should be able to point to unique things about them, just as they do about rogues, clerics and wizards.

 

[Kraydak]

Themes give feats. 3e gave fighters feats. We saw how well that worked. It does seem as if they are floundering with fighters. Depending on how they are doing multi-classing, it may be a pretty much unsolvable problem.

 

[Remathilis]

Neither a 2nd theme nor "pseudo" 4e exploits will help.

Personally, giving fighters "fighters surge" at first level and letting it scale up so that a fighter has a "pool" of extra actions will help. It will also help some examples of common stunts (trip, grapple, bull rush, charge, and so on) show up.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Neither a 2nd theme nor "pseudo" 4e exploits will help.

Personally, giving fighters "fighters surge" at first level and letting it scale up so that a fighter has a "pool" of extra actions will help. It will also help some examples of common stunts (trip, grapple, bull rush, charge, and so on) show up.

If all fighters get are a few extra actions per day, I would find that incredibly boring.

 

[Kinak]

Second theme really seems like a cop-out.

At the very least they needs something like schemes in that it's like an extra theme, but is actually fighter specific. This could actually get all your guardian and weapon master and ranged fighter and finesse fighter variants in one place.

Alternately, I could definitely see stances or special abilities tied to different weapons. Swapping weapons to change your approach to combat seems rather iconic and would be easy to keep track of (since you have separate weapon stats already).

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[hafrogman]

Yeah, the theme idea also seems problematic because of the modularity of certain options. What does the fighter get when someone turns off themes? Hosed?

Before the playtest came out, some ideas had been floated around about attack riders. Kind of like tide of iron, but less defined. What if instead of attacking OR bull rushing/disarming/tripping whatever, the fighter's thing is that he has so internalized attacking that he can do that free on top of anything else. But the playtest has none of those things, presumably they'll be a "combat" module addition. So again, without that, how do we manage?

Well, what the playtest does have is "improvise". So I guess the description would be that a fighter can combine "improvise" AND attack as a single action. It's vague, but then much of the rules are in this iteration.

Now instead of "just attacking" every round the fighter never "just attacks", he's always giving a sweeping leg strike that does weapon damage and allows an contest to trip, or an powerful bash to combine with a contest to push the enemy or whatever else the DM and player work out.

 

[Sunseeker]

If all fighters get are a few extra actions per day, I would find that incredibly boring.

I agree.

The 5e fighter currently suffers from the traditional fighter problem of iHit. That's a fine thing for a barbarian to do, they hit, they hit hard, they hit while yelling. But fighters should be a bit more than the latest apple product. We're talking about a trained martial swordsman.

I think the Contest system was supposed to be designed primarily for the fighter for various combat maneuvers, but like other games that develop systems that supposedly take place in the blink of an eye but really take a while to resolve, I don't think it's the answer.

I think the solution is still within the design of the Slayer and the Slayer's various stances. Integrate combat maneuvers into the iHit system and you'll produce a fighter with both variety and creativity without producing a system of interesting, but nevertheless, false choicees.

 

[variant]

The fighter is suppose to be a simple class to play. Throw in a bunch of complicated options for him and that goes out the window.

 

[Sunseeker]

The fighter is suppose to be a simple class to play. Throw in a bunch of complicated options for him and that goes out the window.

Says who? I don't think WOTC has come out and said "Fighters are simple, they don't get cool stuff." "Wizards are complex, they get cool stuff."

There are some serious misconceptions here.

First off: "Simple" does not mean boring. Stances are simple and easy to play and with a good variety of them, anything but boring.
Second: "Easy" does not mean simple. Every new player to D&D should not be required to first play a fighter, then play a rogue, then work their way up to the all-mighty caster. All classes should be "easy" to play, and once again, "easy" does not translate into "simple" or "boring."

The DDN fighter isn't just simple. It's boring. It's repetitive. It's uncreative.

Players should be able to sit down at the table and say they want ease of play, clarity of play, and be "cool".

The fighter doesn't need to hit X-X-Y-Y-A-B-"Jump"-"Space" and double-click his way to success, but neither should the fighter simply button-mash basic-attack to victory.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Yeah, the theme idea also seems problematic because of the modularity of certain options. What does the fighter get when someone turns off themes? Hosed?

Before the playtest came out, some ideas had been floated around about attack riders. Kind of like tide of iron, but less defined. What if instead of attacking OR bull rushing/disarming/tripping whatever, the fighter's thing is that he has so internalized attacking that he can do that free on top of anything else. But the playtest has none of those things, presumably they'll be a "combat" module addition. So again, without that, how do we manage?

Well, what the playtest does have is "improvise". So I guess the description would be that a fighter can combine "improvise" AND attack as a single action. It's vague, but then much of the rules are in this iteration.

Now instead of "just attacking" every round the fighter never "just attacks", he's always giving a sweeping leg strike that does weapon damage and allows an contest to trip, or an powerful bash to combine with a contest to push the enemy or whatever else the DM and player work out.

I'm liking this idea; that the fighter gets to perform two related actions, one an attack, the other some other benefit/rider. Perhaps to compress it into the single action, you could have that if an attack is successful by 5 or more, they get the regular attack plus the rider.

The primary effect of this can be that the fighter is the team player, who can give other combatants advantage (or advantages). They are in the thick of the action leading the way, kind of like if they kill the warlord and steal some of his goodies.

Other times it can be as the quote above where perhaps if the fighter has advantage, they can do two things at once. So instead of using the second die to find a single best roll, the two dice are used to resolve two separate but related actions, such as the attack and then bull rush over.

Essentially, fighters should have lots of ways of using the advantage they have as well as lots of ways of giving it out to their allies. I think this should be the fighter's "shtick".

Interesting thoughts everyone.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise